Hidden among the landmarks of General Motors’s Warren Tech Center outside Detroit is the new foundation for the automaker’s $900 million bet on its electric future.
The nondescript 500,000-square-foot pair of white boxes, which house GM’s new Battery Development Center, might not look like much. But locked in is the key to GM’s plan to reduce the cost of their EVs by about 10%.
At a time when other car companies are retreating from EVs, GM’s new Battery Cell Development Center is part of a renaissance. And GM is the only one that told TechCrunch that it would allow it to bring a new slate of low-cost batteries to market a year earlier than planned.
GM has not been immune to the US EV market. Last year, the automaker took a $1.6 billion charge as it overhauled its EV production capacity, laying off thousands of workers in the process. It has also reportedly halted, if temporarily, the renewal of its full-size EV trucks and SUVs.
To get its EV strategy back on track, Kurt Kelty, GM’s vice president of battery and sustainability, pins the company’s success on a new battery chemistry known as LMR. Kelty, who once led battery technology at Tesla, has made it his signature in his two years at the company.
“That’s going to be our bread and butter,” Kelty told TechCrunch. “That will be our main product line.”
The battery is restarting
GM’s halting of EVs has signaled the broader battery industry in the US, which over the past few decades has been booming. Early manufacturers have never lived up to their promise, and recently, intense competition from Chinese companies has forced automakers and battery makers to rethink the plans they made five years ago.
For GM, that pressure has led to a shortened life for Ultium, the branded battery platform that underpins its current EVs. Like much of the industry, the automaker was betting big on an expensive but powerful battery chemistry known as NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt). Rising commodity costs and China’s dominance of key minerals have kept EV prices higher than expected. NMC is not going away, but at GM, it will be limited to high-end GM vehicles.
Instead, GM has been developing LMR (lithium-manganese-rich), which it says is nearly as strong 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 GM introduced LMR last year, it said that, in a truck like the Chevrolet Silverado EV, the new chemistry should preserve most of the car’s 400-plus mile range while cutting costs by at least $6,000. For the mid-range model, that would bring it within spitting distance of the gas version.
Finding new battery chemistry is one thing. Producing gigawatt-hour figures is another, especially at the pace the EV industry is moving. Facing pressure from major automakers like BYD and battery titans like CATL, GM says it wants LMR vehicles on the road by 2028. GM needs a new Battery Cell Development Center to deliver if it wants to meet that deadline.
The new structure 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 success that came from Wallace to the factory floors of Tennessee and Ohio.
BCDC, as insiders call the center, is something like a driver’s 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 made in small batches – about 30 to 50 per day – at the Wallace Battery Cell Research Center nearby and determine whether they are ready for production.
Knowing the battery recipe
Many recipes for new batteries fail to deliver when they are finalized on a commercial scale, and companies don’t have years to solve the problems. If a new chemistry cannot achieve an 85% yield within 18 months on a production line, it should not be considered commercially viable, according to a McKinsey report.
Challenges are like using a recipe meant for a family of four and up to a wedding reception with 400 guests. It’s not just a factory outlet, either. The batteries from the research center are the cells of small coins, but the cells in the EV pack look like a small cutting board.
“Once you learn the recipe from Wallace, you have to figure out how to do this at high volume?” Kelty said. “You really learn a lot from that letter cell to the main road because it doesn’t transfer well.”
BCDC is meant to make that step painless.
Testing at the facility costs about $200,000, which is significantly less than a full-size Ultium factory. Once the BCDC team is confident they have the process nailed down, the transition to full production should be easy, Kelty said. “The machines are almost the same between them, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to pass the hand.”
BCDC is one or two orders of magnitude smaller than Ultium’s 2.8 million-square-foot battery factory in Tennessee. Ultium’s factory makes about 300,000 cells a year, or 45 gigawatt hours. BCDC has several production lines, making about a hundredth of the number of cells, and its mixing tanks, where the battery materials are assembled, hold 40 liters instead of 2,000. Although smaller, BCDC is still an order of magnitude larger than the neighboring Wallace Center.
“BCDC is intended to bridge the gap,” Mo Gallegos, head of BCDC at GM, told TechCrunch.
It turns to AI models
To further reduce costs, GM has been working to simulate as many processes as possible using various AI models. The company has invested heavily in computing power, and while no one can put a number on it, I’m told it’s “the national lab average.”
The automaker has developed physics-based models to simulate how changes in chemistry or manufacturing process will affect battery cell performance.
“On the LMR, we logged over 150 million hours on the CPU,” Radu Theyyunni, director of global electronics and powertrain at GM, told TechCrunch. “Most engine systems don’t use a lot of valuable hours.”
There is also a digital twin for all of BCDC, including machine control boards, cables, and mixing tank blades. Before I set foot in BCDC, the team gave me a VR headset and took me through a digital twin, where I was able to follow the production line from start to finish.
Since the BCDC has taken shape, the digital twin has been used in a variety of activities. In one instance, the team used it to determine whether plans left enough clearance for equipment to operate and maintain regularly. For one, they simulate the equipment’s control systems to ensure that everything will behave as intended.
“Is the equipment working the way it’s supposed to? Is it working safely? Is it doing all the things we think this control system is going to do? That shortens our debugging and expansion time,” Gallegos said. In all, GM says the simulation saved it millions of dollars.
GM needs all the speed it can get.
While the EV market in the US has softened recently, globally, it grew by 20% last year. Future projections of higher oil prices coupled with lower battery costs suggest that a shift away from fossil fuels will happen eventually, if not sooner.
If LMR is ready in time, it could help GM offer competitive EVs with enough value to appease worried Americans. But first LMR needs 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 car manufacturers as engine development was a century ago. The future of GM’s EV depends on its ability to shepherd new chemicals from R&D to production.
Kelty likes to say that GM makes “the right battery for the right use,” perhaps echoing the company’s old slogan, “a car for every purse and purpose.”
The LMR may be BCDC’s first trial, but it is unlikely to be the last.
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