General Motors (GM) wants to accelerate its production of electric vehicles, and quickly. The company has big ambitions in this area, but to make it possible, it will need to increase its current production rate.
Next year alone, four new mass-market models are expected: EV versions of the Escalade (IQ), Equinox, Blazer and Silverado. That’s not counting the flagship Celestiq, which will be available in limited quantities.
Within a year, these vehicles will all be on the market. GM hopes to be able to build 400,000 units annually by then, but Automotive News reports that the company’s aim beyond that is to reach a capacity of one million units built per year by 2025.
To get there, GM will get a helping hand when its second Ultium battery plant opens in Tennessee this year, joining the Ohio plant. The facility is being built as part of a joint venture with LG Energy Solutions.
GM executives told Automotive News that production has increased in recent months and continues to grow. CEO Mary Barra said the company built 50,000 electric vehicles in North America in the first half of this year. It's worth noting that four out of five of those were Chevrolet Bolts, which are assembled on the company's old electric structure and not the Ultium platform that will serve all the future EVs, as well as the next-generation Bolt.
GM hopes to build 100,000 electric vehicles in the second half of this year, bringing its total to 150,000. That's still a long way from the 400,000 target for 2024.
“There’s been some criticism that we should have been faster with our EVs. We’re going as fast as we can, but we wanted to make sure we were leveraging a platform that’s going to give us efficiency with Ultium and that consumers weren’t going to have to compromise. I’m very confident with the product portfolio we have coming, the pricing and the demand,” Barra is quoted as saying, by Automotive News.
During a conference call at the end of July on financial results, Barra explained that a problem with an automation equipment supplier had slowed down the assembly of battery modules. The company has deployed engineers to help build manual assembly lines. She also said GM plans to increase module production capacity this year at its electric vehicle plants in Michigan, Tennessee, Mexico and, by the middle of next year, Ontario.
“We’ve already seen a lot of improvement from, I’ll say, the last four to six weeks. We’re going to continue on that path. We’ve also added additional lines because we don’t want module production to gate our launch of all the products that we have coming in the second half of this year and continuing into next,” said Barra.
For the moment, GM is having no trouble finding buyers for its electric products. But the longer production takes, the greater the delays for consumers. Some may go elsewhere, which is why it's important for the company to put the pedal to the metal.
Many will be watching to see how production progresses over the next 12 to 18 months.