GM working to increase production of EVs

By mid-2024, General Motors plans to have several new electric vehicle nameplates in production, from the Chevrolet Equinox that was designed with affordability in mind to the Cadillac Escalade IQ costing four times as much.

That's also when the automaker expects to have built 400,000 EVs, on the way to reaching capacity for 1 million a year starting in 2025.

GM will get some help reaching that goal when its second Ultium Cells battery plant with joint- venture partner LG Energy Solution opens in Tennessee this year, joining the one already operating in Ohio. With more battery capacity and more EV nameplates on the way, GM is working to resolve issues that have constrained its ability to scale production.

Production of the Ultium-based EVs that GM already sells, including the Cadillac Lyriq crossover and the GMC Hummer EV pickup and SUV, started off slower than planned. Production demands are only going to grow, as all four of GM's U.S. brands have EV launches in the next year en route to an all-electric light-duty lineup by 2035.

Executives have said output has picked up in recent months and continues to rise.

GM CEO Mary Barra said the automaker built 50,000 EVs in North America in the first half of this year, though 80 percent were Chevrolet Bolts built on GM's outgoing battery architecture. The company aims to build 100,000 EVs in the second half of the year, and Barra said a greater share of them will be on GM's newer Ultium battery platform.

More than 2,000 Lyriqs and Hummer EVs reserved by customers were in transit to dealers at the end of June, Barra said on GM's second-quarter earnings call. And more than 1,000 Lyriqs were delivered to customers in July, CFO Paul Jacobson said during a J.P. Morgan conference this month. It took GM nearly a year to deliver the 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 said. "I'm very confident with the product portfolio we have coming, the pricing and the demand."

GM still is relatively new to producing batteries and EVs at higher volumes, said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars.com. That requires learning new processes and is influenced by factors outside the company's control, such as the battery supply chain.

The automaker's EV production targets are achievable, he said, but "those numbers assume everything goes to plan, with no hiccups."

Barra said on GM's July 25 earnings call that an automation equipment supplier issue slowed battery module assembly, so the company sent manufacturing engineering teams to help and created manual assembly lines. It plans to add module capacity this year at EV plants in Detroit; Spring Hill, Tenn.; and Ramos Arizpe, Mexico, and by mid-2024 in Ingersoll, Ontario, Barra said.

"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," she said. "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. And we know we're going to need that module assembly capability anyway as we continue to grow."

Inder Dosanjh, CEO of Dosanjh Family Auto Group in the San Francisco Bay Area, said he expects production of the upcoming Cadillac Escalade IQ will more quickly reach capacity.

Dosanjh, a former chairman of the Cadillac National Dealer Council, said he has started to notice improved Lyriq supply.

In his market, the backlog is so long it could take a year to fulfill.

At his Stevens Creek Cadillac dealership, "if that store had 400 Lyriqs today, we could sell all 400," he said. "Demand is really high."