GM’s electric future depends on a new battery, and this building

Hidden 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 500,000-square-foot pair of off-white boxes, which house GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center, may not seem like much. But locked inside is the key to GM’s plan to reduce the cost of its electric vehicles by nearly 10%.

At a time when some auto companies are phasing out electric vehicles, GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center is part of a reset. And GM told TechCrunch it will allow it to bring a new range of lower-cost batteries to market a year faster than planned.

GM has not been immune to the unrest in the US electric vehicle market. Last year, the automaker made a $1.6 billion charge while reconfiguring its electric vehicle production capacity, laying off thousands of workers in the process. also has supposedly archivedalbeit temporarily, an update to its EV trucks and full-size SUVs.

To get its electric vehicle strategy back on track, Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of batteries and sustainability, attributes the company’s success to a new battery chemistry known as LMR. Kelty, who previously led battery technology at Tesla, has made it his flagship product in the two years he has been with the company.

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

Battery reset

GM’s halt to the launch of electric vehicles has mirrored the broader battery industry in the United States, which has developed in fits and starts over the past two decades. Early startups have failed to deliver on their promise, and more recently, intense competition from Chinese companies has pushed auto and battery makers to rethink plans they made five years ago.

At GM, that pressure led to shortening the life of Ultium, the branded battery platform that underpins its current electric vehicles. Like much of the industry, the automaker had bet heavily on an expensive but powerful battery chemistry known as NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt). Rising materials costs and China’s dominance over key critical minerals have kept EV prices higher than expected. NMC isn’t going away, but at GM it will be restricted to high-end GM vehicles.

Instead, GM has been developing LMR (lithium manganese rich), which it claims is almost as energy dense as NMC, but at a cost comparable to cheaper chemicals like LFP (lithium iron phosphate) that power low-end models like the Chevrolet Bolt.

When G.M. introduced MRLs last yearHe said that, in a truck like the Chevrolet Silverado EV, the new chemistry should preserve most of the vehicle’s 400-plus mile range while reducing costs by at least $6,000. For a mid-range model, that would put it closer to the gasoline version.

Discovering new battery chemistry is one thing. Manufacturing gigawatt-hours is another, especially at the pace the electric vehicle industry is advancing. Under pressure from auto giants like BYD and battery titans like CATL, GM says it wants to put LMR vehicles on the road by 2028. GM needs to get the new Battery Cell Development Center up and running if it wants to meet that deadline.

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

The BCDC, as insiders call the facility, is something like a pilot line, but larger. When fully operational, it will be capable of producing about 2,500 cells a day, or about half a gigawatt-hour a year. Batteries developed in small batches (about 30 to 50 per day) will be needed at the Wallace Battery Cell Research Center next door and determined if they are ready for production.

Master the battery recipe

Many recipes for new batteries don’t work when taken to a commercial scale, and companies don’t have years to solve the problems. If a new chemistry cannot achieve 85% yield in 18 months on a production line, it should not be considered commercially viable, according to a McKinsey Report.

The challenges are similar to using a recipe intended for a family of four and scaling it up to a wedding reception with 400 guests. It’s not just about the factory’s great performance, either. The batteries emerging from the research center are small button cells, but the cells in an EV pack are more like a small cutting board.

“Once you learn how to make the recipe at Wallace, you have to figure out, well, how do you make this in high volume?” Kelly said. “You really learn a lot when going from the button battery to the large format because it doesn’t transfer perfectly.”

BCDC’s goal is to make that step less painful.

A test at the facility costs about $200,000, much less than at the full-size Ultium plant. When the BCDC team is confident it has the process defined, the transition to full production should be easier, Kelty said. “The team is almost the same between them, so it shouldn’t be such a difficult transfer.”

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

“The BCDC aims to close the gap,” Mo Gallegos, BCDC director at GM, told TechCrunch.

Turning to AI models

To further reduce costs, GM has been working to simulate as many processes as possible using a variety of AI models. The company has invested heavily in computing power and, although no one would put a number on it, I am told it is “national laboratory scale.”

The automaker has developed physics-based models to simulate how changes in a chemical or production process will affect the performance of a battery cell.

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

There is also a digital twin of the entire BCDC, including the equipment control boards, wiring, and even the mixing tank blades. Before I set foot in the BCDC, the team asked me to put on a virtual reality headset and walked me through the digital twin, where I was able to follow the production line from start to finish.

As the BCDC has taken shape, the digital twin has been used for a variety of tasks. In one case, the team used it to determine whether the plans left enough clearance around the equipment for regular operations and repairs. In another, they simulated the equipment’s control systems to ensure that everything behaved as expected.

“Is the equipment working like it’s supposed to? Is it working safely? Is it doing all the things that we think this control system is going to do? That shortens our debugging and ramp-up time,” Gallegos said. In total, 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 weakened recently, globally it grew 20% last year. The looming specter of high oil prices, coupled with declining battery costs, suggests the transition away from fossil fuels will occur eventually, if not sooner.

If the LMR is ready in time, it could help GM offer competitive electric vehicles with enough range to appease anxious Americans. But first the LMR must go through the BCDC. Gallegos expects the first batches to roll off the line by the end of this year.

In the next decade, battery development will be as important to automakers as engine development was during the last century. The future of GM’s electric vehicles depends on its ability to guide new chemistries from research and development to production.

Kelty likes to say that GM is developing “the right battery for the right application,” perhaps echoing a old company motto“a car for every pocket and purpose.”

LMR could be the BCDC’s first test, but it is unlikely to be the last.