GM has invested massively in EV research, and is now betting that its new Ultium platform, made up of batteries. motors, software, and other components will set it apart from the competition, and maybe eventually help it to replace Tesla as the top EV maker in the world.
Unveiled in March of 2020, the first vehicles built around the platform will be delivered this year.
The centerpiece of the Ultium platform are GM’s new batteries, developed in partnership with LG Energy Solutions, a division of Korea’s LG Corp. The batteries use an unorthodox chemistry which reduces the expensive and difficult to source Cobalt by 70%. This reduces costs, bringing battery costs below the $100 per kilowatt hour that is seen as the barrier to making EV’s economically competitive with combustion engines — a cost per kilowatt which is one-tenth that of the 2010 Chevy Volt’s battery. The batteries also utilize a pouch structure compared with Tesla’s cylindrical cells, which packages energy more densely, and which allow cells to be replaced or upgraded. The Aluminum chemistry also makes the battery electrodes more structurally sound, and less prone to lithium spike formation from fast charging, which can short out a battery.
GM’s battery monitoring system will operate wirelessly, using a Bluetooth-like 2.4-GHz spectrum wireless connection, eliminating soldering and wire harnesses, and allowing the system to connect to the cloud and have wireless diagnostic analysis.
The Ultium platform is also designed to create a single foundational structure scalable to all of GM’s product selections. This means by adapting the Ultium platform, they can create 19 different conformations that will be used among GM’s entire product fleet. That is compared to today’s staggering menagerie of 550 combustion-powertrain combinations it takes to produce all of GM’s vehicles. By consolidating their design so all of their vehicles can be made from a smaller pool of component parts, GM will cut costs, reduce shipping and manufacturing complexity, and simplifies the parts supply chain.
GM also made the system which manages the battery pack uniquely adaptable, so that it could incorporate different cells with different chemistries in the same pack. That will allow the battery’s component parts to later be replaced with newer technologies should they fail in the future.
Although Tesla was the undisputed king of EVs in 2021, GM believes the Ultium platform will allow it to dominate the North American EV market by 2025. Of course in this environment, there are a lot of other EV companies pioneering a lot of other EV technologies, and they are all vying for the same prize.
