Electric vehicle makers are all the rage in 2021 and General Motors
GM,
and Ford Motor
F,
have made tremendous strides in growing their EV businesses, but investment manager Cathie Wood says it may be too little, too late for those traditional car manufacturers.
Wood said that GM and Ford are seeing stellar stock performances this year, with investors giving them some credit for their attempts to shift from internal combustion engines, or ICE, to electric vehicles. The big challenge though is that EV manufacturing is not inherent to those companies.
“And the reason is they don’t have the DNA for this brave new world,” said Wood during an interview with MarketWatch sister publication Barron’s in a Wednesday afternoon interview.
Wood said that Ford and GM “were born in the industrial, gas-powered age” and said that they have to make “one giant leap” to transform their ICE focused businesses. Ford was founded in 1903 and GM was founded in 1908, but both have recently emerged with promising EV vehicles to compete with the likes of Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
Shares of Ford are up 126% so far this year, bringing the company’s market cap to around $80 billion; GM’s shares, meanwhile, are up 55% for this year, with its market cap at $94 billion.
Investors have been keenly focused on the performance of EV upstarts like Lucid Group
LCID,
whose surge in recent sessions brought its market cap to $91 billion on Tuesday. A rally in Rivian Automotive Inc.
RIVN,
which recently made its debut on the Nasdaq, saw its shares surge, bringing its total value to $150 billion.
Wood is a renowned money manager, whose funds focus on making investments in disruptive innovations and she manages the flagship $20.7 billion ARK Innovation ETF
ARKK,
ARK Innovation had been a highflier in 2021 until a rotation out of growth stocks helped to pummel her vehicle which is down 6% so far in 2021.
By comparison, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
was up 17% in the year to date, the S&P 500 index
SPX,
was rising nearly 25%, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP,
was up nearly 24%.
