Can Detroit Catch Tesla?

As the traditional automakers finally steer toward an all-electric future, batteries will be essential. GM hopes a second-mover advantage will let it catch up to Tesla and pass it on the straightaway.

Show Notes

If any cars are mobile phones with wheels, it’s electric cars. And just as the switch from landline phones to mobile phones was quick, and from computers to smartphones was even quicker, the shift from engines to motors, from internal combustion cars to electric cars, is starting to gain momentum and when it reaches scale, it will happen quickly.

How quickly? Pandemic aside, Tesla would be on track to sell half a million cars in 2020, all of them electric. By contrast, GM sold almost 3 million cars last year, almost none of them electric. But by 2025 or so, GM plans to sell a million electric cars, a year that the company plans to be its tipping point toward electrics.

Of course, to do that, you need amazing batteries, and an amazing capacity to produce batteries—both of which are at the heart of the company’s plans. A new GM battery factory, in partnership with LG Chem, will dwarf Tesla’s Gigafactory and power, pun intended, its drive, pun again intended, to that 2025 goal of a million electric cars.

What is Fixing the Future?

Fixing the Future from IEEE Spectrum magazine is a biweekly look at the cultural, business, and environmental consequences of technological solutions to hard problems like sustainability, climate change, and the ethics and scientific challenges posed by AI. IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine of IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences.