Tag Archives: General Motors Co

GM to open battery cell development center in push to cut EV costs

By Ben Klayman

DETROIT (Reuters) – General Motors Co on Tuesday said it will open a battery cell development center in southeast Michigan to help it drive down the cost and boost the driving range of electric vehicles with lithium ion and solid-state battery cells.

The Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center, to be located on the No. 1 U.S. automaker’s technical campus in Warren, Michigan, is expected to open in mid-2022 and begin building prototype cells in the fourth quarter, GM said.

“The key to making these vehicles affordable is going to be the cell cost in the battery packs,” Ken Morris, GM’s vice president of electric and self-driving vehicles, said on a conference call with reporters. GM will spend “hundreds of millions” of dollars on the new center, he added.

GM has said it will spend $35 billion through 2025 on EVs and autonomous vehicles, and is expected to outline targets beyond that period at its investor day on Wednesday.

Part of that push is GM’s partnership with LG Energy Solutions, a unit of South Korea’s LG Chem, to develop its Ultium batteries. The companies have announced two joint-ventures battery plants and GM has said it intends to open two more.

GM has targeted eliminating emissions from all light vehicles it sells by 2035.

A key element to making EVs more attractive to consumers is driving down their cost and a big part of that is the batteries. GM has said it wants to have at least 60% lower battery costs in the next generation of Ultium and officials said future products will allow electric driving ranges of 600 miles (965 km) on a single charge.

The new facility, at almost 300,000 square feet (27,900 square meters), will work with the company’s existing materials research and development and battery systems labs in Warren. It will also work with SES, a Massachusetts company with which GM formed a partnership with in March.

The center, named for Bill Wallace, a former executive who played a key role in the development of GM’s advanced battery technology before he died from cancer in 2018, will be capable of building large-format, prototype lithium-metal battery cells, as well as developing silicon and solid-state technologies.

It will also develop new production methods to use in battery plants.

GM rival Ford Motor Co in April said it would invest $185 million to open in late 2022 an EV battery development center.

(Reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit; editing by Richard Pullin)

GM extends production cuts due to chip shortage, Stellantis warns of lingering pain

By Ben Klayman and Nick Carey

DETROIT/LONDON (Reuters) – The global semiconductor chip shortage led General Motors Co on Wednesday to extend production cuts at three North American plants and add a fourth to the list of factories hit, and Stellantis to warn the pain could linger far into the year.

The extended cuts do not change GM’s forecast last month that the shortage could shave up to $2 billion from this year’s earnings. GM Chief Financial Officer Paul Jacobson subsequently said chip supplies should return to normal rates by the second half of the year and he was confident the profit hit would not worsen.

However, Stellantis on Wednesday did not give an estimate for the financial hit it expects this year from the shortage and said the issue could last into the second half of 2021.

The chip shortage, which has hit automakers globally, stems from a confluence of factors as carmakers, which shut plants for two months during the COVID-19 pandemic last year, compete against the sprawling consumer electronics industry for chip supplies.

Consumers have stocked up on laptops, gaming consoles and other electronic products during the pandemic, leading to tight chip supplies. They also bought more cars than industry officials expected last spring, further straining supplies.

GM did not disclose the impact on volumes or say which supplier or parts were affected by the chip shortage, but the U.S. automaker said it intends to recover as much of the lost output as possible.

“GM continues to leverage every available semiconductor to build and ship our most popular and in-demand products, including full-size trucks and SUVs,” GM spokesman David Barnas said. “We contemplated this downtime when we discussed our outlook for 2021.”

GM said it would extend downtime at plants in Fairfax, Kansas, and Ingersoll, Ontario, to at least mid-April, and in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, through the end of March. In addition, it will idle its Gravatai plant in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in April and May.

The Detroit automaker had previously extended production cuts at three North American plants into mid-March and said vehicles at two other plants would only be partially built. Following Wednesday’s cuts, forecasting firm AutoForecast Solutions estimated GM could lose more than 216,000 units globally due to the shortage.

While reporting quarterly results on Wednesday, Stellantis said the chip shortage could weigh on 2021 earnings and Chief Financial Officer Richard Palmer told analysts on a conference call the financial impact was a “big unknown.”

Stellantis Chief Executive Carlos Tavares said the automaker was working hard to find alternative chip supplies, but he was “not so sure” the issue would be resolved by the second half of 2021.

Ford Motor Co said last month the lack of chips could cut company production by up to 20% in the first quarter and hurt profits by as much as $2.5 billion. It had previously cut production of its top-selling F-150 pickup truck.

Some automakers, including Toyota Motor Corp and Hyundai Motor Co, avoided deeper cuts by stockpiling chips ahead of the shortage.

Industry officials and politicians have pushed U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to take a more active role in dealing with the chip shortage.

Last week, Biden said he would seek $37 billion in funding to supercharge chip manufacturing in the United States. An executive order also launched a review of supply chains for such critical products as semiconductor chips, electric vehicle batteries and rare earth minerals.

Complicating matters was a severe winter storm in Texas last month that killed at least 21 people and led to the shutdown of several chip plants. Semiconductor industry officials said customers would face knock-on effects in several months.

(Reporting by Ben Klayman in Detroit and Nick Carey in London, editing by Jonathan Oatis and Chizu Nomiyama)

GM CEO Barra, Ivanka Trump talk jobs in a 2020 battleground

By Joseph White

WARREN, Mich. (Reuters) – General Motors Co Chief Executive Mary Barra hosted Ivanka Trump, daughter and adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, for a tour on Wednesday of a GM worker training center in one of the hottest battlegrounds of the U.S. presidential race.

GM and White House officials said the meeting at GM’s technical center in Warren, Michigan, was scheduled long ago, and was not a political event.

Still, the campaign context behind the location, the subject – manufacturing jobs – and the timing of the visit was inescapable.

Warren is in Macomb County, north of Detroit, which will be pivotal to winning Michigan’s electoral votes in November. Preserving U.S. manufacturing jobs has been a focus of President Trump’s administration since its first day.

Big U.S. corporations face a challenge during a charged campaign season. Barra and GM have not endorsed a candidate in the presidential contest, and will not, company officials said. Still, GM has much at stake in policy decisions Trump – or his successor – will make on issues such as tailpipe emissions, autonomous vehicle safety rules, trade and taxes.

GM is among several corporations supporting White House programs to promote investments in worker training. Ivanka Trump is leading those efforts, including an advertising campaign called “Find Something New.”

Among the students in the GM program who met with Barra and Trump was Zephirin Hunt, who started with GM as a temporary worker at the automaker’s Flint truck assembly plant. Now, Hunt said, he is a skilled trades worker at an assembly plant near Lansing, Michigan, pursuing a course of training in electronic machine and robot controls. “Every 890 hours,” of training, “we get a raise,” Hunt said.

GM and Barra have had an up and down relationship with the president, who attacked Barra and the automaker for a November 2018 decision to close an assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio. That shutdown was part of a broader retrenchment at GM in 2019 that resulted in the closure of a transmission plant in Warren, and thousands of layoffs at the GM technical center.

Trump has also blasted GM for investing in China, and criticized the company earlier this year during a negotiation that led to GM building ventilators in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

GM has sided with Trump in a legal fight with the state of California over its authority to set stiffer vehicle emissions standards than those established by the U.S. government, however.

(Reporting by Joe White in Warren, Additional reporting by David Shepardson in Washington; Editing by Tom Brown)

Toyota expands U.S. Takata air bag recall to 600,000 extra vehicles

The Toyota logo is shown at the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S., November 30, 2017.

By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Toyota Motor Corp said on Tuesday it was expanding its safety recall involving Takata Corp front passenger air bag inflators to cover about 601,300 additional vehicles in the United States.

Takata and its U.S. entity TK Holdings Inc filed for bankruptcy in June after it said it was recalling more than 100 million of its air bag inflators worldwide through the end of 2019 because they could inflate with too much force and spray metal fragments.

Air bags with the inflators have been linked to at least 180 injuries and 20 deaths, mostly in the United States including one in Louisiana that was identified last month.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Saturday posted a notice from Takata that said the company would recall another 3.3 million inflators for vehicles from automakers including Toyota, Honda Motor Co, BMW AG, Daimler AG, General Motors Co, Tata Motors Jaguar Land Rover unit and Subaru Corp.

NHTSA said in November that 19 automakers had recalled 46 million inflators in 34 million U.S. vehicles — and by 2019 as many as 70 million U.S. inflators will have been recalled. In June, the agency said only about 35 percent of vehicles recalled have been repaired to date.

In January 2016, Takata agreed to plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing and pay $1 billion to resolve a U.S. Justice Department investigation into the inflator ruptures.

(Reporting by David Shepardson in Washington and Sanjana Shivdas in Bengaluru; Editing by Tom Brown)