General Motors has high hopes for their electric vehicle (EV) segment in 2023, but if the automaker’s track record with the Hummer EV is any indication, they are facing an uphill battle to reach their goals.
GM says it is committed to an all electric future, and is putting billions of dollars behind those words to electrify their fleet and introduce over a dozen new EVs over the next few years, with the eventual goal to deliver 1 million by 2025.
Those EVs will be built on the Ultium platform, the first of which was the Hummer EV, which first rolled off the production line in late December 2021.
As we have previously reported the Detroit-based automaker has struggled to ramp production and in mid-2022 was only building 12 Hummer EVs per day, despite an order backlog of over 80,000.
Fast forward and 15 months after production first began GM is still only producing 12 Hummer EVs per day, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal published on Wednesday. Making matters worse those that have been built have been stuck at dealerships since October due to a stop-sales order after it was discovered water was seeping into the massive 212kWh battery packs. That issue resulted in a recall of units already delivered to customers as well.
It is not just the Hummer EV that GM is struggling to ramp production with. The Cadillac Lyriq, also based on the Ultium platform, started production in March last year, but the automaker was only able to deliver 122 units in 2022, mostly due to quality issues during production.
The painfully slow rate of production poses a serious problem for GM if they are to reach their goal of selling 1 million EVs by 2025. Their customers have clearly shown their willingness to buy a GM-made EV, with reservations for some of their EVs totalling several hundred thousand. However unless they can rapidly scale production over the next two years, those customers will be waiting for a very long time.
