General Motors will build an electric version of the Silverado at Factory ZERO in Detroit and Hamtramck.
The Silverado EV will sit on GM’s Ultium battery platform and will offer customers a GM-estimated range of more than 400 miles on a full charge, the automaker said Tuesday.
Both retail and fleet versions will come in a variety of options and GM said it expects there will be high demand for the pickups. GM did not provide a start of production date for the Silverado EV.
GM also is building the GMC Hummer EV pickup and Hummer EV SUV at Factory ZERO.
Thousands of jobs
“The vehicles coming from Factory ZERO will change the world, and how the world views electric vehicles,” GM President Mark Reuss said in a statement. “The GMC Hummer EV SUV joins its stablemate in the realm of true supertrucks, and Chevrolet will take everything Chevy’s loyal truck buyers love about Silverado — and more — and put it into an electric pickup that will delight retail and commercial customers alike.”
In January 2020, GM said it would invest $2.2 billion in Factory ZERO, then called Detroit-Hamtramck assembly, to produce a variety of all-electric trucks and SUVs.
In October 2020, GM renamed the plant Factory ZERO to reflect GM’s vision of a future with zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.
GM has said all of its light-duty vehicles will be zero emissions by 2035 and the company will be carbon neutral by 2040.
“We’re essentially creating a brand-new factory of the future inside the walls that have stood for four decades,” Reuss said during a media event. “When we’re done and the plant is fully up and running, we’ll have team of 2,200 jobs here, plus the supplier community supplies the plant.”
GM is spending $7 billion this year alone, Reuss said, to design and manufacture EVs. The automaker has said it will invest $27 billion through 2025 on EV development.
Market tested
GM presently builds its internal combustion Chevrolet Silverado light-duty pickup at its plant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Silao Assembly Plant in Mexico. It builds the heavy-duty version of the gasoline pickup at Flint Assembly.
The local union shop chairman at Fort Wayne Assembly said he feels “extremely confident” that the members at his plant will be a part of GM’s electric future even if the Silverado EV now goes to Factory ZERO to build.
“The market will be tested first to see the real demand for an electric truck,” UAW Local 2209 Shop Chairman Rich LeTourneau said. “If the demand remains the same as we are experiencing today, we will serve GM either way in the long term.”
GM has confirmed it will build the following at Factory ZERO:
- 2022 GMC Hummer EV pickup: Starts production in late 2021.
- 2024 GMC Hummer EV SUV: Starts production in 2023
- Cruise Origin EV: Starts production sometime in 2022.
- Chevrolet Silverado pickup: Production TBD.
“The new products GM will build here at Factory ZERO confirms General Motors’ commitment to manufacturing,” said Gerald Johnson, GM’s executive vice president of Global Manufacturing. “There is no company so uniquely positioned to succeed than General Motors. Here at Factory ZERO, our team is building the future.”
GM will assemble the upcoming all-electric Cadillac Lyriq SUV at its Spring Hill Assembly plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee. GM is investing $2 billion in Spring Hill to retool it to make EVs in the future, while continuing production of the Cadillac XT5 and XT6 internal combustion vehicles, too. GM will launch the Lyriq early next year.
GM already has invested $3.5 million at Orion Assembly in Lake Orion for the production of future EVs. GM currently builds the Chevrolet Bolt and the upcoming Bolt EUV at Orion, but it has said it will add a Cruise self-driving test car there. In support of the Cruise test car, GM is investing $750,000 at its battery assembly plant in Brownstown Charter Township.
GMC revealed the 2024 Hummer EV SUV on Saturday evening during the NCAA’s Final Four basketball tournament. When production begins in early 2023, the Edition 1 will start at $105,595. It will have an expected range of 300 miles on a full charge, GM said. When equipped with the Extreme Off-Road Pack, the SUV jumps to $110,595, with an expected range of 280 miles on a full charge.
A lot of suffering
GM announced the Silverado EV during an event at Factory ZERO on Tuesday afternoon where Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Michigan’s senators and other legislators attended.
UAW Vice President of General Motors Terry Dittes dubbed it a great day for union members.
“The most important individuals of this whole process are the people sitting in the back, the members of Local 22,” Dittes said, referring to the hourly workers at Factory ZERO. “You are the ones who do the work, who know the product and are loyal to the products.”
Dittes reminded those gathered for the announcement of the historical significance of the factory and its importance to Detroit and Hamtramck.
“To build this plant it took eminent domain. So there was a lot of suffering to build this plant in the 1980s,” Dittes said.
The plant is sometimes called Poletown because GM built it on the site of a Polish immigrant community straddling the Detroit-Hamtramck border. In fact, the body shop is in Hamtramck and the general assembly is in Detroit.
The 300 acres Factory ZERO sits on was home to a Polish neighborhood with about 4,000 residents, more than 1,000 houses, several Catholic churches and more than 100 businesses. It all stood where GM wanted to build a plant and in a bold and hotly contested move, government leaders used eminent domain powers to seize and raze those properties on GM’s behalf.
It made national news and stirred up many protests including a nearly monthlong sit-in at the neighborhood’s Immaculate Conception Church that police eventually broke up with arrests.
But GM built over 3 million cars there, then in 2018 GM put the plant, along with Lordstown Assembly in Ohio and two transmission plants, on its list to permanently shut down.
“General Motors and the UAW got into a pretty big fight about that,” Dittes said, referring to the 40-day strike against GM during contract negotiations in 2019.
“But you are now going to receive more product and those people who are scattered about at other locations, they’ll be back in this house. And we’ll be hiring more people,” Dittes told the crowd. “In the next couple of years, no one will build more models of EVs than General Motors and we in the UAW couldn’t be happier. Those are jobs for our members and for the community.”
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Contact Jamie L. LaReau: 313-222-2149 or jlareau@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @jlareauan. Read more on General Motors and sign up for our autos newsletter. Become a subscriber.