GM Remains Committed to EVs but Will Ditch ‘Ultium’ Name

• General Motors has dropped the Ultium name immediately with no new replacement planned, though the name will survive on the automaker’s joint-venture battery facilities.

• GM took second-place after Tesla in US EV sales in the last quarter and expects to sell approximately 200,000 electrics in North America this year, Reuss said.

• “Conditions are in place for North America to seize battery leadership from China,” said Kurt Kelty, GM’s battery exec.

General Motors is ditching the Ultium name used for virtually every new battery-electric vehicle it has built this decade except for the Chevrolet Bolt, but it is not slamming the brakes on plans to become the big player in EVs among major manufacturers.

The automaker expects “positive variable profit” on all EVs by next year, CEO Mary Barra told the Wall Street crowd Tuesday at its Investor Day event at its sprawling Spring Hill, Tennessee, flexible EV and ICE assembly plant.

GM has dropped the Ultium name immediately with no new replacement planned, though the name will survive on the automaker’s joint-venture battery facilities.

Why is the company scrapping the battery brand name that brought it into the modern EV era? “As GM continues to expand its EV business, the company is no longer branding its electric vehicle architecture, battery and cells, or EV components with the Ultium name starting in North America” a company spokesman tells Autoweek.

Meanwhile, the 2026 Chevy Bolt launches late next year with the “latest technology” and faster charging for slightly more than the last model’s $28,795 sticker price, GM President Mark Reuss told Wall Street investors and analysts.

Developed under the Ultium platform program, the Bolt will cost GM far less than the old model, so it too will be profitable.

“And we don’t need to create a skunkworks to create a profitable Bolt,” Reuss said, throwing shade on cross-town rival Ford and CEO Jim Farley’s announcement last year that his company’s next-generation EVs were engineered by a secret “skunkworks.”

GM took second-place after Tesla in US EV sales in the last quarter and expects to sell approximately 200,000 electrics in North America this year, Reuss said.

Kurt Kelty, vice president for battery, cell, and pack, told the Wall Street crowd that “manufacturing problems of last year are behind us,” though the oft-stated plan from early this decade that GM would build 1 million EVs in North America by 2025 has been largely forgotten.

Instead, GM is claiming some advances and victories in an EV market that has softened in the last 18 months or so, though automakers producing both saw slight gains in EV sales in the last quarter as the overall market started to slip.

Its EV models are drawing more first-time GM buyers, and they are younger, have higher household incomes, and 60% are sold on the East or West Coasts, compared with 40% to the coasts for GM’s ICE models, Reuss said.

The company is preparing new plug-in hybrid models coming in 2027—full-size trucks and SUVs—as internal-combustion power continues to be popular while stiffer emission standards make them a necessary bridge to an EV future, Reuss said.

That future is bright for our market, despite the Chinese auto industry’s push into foreign markets with its low-priced electric vehicles.

“Conditions are in place for North America to seize battery leadership from China,” said Kelty, GM’s battery exec.

GM’s “new EV battery roadmap” calls for a mix of nickel-cadmium, nickel-metal hydride, lithium-ion, nickel-manganese cobalt, or lithium-iron phosphate batteries to be used wherever most appropriate.

For example, “high nickel” batteries will power EV trucks for a 490-mile range, while lithium-iron phosphate cells are best for vehicles that need 350 miles of range, said Kelty, a former executive from Tesla and Panasonic.

Kelty also announced GM will build a battery development center at its Warren, Michigan, technical center, with first cells ready for prototype testing by early 2027.

The Battery Cell Development Center will be adjacent to the Wallace Battery Center, which opened in 2022.

If you’re paying close attention to EV technology, is there a battery type you think is best suited for the future? Please comment below.