GM Announcement on Electric Drive Production in St. Catharines
On February 20, General Motors (GM) and Unifor national held a public press conference at GM's St. Catharines Powertrain Plant to announce plans to produce electric vehicle propulsion systems at the plant.
"This is a time of historic change for our industry, and with this significant investment, St. Catharines will play a critical role in our electric vehicle future," said Marissa West, president and CEO of GM Canada. "The St. Catharines team produces engines and transmissions for many of GM's most popular vehicles, including full size trucks, SUVs and Corvette and we are very excited to announce our plans to supply critical drive units as well. This will support GM's plans to build 1 million electric vehicles a year in North America by 2025."
"For more than 70 years, highly skilled autoworkers in St. Catharines have built among the most advanced powertrains anywhere in the world," said Lana Payne, Unifor National President. "With a historic investment commitment from GM to build new electric drive units, autoworkers will continue to be the region's economic backbone for generations to come."
Despite the announcement giving the impression it is a done deal, GM made the announcement on the condition of public funding, which is the current subject of negotiations with the federal and Ontario governments.
In other words, the announcement is part of the negotiations with the governments. Otherwise, why make such an announcement before it has been finalized? It is also important to consider that the announcement is in advance of negotiations with autoworkers in Canada at what is called "the Big 3" (GM, Ford and Stellantis/Chrysler). In this respect, the announcement is also part of those negotiations, to create enthusiasm for future investments, that are not yet secured and that the company can then use against the workers and the governments as a form of blackmail to get whatever it wants. In this situation it appears that GM feels that working with the union in this way will benefit them by pressuring the government to give big handouts. It is a dangerous situation because the company is creating illusions that workers' interests can be defended by giving up their independent thinking and action and instead seeing their interests as one with the company, in this case to get public handouts. This blurring of the lines is part of the companies' attempts to get workers to give up their demands for wages and working conditions acceptable to them for the jobs they do and their actual conditions on the basis of promises about production if the public pays up. In the end it is the workers and their communities who will pay for the handouts from the government through cuts to social programs unless governments act to recoup their investments to re-invest in the public services the workers and their communities require, which is not something they are doing.
About GM's Electrification Plans
GM's plans for electrifying its vehicle fleet is based around sharing as much of the hardware as possible, which includes: the battery cells and monitoring system, the essential motor architecture, and the operating system. This then makes the components scalable across various products – reducing the costs of having so many different vehicles, parts and production lines. According to reports, GM envisions some 19 battery and motor combinations for its electric vehicles, in contrast with its current portfolio of 550 combustion-powertrain combinations. The sharing of the platform and components also means that production can be shifted quickly from one location to another if there is a strike or negotiations as a way to blackmail workers into accepting lower wages and working conditions, or as part of economic warfare against countries or jurisdictions.
GM has 10 propulsion plants in the U.S. Some experts expect there to be a consolidation of these plants as a result of the common platforms the electric vehicles are built on. "EVs are just honestly a lot more simplistic, so there's not going to be as much to them," said Brian Maxim, vice president of global powertrain at AutoForecast Solutions LLC.
In September 2022, General Motors had announced that it would manufacture its first electric car drives at its transmission plant in Toledo, Ohio.
The drive systems, that may be produced in St. Catherines, are for GM's Ultium platform. GM originally introduced the drive system 'Ultium Drive' in 2020. Due to its modular nature, these drive units can theoretically be installed in all Ultium models. This includes such models as the GMC Hummer EV, Cadillac Lyriq and the Chevrolet Equinox EV. The BrightDrop Zevo 600 delivery vehicle, assembled in Ingersoll, Ontario, is also based on the Ultium platform.
The Ultium platform refers mainly to the common Ultium battery cells that are used in the cars. They were developed and are produced by GM in partnership with LG Energy Solution, a division of the Korean conglomerate LG Corp. The company they formed to produce them is called Ultium Cells. The Ultium battery uses large (23.0-by-4.0-by-0.4-inch) pouch-type cells that package energy more densely than cylinders can. They weigh about 3 pounds each, hold 0.37 kWh of energy, can be arranged vertically or horizontally to suit space requirements of different vehicles, and are typically bundled into 24-cell modules. The Ultium platform allows GM to run battery cells with different chemistries in the same pack, so parts of the pack can be replaced with new types or different chemistry of batteries as things develop. The batteries diminish the reliance on cobalt – the most costly mineral in the cathode of existing batteries -- by 70 percent by adding aluminum, which reduces the overall production cost of each battery pack. The company says it will help push battery pack costs below $100 per kilowatt-hour -- considered to be a critical threshold for EVs to be competitive in terms of profit with internal combustion engines. The batteries are currently being made in Lordstown, Ohio in a plant very close to GM's Toledo plant where its electric drives are produced. Of note is that on December 9, the workers at the battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio voted in favor of joining the UAW by a vote of 710 to 16, the UAW said. There are also plans in place for other factories in Tennessee and Michigan.
The battery cells will also be monitored and coordinated wirelessly using the Bluetooth-like 2.4-GHz spectrum. This will result in reducing the vehicle's weight, complexity and space required to solder wired connections in existing vehicles; reducing the labour and materials required for assembly. The system, called Ultifi, constantly monitors the battery sharing info with the cloud. It also enables flash reprogramming when retrofitting newer battery chemistries or when re-purposing a pack including for grid energy storage, which is being presented as a way to expand electrical storage in an electrical grid using individual vehicles' storage capacity and feeding it back and forth from the location of charging.
Besides monitoring the battery operation, Ultifi is also
designed to generate a new revenue stream for GM in the form
of subscriptions to streaming content, concierge services, and
selling permanent upgrades or renting temporary features over
a vehicle's useful lifetime. Some examples of these upsells
are: vehicle authorization using driver-facing camera and
facial recognition software, automatic window/roof closing
based on links to local weather forecasts, Planetarium app
using GPS location to indicate nearby star constellations on
the infotainment screen(s), gesundheit mode that closes
windows and activates air recirculation when pollen counts are
high, monitoring of nearby traffic to learn of icy/slick
spots, potholes, obstacles, etc. enhanced powertrain and
suspension settings.
For further information on transformations in production in
the automotive sector as a result of electrification click
here.
(With files from electride, Detroit Free Press)
This article was published in
Volume 53 Number 4 - April 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2023/Articles/M530045.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca