GM opens battery center to accelerate lower-cost EV production

General Motors has opened a new 500,000-square-foot Battery Cell Development Center (BCDC) in Detroit. The facility is a cornerstone of the automaker’s $900 million bet on its electric future and part of a reboot of its EV strategy. GM claims the BCDC will allow it to bring a new slate of lower-cost batteries to market a year faster than planned, helping to slash EV costs by nearly 10%.

The launch follows a difficult period for the automaker, which took a $1.6 billion charge last year to reconfigure its EV production capacity. To get its strategy back on track, GM is pivoting from expensive NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt) chemistry to a new battery chemistry known as LMR (lithium-manganese-rich). According to GM, LMR chemistry is comparable in cost to cheaper chemistries like LFP (lithium-iron-phosphate) but should preserve most of a vehicle’s more than 400-mile range while slashing costs by at least $6,000.

The BCDC acts as a pilot line to bridge the gap between research and mass production. “The BCDC is intended to bridge the gap,” said Mo Gallegos, head of BCDC at GM. It takes batteries developed in small batches of about 30 to 50 per day at the Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center—which GM opened in 2022—and prepares them for full-scale factories like the 2.8 million-square-foot Ultium battery plant in Tennessee. While the Ultium plant has a capacity of 45 gigawatt-hours and produces 300,000 cells per year using 2,000-liter mixing tanks, the BCDC operates on a smaller scale. It features 40-liter mixing tanks and is capable of producing about 2,500 cells per day, or about half a gigawatt-hour per year.

To optimize production and lower costs, GM is using a digital twin—a virtual simulation of a physical system—to model the facility and its equipment. The automaker has also logged 150 million CPU hours simulating the LMR chemistry. This testing is critical because a new chemistry must hit an 85% yield within 18 months on a production line to be commercially viable, according to a McKinsey report. A test run at the BCDC costs about $200,000, which is far less than at a full-scale plant.

Facing intense competition from Chinese rivals like automotive competitor BYD and battery manufacturer CATL, GM wants to get LMR-equipped vehicles on the road by 2028. Although the U.S. market has softened, the global EV market grew 20% last year, making rapid commercialization essential.

Why it matters

GM is launching its new Battery Cell Development Center to accelerate the production of lower-cost LMR battery chemistry. The facility represents a key effort to reduce EV costs and improve the automaker’s competitiveness against rivals like BYD and CATL.