General Motors has idled its factory in Canada that builds electric delivery vans for its subsidiary BrightDrop due to a parts shortage.
On Wednesday, GM said its CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersol, Canada, will remain shut down until the end of the month. GM makes its Zevo 600 electric delivery van, which resembles the big brown UPS-style truck, at CAMI for BrightDrop. The factory will also assemble a smaller EV410 midsize delivery van for BrightDrop in the future.
“CAMI observed GM’s annual Summer Shutdown the weeks of July 3 and July 10,” Monte Doran, GM Canada spokesman told the Detroit Free Press in an email. “We extended shutdown for the weeks of July 17 and July 24 to help us manage through parts availability issues, with regular operations resuming on Monday, July 31.”
Mysterious parts shortage
The exact nature of the parts shortage is a mystery. According to a report in an Ontario newspaper, The London Free Press, Unifor Local 88 Shop Chair Mike Van Boekel said high demand for GM’s Ultium battery and limited production is to blame.
“They’re out at all GM plants, they need batteries and it stems from a raw material bottleneck,” Van Boekel said in the article. “Sales are through the roof. Things are good, but we just don’t have batteries.”
Van Boekel sent a message to the Free Press through his union vice president saying he “is unwilling to confirm or deny the specifics around the GM part shortage only that Unifor represents the workers at the Ingersoll facility and is not necessarily privy to specifics of GM’s parts inventory.”
But Unifor Auto Director Dino Chiodo told the Detroit Free Press in an email, “Unifor can confirm that the CAMI plant is idled until July 31 due to supply chain issues, of which the battery shortage is one component. The temporary shut-down impacts 1,250 Unifor production members. GM has been working collaboratively with the union to keep workers apprised of the operational flow.”
On Monday, GM President of North America Rory Harvey told the Detroit Free Press that supply of battery modules was tight and it is the main production hiccup to production of the GMC Hummer EV pickup and the Cadillac Lyriq, when asked about the low sales of the pickup and the Lyriq electric SUV this year.
GM denies a battery shortage as the cause of shutdown
GM spokesman David Caldwell told the Detroit Free Press only that it is “a parts availability issue — not involving battery raw materials, not involving battery cells.”
GM’s electric delivery vans for BrightDrop, as well as its newer EVs such as the Hummer and Lyriq, use GM’s new Ultium propulsion system. The batteries for those vehicles are made at the Ultium Cells LLC factory near Lordstown, Ohio. Ultium Cells is a joint venture between GM and LG Energy Solution. The joint venture is building two new battery cell plants, but they won’t open for several months. One is in Spring Hill, Tennessee, due to open late this year, and the other near Lansing is set to open in 2024.
BrightDrop, which GM started in early 2021, currently has FedEx, Merchants Fleet and Walmart as its biggest clients. It has said it expects to be making 50,000 trucks a year at CAMI starting in 2025.
GM has hit its EV production target, many in-transit
Caldwell said GM has hit its target to build 50,000 total EVs in North America in the first half of the year.
“There’s no change to our previously stated targets for the second half of 2023 and into 2024,” Caldwell said. “Both cell production and Ultium Platform production are on the rise. We’re planning to provide an update on EV production at earnings next week — specifically during the call with investors.”
GM has said it plans to double its first-half EV production in the second half of this year. It targets building 400,000 EVs across 2022, 2023 and the first half of next year.
For the first half of this year, GM delivered 49 Hummer EV pickups, which are made at Factory Zero located in Detroit and Hamtramck. That’s down from 371 Hummer pickups delivered in the first half of 2022.
GM delivered 2,316 Lyriqs in the first half. The Lyriq has a starting price of $61,795, lower than the $98,400 starting price of the 2023 Hummer, so the Lyriq is meant to be a higher volume vehicle. The Lyriq is assembled in the Spring Hill Assembly plant. There’s no year-ago comparison because GM started building the Lyriq in the third quarter last year.
More:GM promises more of its newer EVs will be built in the 2nd half after slow rollout
Caldwell said GM has “more than 2,000” Lyriq and Hummer EVs in-transit on their way to dealers and customers and that the “reported sales numbers don’t reflect vehicles produced, but yet to arrive.”
Harvey said on Monday that GM is coming “up to speed on battery capacity and building momentum and I anticipate a lot more EVs being built in the second half of this year than the first half of this year.”
Contact Jamie L. LaReau: jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber