GM’s electric future depends on a new battery — and this facility

Tucked away among the architectural landmarks of General Motors’ sprawling Warren Tech Center outside Detroit is a new cornerstone of the automaker’s $900 million bet on its electric future.

The nondescript pair of 500,000-square-foot off-white boxes that house GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center might not look like much. But locked inside is the key to GM’s plan to cut the cost of its electric vehicles by nearly 10 percent.

At a time when some car companies are pulling back from EVs, GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center is part of a reboot. And it’s something GM told TechCrunch will allow it to bring a new line of lower-cost batteries to market a year sooner than planned.

GM has not been immune to the malaise in the US electric vehicle market. Last year, the automaker got one $1.6 billion charge as it restructured its EV production capacity, laying off thousands of workers in the process. It has too according to informationif temporary, a refresh of full-size EV trucks and SUVs.

To reset its electric car strategy, Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of batteries and sustainability, is pinning the company’s success on a new battery chemistry known as LMR. Kelty, who previously led battery technology at Tesla, has made it his signature product in his two years at the company.

“That’s really going to be our bread and butter,” Kelty told TechCrunch. “This will be our main product line.”

Battery reset

GM’s halting of electric vehicles mirrors the broader U.S. battery industry, which over the past two decades has grown in application and startup. Early startups fell short of their promise, and more recently, intense competition from Chinese companies has prompted automakers and battery makers to rethink plans they made five years ago.

At GM, that pressure has led to a shortened lifespan of Ultium, the branded battery platform that underpins its current electrics. Like much of the industry, the automotive industry had bet heavily on an expensive but powerful battery chemistry known as NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt). Rising material costs and China’s dominance of critical base minerals kept EV prices higher than expected. NMC won’t go away, but at GM, it will be limited to high-end GM vehicles.

In its place, GM has developed LMR (lithium manganese rich), which it says is nearly as energy-dense as NMC, but at a cost comparable to cheaper chemicals like LFP (lithium-iron-phosphate) that powers low-end models like the Chevrolet Bolt.

When GM introduced LMR last year, it said that, in a truck like the Chevrolet Silverado EV, the new chemistry would preserve most of the vehicle’s 400-plus mile range while cutting costs by at least $6,000. For a mid-range model, this would bring it within striking distance of the gas version.

Discovering a new battery chemistry is one thing. Building gigawatt-hour value is another, especially at the pace the EV industry is moving. Facing pressure from auto giants like BYD and battery titans like CATL, GM says it wants to have LMR vehicles on the market by 2028. GM needs its new Battery Cell Development Center to deliver if it wants to hit that deadline.

The new building serves as the cornerstone of GM’s battery strategy. The company opened the Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center and its first gigafactory in 2022. What was missing was a way to connect the discoveries coming out of Wallace to the factory floors in Tennessee and Ohio.

BCDC, as those in the know call the facility, is kind of like a pilot line, but bigger. When fully operational, it will be able to produce about 2,500 cells per day, or about half a gigawatt hour per year. It will take batteries developed in small batches — about 30 to 50 a day — at the Wallace Battery Cell Research Center next door and determine whether they are ready for production.

Master the battery recipe

Many recipes for new batteries fail to deliver when rolled out on a commercial scale, and companies don’t have years to fix the problems. If a new chemistry cannot achieve 85% efficiency within 18 months on a production line, it should not be considered commercially viable, according to McKinsey report.

The challenges are similar to taking a recipe meant for a family of four and scaling it up to a wedding reception with 400 guests. It’s not just absolute factory performance. The batteries that come out of the research center are small coin cells, but the cells in an EV pack look more like a small cutting board.

“Once you know how to make the recipe in Wallace, then you have to figure out, well, how do you make it at high volume?” Kelty said. “You really learn a lot going from that coin cell to the big format because it doesn’t transfer perfectly.”

BCDC aims to make this step less painful.

A test run at the facility costs about $200,000, which is much less than the full-size Ultium plant. Once the BCDC team is confident the process is complete, the transition to full production should be easier, Kelty said. “The equipment is almost the same between them, so it shouldn’t be that difficult to transmit them.”

BCDC is an order of magnitude or two smaller than the 2.8 million square foot Ultium battery plant in Tennessee. The Ultium plant produces about 300,000 cells per year, or 45 gigawatt hours. BCDC has fewer production lines, makes about one-hundredth the number of cells, and its mixing tanks, where the battery materials are mixed, hold 40 liters instead of 2,000. Although smaller, BCDC is still an order of magnitude larger than the Wallace Center next door.

“BCDC is meant to bridge the gap,” Mo Gallegos, head of BCDC at GM, told TechCrunch.

Turn to AI models

To further reduce costs, GM is working to simulate as many processes as possible using a variety of artificial intelligence models. The company has invested heavily in computing power, and while no one would put a number, I’m told it’s “national lab scale.”

The automotive industry has developed physics-based models to simulate how changes in a chemistry or manufacturing process will affect a battery’s performance.

“At LMR, we’ve logged over 150 million CPU hours,” Radu Theyyunni, GM’s director of global virtual electric propulsion and powertrains, told TechCrunch. “Most engine programs don’t use that many core hours.”

There’s also a digital twin of the entire BCDC, including the equipment control boards, wiring, and even the blades on the mixing tanks. Before I set foot in BCDC, the team fitted me with a VR headset and walked me through the digital twin, where I could follow the production line from start to finish.

As the BCDC has been formed, the digital twin has been used for a number of tasks. In one case, the team used it to determine whether designs left enough clearance around equipment for routine operations and repairs. In another, they simulated the equipment’s control systems to ensure everything would behave as intended.

“Is the equipment working as it should? Is it working safely? Is it doing all the things we think this control system is going to do? That cuts down on troubleshooting time and ramp-up time,” Gallegos said. Overall, GM says the simulations have saved it millions of dollars.

GM needs all the speed it can get.

While the electric vehicle market in the US has softened recently, globally, it grew 20% last year. The looming specter of high oil prices coupled with falling battery costs suggests the transition away from fossil fuels will happen eventually, if not sooner.

If the LMR is ready in time, it could help GM offer cost-competitive EVs with enough range to calm worried Americans. But first LMR has to go through BCDC. Gallegos expects the first batches to roll off the line later this year.

In the next decade, battery development will be as important to the automotive industry as engine development was in the last century. GM’s EV future depends on its ability to advance new chemicals from R&D to production.

Kelty is fond of saying that GM develops “the right battery for the right application,” perhaps echoing a old company slogan“a car for every bag and purpose”.

The LMR may be BCDC’s first test, but it’s unlikely to be its last.