- General Motors is building a new 300,000-square-foot battery research factory in Michigan
- The new facility will be named the Wallace Battery Innovation Center after Bill Wallace, a battery engineer at GM who died in 2018, and located in Warren, Michigan
- The innovation center will be “one of the only ones in North America that can use large format prototype cells, up to a meter wide or even wider than that, with uniform stacked electrodes
DETROIT, Michigan: Setting the stage for a battery breakthrough that will help it build electric vehicles that can travel as much as 600 miles on a single charge, roughly twice the range of most EVs on the road today, General Motors is building a new 300,000-square-foot battery research factory in Michigan.
The new facility will be named the Wallace Battery Innovation Center after Bill Wallace, a battery engineer at GM who died in 2018, and located in Warren, Michigan, near the campus of the automaker’s 710-acre Technical Center in Southeast Michigan.
The innovation center will be “one of the only ones in North America that can use large format prototype cells, up to a meter wide or even wider than that, with uniform stacked electrodes,” said Ken Morris, vice president for electric and autonomous vehicles at GM.
The goal is to produce batteries with an energy density of “up to 1,200 watt-hours per liter,” Morris said, adding, “And that means that you can easily have a 500- or a 600-mile vehicle on a single charge.. creating a new reality for our customers.
“With these high-energy-density, low-cost vehicles, we really think we can have a better package that’s less mass, better for the vehicle, better for the customer, and it can be the reality as quickly as we can through the Wallace Innovation Center,” Morris added, as quoted by theverge.com.
The first generation of Ultium batteries will make their debut in the Hummer EV pickup truck, which is scheduled to go into production next year.
“The Wallace Center is going to be a co-location of development engineers, research engineers, and manufacturing engineers, where we’re going to accelerate this next generation,” Morris said. “Technology like lithium metal or pure silicon anodes, even solid-state batteries.”
The innovation center is not a battery manufacturing facility – GM is building two of those with partner LG Chem – but it will be set up for pilot assembly lines so the automaker can experiment with different production methods.
