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Century-old General Motors, and not electric-vehicle pioneer Tesla, should be the auto maker with a $150-plus billion market value.

No, Barron’s hasn’t lost its mind. There are several data points—both financial and operational—that lead us to that conclusion.

First, the financial bit. Investors give General Motors (ticker: GM) little credit for the huge amount of cash it generates. Conventional wisdom holds that GM’s cash flow will be volatile, dropping dramatically when car sales fall. But that hasn’t been the case since the financial crisis, when the reborn company emerged from its chapter 11 restructuring.

Over the past nine years, the auto maker’s free cash flow has averaged about $5.4 billion (see chart). For 2020, it forecast almost $7 billion of free cash flow when reporting earnings on Feb. 5. At that level, GM stock, trading at $33.57, would have a free-cash-flow yield of almost 14%.

The S&P 500 index’s free-cash-flow yield is about 3.7%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average’s is about 2.5%. Tesla (TSLA)—the second-most-valuable car company on the planet after Toyota Motor (TM)—has a free-cash-flow yield of about 0.8%.

If GM traded like any other company in the broader market—and we aren’t suggesting that it should trade like the fast-growing electric-vehicle pioneer—its market value would approach $200 billion, up fourfold. But the market disagrees with this analysis. GM fetches less than six times estimated earnings. Investors treat it like a troubled traditional car company.

That’s where the rest of the argument comes in. GM is more tech-forward than you might realize. Like Tesla, it’s heavily invested in autonomous-driving technology, via its Cruise division.

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Cruise is valued at about $19 billion, based on investments from other car companies. That’s not a part of the free-cash-flow analysis. If Cruise is worth that much, its just gravy. “The Cruise portion of the [Wednesday investor] day was extremely compelling,” Levin Easterly Partners portfolio manager Christopher Susanin told Barron’s. “They are close to having an autonomous taxi fleet in San Francisco.”

Tesla makes far more battery-powered cars than anyone in the U.S., but GM is also investing heavily in electric vehicles. GM teased its all-electric Hummer during the Super Bowl, and the company is converting its huge Detroit-Hamtramck plant to make only EVs.

RBC analyst Joseph Spak rates GM shares the equivalent of Buy, with a $49 price target. That values GM at about $70 billion, even adjusting for its auto-financing unit and pension deficit—up more than 40% from recent levels. That’s not fourfold, but it isn’t bad.

Spak argues that GM could be the best-performing auto stock in 2020 because it has a new pickup truck, no European Union exposure—the company sold its operations there—and, of course, that attractive free-cash-flow yield.

Nevertheless, catching Tesla stock is a tall order. It’s up more than 75% year to date, giving it a market capitalization of about $135 billion.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com