has Barra failed? — Technical headaches put the brakes on GMs big EV push GM sold a record number of EVs in 2023, but only thanks to the Bolt EV and Bolt EUV.
Jonathan M. Gitlin – Jan 4, 2024 2:32 pm UTC Enlarge / A GM Ultium battery pack like that found in the Lyriq. Santa Fabio for General Motors reader comments 17
General Motors ended 2023 as the number one automaker in the United States, selling 2.6 million new vehicles during those 12 months. That’s a 14.1 percent increase from its performance in 2022, and comfortably eclipses the 2.3 million cars that Toyota sold during the same period. It had a strong year in terms of electric vehicle sales tooup 93 percent year-on-year.
But a quick look at the data reveals a somewhat less rosy picture. Yes, it was a banner year for GM EVs, with 75,883 deliveries in 2023. But only because of the Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV. Chevy delivered 62,045 Bolts in 2023, a 62.8 percent increase on the 38,120 Bolts it sold in 2022.
But as Ars has detailed in the past, the Bolt is no more. Production ended at the Orion Assembly plant in Michigan on December 18, and GM is laying off 945 workers at the plant as it retools the factory to make electric trucks like the Chevy Silverado EV and GMC Sierra EV.
GM CEO Mary Barra has promised a new Bolt EV, this time using GM’s newer battery platform, known as Ultium. But the second-generation Bolt isn’t scheduled to appear until 2025 at the earliest. Cheap, mass-produced cells?
GM has bet big on Ultium. In 2020 it revealed the new battery platform and told us that the new cells, developed together with LG Chem (which also produced the packs for Bolt) would drop below the $100/kWh barrier “early in the platform’s life.” $100/kWh is the point at which an EV powertrain reaches price parity with an internal combustion engine powertrain, at which point an EV should no longer cost several thousand dollars more than an equivalent conventionally fueled vehicle.
Together with LG Chem and now Samsung, GM is investing billions of dollars in battery factories, and the automaker had said it plans to build a million EVs a year by 2025.
But most of those battery plants are still under construction, and last July it had to pause building some Ultium EVs due to a lack of cells.
In fact, in 2023 GM delivered just 13,838 Ultium-based EVs: 9,154 Cadillac Lyriqs, 482 Chevrolet Blazer EVs, 461 Chevrolet Silverado EVs, 3,244 GMC Hummer EVs, and 497 BrightDrop delivery vans. Advertisement
A spokesperson for GM told Ars that “cell production is going great, but the automation we use to pack cells into modules was not able to keep up,” and that “things are definitely improving.”
During the automaker’s Q2 2023 call with investors, it said that it had “deployed teams from GM manufacturing engineering to work on site with our automation supplier to improve delivery times,” and that it had added manual module assembly lines and was installing “more module capacity at all of our North America EV plants, beginning with Factory ZERO and Spring Hill this summer, Ramos Arizpe in the fall, and CAMI in the second quarter of next year.”
Three months later, GM told investors that “our battery module constraint is getting better, which helped us more than double Ultium Platform production in the third quarter compared to the second quarter. We are now in the process of installing and testing our high-capacity module assembly lines, which will continue into the first part of next year.”
GM also said that it believes the production constraint will have been overcome by mid-2024. Software is hard
Unfortunately for GM, a lack of Ultium cells isn’t its only headache where new EVs are concerned. Last year the automaker revealed that it was dropping support for Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, the extremely popular phone-casting apps, from its EVs from model year 2024. Instead, its Ultium-based EVs would ship with a new infotainment system called Ultifi, built using Google’s Android Automotive OS (not to be confused with the phone-casting Android Auto). Enlarge / The infotainment system crashed more than once during our drive of the Blazer EV, and the problem is serious enough that GM issued a stop sale for the SUV as a result.Jonathan Gitlin
In December, GM told Motor Trend that it dropped CarPlay and Android Auto because they caused stability issues. Which probably makes it all the more awkward that the company has had to issue a stop sale for the Blazer EVwhich Motor Trend inexplicably crowned its SUV of the yearthanks to a litany of problems with its infotainment system crashing. Indeed, during Ars’ brief time with a Blazer EV on the first drive last month, we also experienced these problems, with the system crashing randomly.
A spokesperson for the company told Ars that “GM is working quickly to address these issues and to implement a fix. Customers will be able to bring their Blazer EVs to Chevrolet dealers once they are notified that the related software update is available. Our engineering teams are working around the clock toward a solution.”
Listing image by Jonathan Gitlin reader comments 17 Jonathan M. Gitlin Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC. Advertisement Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Related Stories Today on Ars
