- The carmaker made the announcement while revealing a new forecast for EV production this year.
- The Ultium Cells name will be retained for GM’s joint venture battery plants in the US.
- Vehicles using the Ultium platform include the Cadillac Lyriq, Buick Electra E4, and Honda Prologue.
GM is ditching the Ultium name for its electric vehicle architecture and associated technologies. The car manufacturer hasn’t given a reason for the change, but it likely feels it’s no longer necessary to use this branding while it grows its portfolio of EVs.
The company expects to end 2024 having built approximately 200,000 EVs in North America for the Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, and BrightDrop brands. While this is significantly fewer than the 300,000 units GM originally intended to produce this year, the company’s Ultium models are apparently getting closer to becoming profitable.
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“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 GM spokesperson recently told Auto News. GM will retain the Ultium name at its joint venture plants in the US.
GM started using the Ultium name in early 2020. It served as an umbrella term to refer to the company’s electric architecture as well as its traction motors, drive units, and battery packs. Current EVs based on the Ultium platform include the Acura ZDX, Buick Electra E4 and E5, Cadillac Lyriq, Cadillac Celestiq, Chevrolet Blazer EV, Chevrolet Silverado EV, and the Honda Prologue.
While speaking at GM’s investor day at its Spring Hill, Tennessee, manufacturing site, chief executive Mary Barra revealed that the company’s early investments in EVs will allow them to become profitable earlier than many had expected.
“This inflection point in EV profitability is arriving much faster than many people thought, but it’s driven by the strategy we began executing in 2018,” she revealed. Earlier in the year, GM said it was targeting positive variable profit, excluding fixed costs, for its EVs in the fourth quarter as well as mid-single-digit margins in 2025.
