General Motors to Abandon Ultium Battery Brand and Adopt LFP Technology
TapTechNews October 9th news, General Motors announced that it will abandon the Ultium battery brand to expand the types and chemical compositions of batteries used in its electric vehicles.
At today's investor event, Kurt Kelty, vice president of General Motors batteries and former Tesla executive, announced plans to adopt lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery technology to reduce the cost of electric vehicles by up to $6,000. General Motors currently uses the more common nickel-cobalt-manganese (NCM) battery on its Ultium platform.
Several automakers including Tesla and Ford have already been using LFP batteries. LFP batteries have lower complexity, lower production costs, and do not rely on excessive cobalt used in NCM batteries. Cobalt is known as the blood diamond in batteries, and many automakers are trying to avoid long-term use of cobalt.
General Motors launched the Ultium battery in 2020 for its electric vehicle series, including Chevrolet Equinox and Blazer EVs, Cadillac Lyriq, Hummer EV and partner vehicles such as the Honda Prologue SUV. But Ultium has never become a household name, and now General Motors is abandoning the brand and its one-size-fits-all approach to battery systems.
Kelty said that General Motors will open a battery research and development center at its Warren, Michigan, technical center in 2027 to better compete with Chinese battery manufacturers that dominate the global supply chain. He said that General Motors will meet production demand by 2025, and the battery manufacturing problems faced at the end of 2023 have been resolved.
General Motors will continue to partner with LG to develop batteries and with Samsung SDI to build a new $3.5 billion (TapTechNews note: currently about 24.675 billion yuan) electric vehicle battery factory in Indiana.
Kelty said that General Motors will reduce the battery cost to an average of $60 per kilowatt-hour from 2023 to 2024, and is expected to further reduce it by $30 in 2025 through LFP batteries. He also noted that the automaker can also load LFP batteries into large electric vehicle chassis that usually contain Ultium NCM square batteries and still achieve more than 350 miles (about 563.27 kilometers) of range.
Kelty said that General Motors also reduced the number of modules in the battery pack by up to 75% by using new prismatic batteries, and high-end cylindrical batteries will be used for performance vehicles.