General Motors has big plans for its EVs. Joining its current (ha, get it?) lineup of electric vehicles by mid-2024 are the Cadillac Escalade IQ, Silverado EV, Equinox and Celestiq, just to name a few. The automaking giant expects to have built 400,000 EVs by that time. According to Automotive News, it’s part of an effort to reach a capacity of 1 million units per year starting in 2025.
While it’s been a bit of a slow start for GM, the outlet reports that GM will get some help in reaching its goals when a second Ultium Cell battery plant opens up in Tennessee this year, joining the one it already has in Ohio. It’s being built as part of a joint venture with LG Energy Solutions. On top of that, GM is also reportedly working to resolve issues that have put snags on scaling production.
Executives at GM tell AutoNews that output has picked up in recent months and continues to rise as all four of GM’s brands plan to launch EVs next year en route to an all-electric light-duty lineup by 2035. CEO Mary Barra says the automaker built 50,000 EVs in North America in the first half of this year. However, 80 percent of those were Chevy Bolts built on GM’s soon-to-be-dead battery architecture. It apparently intends to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of this year, and a larger share of them will be on GM’s Ultium platform.
She went on to say that over 2,000 Lyriqs and Hummer EVs reserved by customers were in transit to dealers by the end of June. Additionally, another executive said that over 1,000 Lyriqs were delivered to customers in July. Just for reference, AutoNews says it took GM nearly a year to deliver its first 1,000 Lyriqs.
“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,” Barra reportedly said. “I’m very confident with the product portfolio we have coming, the pricing and the demand.”
During an earnings call at the end of July, Barra said that an automation equipment supplier issue slowed battery module assembly, and because of that, the company sent manufacturing engineering terms to help build manual assembly lines. She also said GM plans to add module capacity this year at its EV 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,” Barra said during the call. “And we know we’re going to need that module assembly capability anyway as we continue to grow.”
Selling the cars doesn’t seem to be a problem at all for GM. It’s just getting them built. The head of a large dealer network in the San Francisco Bay Area told the outlet that the backlog of orders is so long it could take a year to fulfill.
Speaking about his Santa Clara Cadillac dealership, he said “if that store had 400 Lyriqs today, we could sell all 400. Demand is really high.”