John Voelcker Talks “How GM’s Ultium Electric Car Revolution Went Off The Rails” | Episode 275
This podcast is brought to you by star charge the largest EV charging manufacturer in the world and is also a provider of residential and Commercial battery storage and microG grid Solutions and Kim power the reliable quick and scalable EV charging solutions for everyone and [Applause] everywhere Hello friends and welcome back to the out of speec podcast I’m your host Francy glad to have you plugging in with us today I’m accompanied by Kyle Connor from out ofpc of course and also we have a special guest today John vulker a well-known reputable EV journalist contributing
Editor at Car and Driver one of the top EV journalists we’d certainly say John welcome it is great to have you here on the outpec podcast fabulous to be here we could all three probably talk about electric cars for several hours which I think your editing software spares
You yes we really could honestly before we even started this call we were talking for a good bit because you have plenty of experience and knowledge as is Kyle we’re all curious could talk for hours and you’ve covered so much in the electric vehicle space really tremendous
Coverage I’d say and just yesterday you published an article with inside EVS titled how GM’s ultium electric car Revolution went off the rails where you dive into how GM hoped to usurp Tesla as the leader of Eves in America but that obviously has not happened and you dove
Into the sources into the details to figure out exactly what has gone wrong and for a bit of background you know GM had a lot of claims for their electric goals as they’re not the only automaker either to do that and lofty goals and it seems like there were some major
Multiple pieces that stood in the way of reaching those goals and everyone audience you need to go read John’s article probably before even listening to this podcast we will have the article Linked In the show notes it’s published on inside EVS we love them they’re a friend they’re going through a huge
Awesome revamp over you know what their topics they’re covering really relevant to Consumers and stories like this so definitely go over there read through all of John’s hard work because it was a lot of hard work and all of the details of what he’s found and then come back
Here I’ll let you leave okay welcome back so first off John I want to know how did you go about researching this story specifically GM hasn’t been terribly forthcoming with the reasons behind you know their stop sales and slowdowns and delays but they have told us a bit about the problems
Where did you start and maybe why did you start with this story well it’s something that we all talk about right you know you kind of expect so I went to EV day March 2020 last plane flight I took for 16 months before lockdown and GM had a dozen cars there
They talked about ultium they showed it the modules the cells the packs you know full day deep dive great then comes lockdown but we assume that this is chugging along in the background and so on then comes the Hummer they did actually deliver one in 2021 one and so all right great that’s
Proof of concept it proves that electric cars can be badass fine you know get to the volume stuff where are the Chevys where are the trucks you know all right and Cadillac comes first okay lyric great they’re going to move that forward by nine months it’s already in China and
So forth and then the cars didn’t come and the cars didn’t come and the cars didn’t come and it’s been 18 months that I think we’ve been sort of talking to other people about other journalists people we know at GM what’s going on and every and so Mrs Bara has had now three
Quarterly meetings where she has in essence said variations on we’re not where we hope to be and we’re disappointed yeah indeed um and so I wanted to do a story on this and as you you talked about the new regime at inside EVS I work with Patrick George
The editor at a variety of outlets we work very well together and he I had the great Good Fortune where he said what’s a story you’d like to do and I said I want to figure out WTF is going on with ultium right and he said okay great go
Do it so I talked around no one would go on the record and this is kind of like a four-part series I did previously called charging is changing where obviously it’s a thing that everybody talks about but it’s so sensitive and the sources don’t want to burn their business
Contacts and so everyone wants to talk everyone wants to unload no one wants their name associated which is tough for a legit journalist and this sort of came to be the same thing and I had a version of it and I kept going back to GM and saying okay answer this question okay
That’s not an answer ABC give me and so on and so there were a lot of iterations of that and finally something clicked and they said do you want to talk to Anderson and I said yep absolutely and that made it a much richer article because a it meant that
We actually had what I think is the most detailed description of how ultium modules are actually built which was interesting to me because I don’t know enough about manufacturing that having seen one on a table I couldn’t take it apart say how you build it and I took
Away a couple of things from that number one everybody body assumed right that it was the cell Plant GM and LG together Altium cells LLC first plant in Warren Ohio everyone calls it Lordstown but it’s not um second plant in Spring Hill third one in Flint is it where’s the third
One I forget it’s not live yet um okay great and I think they were going to do one in Mexico I don’t know if that’s still going on but um Everybody assumed because getting cells and I have friends within LG friends within Tesla getting cell plants up to profitable yield is to
Quote One battery engineer really really really really really really really hard there were seven relies I counted and so um you know I think everybody assumed that was the problem according to multiple sources that’s not the problem the Warren Ohio plant is now up there
It’s doing what it needs to do they if anything probably overproducing cells it was this problem with assembling the modules and I had originally said they were hand stuffing them the word stuffing is apparently not a good thing to say to a battery engineer so duy
Noted um but they started out at five modules an hour for this entire process where you have the base plate you put the thermal glue on it essentially um you have a top and the four sides obviously I read the article you’ll see the whole description in
There but they could not get it up to speed and they couldn’t get it up to speed for more than 12 months and I didn’t explicitly say in the article but I think what surprises everyone is guys you’re the Detroit 2.5 you’re supposed to know how to build stuff use machine
Tooling we never did find out what the initial company that did the automated assembly of the module is I had a source I trust say rather than going to a company that had done this before had built other modules for other Auto makers or an LG they went to a more
Traditional tier one supplier I don’t know because I asked the question a lot of ways and GM is not talking about who it was they did say there’s more than one supplier and there was a news story that just came out this morning naming a new supplier but quite frankly I don’t
Know if it really matters I just want to know did you go to like I don’t know I think delor Remy doesn’t exist any anymore but one of the traditional kind of people that make gear sets or whatever to do that and if so why and
The offset is China because in China the ultium modules are coming together just fine and they’ve sold over 100,000 ultium Vehicles there so far now granted different cells right Prismatic instead of pouch or lfp blades but still their assembly equipment worked just fine so what the hell happened in North America
Will we ever find out I don’t know well I first of all I just want to commend you on your work because this is the stuff that moves the industry forwards I think it gets everyone talking the same language investigative reporting awesome uh and and honestly I
I John you know me I’m a video guy I don’t read a lot of Articles this was truly a fascinating read so was really cap by nice yeah yeah yeah I know uh so okay just to clarify some things the issues were not with the cell production which is what we had all
Assumed and we all said was they can’t get cells made but that wasn’t the case they were cranking out Sals that and in fact in your article you said they were even exceeding their high expectations for cell manufacturing the actual assembly of the module was what was
Holding it up now I have some experience with this I went to of course Magna is a a supporter of out of spec Magna makes the battery enclosures for GM vehicles specifically the Dual double stacker that the Silverado uses and the Hummer uses I’ve been in that plant I spent two
Days in that plant uh and they were producing I forget the number maybe 60 a day or 80 a day or something like that this was very early on before we knew they were going to have production problems um you know I was going through all the laser weldings which turned out
I guess had to get recalled because it wasn’t a good process there was a lot of advancement in engineering and production of the enclosure but so that was really a fascinating thing so it sounds like the enclosure line was okay maybe they had some issues with ceiling on the first
Trucks but that was solid and going the cell production was solid and going they just couldn’t get the modules put together which seems like a very from the outside looking in simple thing it shouldn’t have taken a year and a half what’s your impression of what were the
Steps they took do you know what steps they took to try and speed up production what was the quality like where was actually the holdup in all of this I couldn’t get to one specific holdup I will admit I have a little bit more appreciation for what it takes to
Do fully automated high volume assembly of a fairly large module 9 kwatt hours is a big module and you know the cells themselves are big but um my understanding in talking to Anderson was they did tweaks essentially in every part of the process um some examples would include making sure that this
Thermally conductive glue is applied in the right place at the right thickness not overapplied not underapplied but within its boundaries um bending the tabs on the cells through the frames that hinge down from the top cover of the module and he talked about having to go back with production Engineers module
Designers battery engineers and tweak some of the specs to look at tolerances things like that it’s all essentially standard production engineering I asked him at the end so okay let’s let’s make you make you the gods for a moment if you had a doover what would you do and he didn’t give me
A specific thing but he indicated that you know part of the challenge was we had such high volume projections right out of the box and that seemed fair to me because if you look at what Mrs bar was saying less than two years ago in terms of hundreds
Of thousands of EVS sold by the end of last year ulti EVS um sold by the end of last year that’s a really steep ramp from I don’t think they ever made more than what 70,000 bolts a year something like that and that was doubling the capacity from the original plan
So I think had they not had such a steep ramp we might not be having this conversation but the assignment they were given was okay from day one in sometime in early 2022 you got to sell for you got to produce the modules for 400,000 EVs and
Some of those EVS have gigundo packs because they’re massive heavy Vehicles so there’s that’s a lot of modules well that’s what I was ask about part of the problem from my side was yes they were very constrained okay so big Pro projections we got it hard to manufacturer modules got that they were
The initial ultium EVS that GM brought out Hummer EV being the first one this is the most thirsty vehicle with the biggest need for the biggest battery that’s ever been put in a series production electric vehicle do you think that that approach compounded the problem in terms of deliveries because
You know now they’re putting essentially two very large battery packs in one vehicle uh what what’s your what’s your approach on that should they have launched with an equinox first or something that needed a lot fewer batteries well um great question and I have at least two parts to the answer um
The first one is that traditionally new technology comes in at the high end of the market either in Ultra Luxury or in sports and performance and the Hummer is sort of in there but you know that’s a $100,000 vehicle right it’s easier to get to profitability quicker by selling x
Amount of Hummers than selling 3x the same amount of Equinox EVS the margins are just higher and we do know of GM that under Mrs bar the company has remorselessly prioritized making a profit over volume over being in every Market over having a full range of
Vehicles you know they do a much smaller number of things now but all of those things are profitable so that’s number one why do the big one first but that said I think we need to have some perspective on the Hummer it is an outrageous vehicle in a lot of ways I
Enjoyed driving it even though I had to drive up over some Shrubbery to charge it um sorry Electrify America it was an old charging station the cable wasn’t long enough but um the Hummer was never going to be a high volume thing you know 100,000 reservations wonderful groovy go wild
But I actually when the Hummer came out I looked at the whole Hummer gen one stuff and in the highest volume Hummer year when they had three separate vehicles you know a handful of milit derived H1s the H2 which was a Silverado underneath and the H3 which was sort of
The cheap high volume Hummer based on a Colorado sort of um the total sales for Hummer in its best year ever were about 70,000 this is not a high volume brand it is the most iny yourface brand you could have until a certain vehicle came out of a certain plant in Texas anyway
And um it was never going to be something that they would sell 10,000 a month I just don’t think it was the lyric I don’t know about 10,000 a month because Cadillac sells this much compared to say Lexus but the lyric I think was going to be their first quasi
Volume entry and then the Silverado the Silverado I think was really where GM felt they were going to sell volume but the lyric was first because it uses half as much pack totally agree on all of your points Hummer is just I think a demonstration of what they’re capable of
And then they can like pull parts out of that and package you know all the other uh Vehicles off of it one thing I want to come back to is I’m not a great company Analyst at all I just stick to the cars but in your article you brought
Up a fair point which is even through all of this in our weird EV bubble GM has been what is going on over there they’re losing it whatever they can’t build these cars but the stock price has remained stable so what would you say to that because I think a lot of our
Audience including me and Francy and everyone we live in the EV world what is the general response to the ultium delays because it doesn’t seem to be affecting the stock price uh heavily back in the day you used to have what you called widows and orphan stocks which were essentially safe
Stocks you know not as safe as say bonds or t bills but stocks that delivered a decent decent um yield every year decent dividend and we’re clearly companies that would never go out of business and GM was one of those for 75 plus years you know GM was always going to be there
And it continues to behave like that kind of stock despite I think the burning desire of its Executives and stockholders for GM to get a little bit of the stratospheric and in to my way of thinking inexplicable valuation of Tesla you know Tesla was the most valuable car
Company on the planet I think there was a point at which it was worth more than the entire rest of the world’s industry added together I may be wrong on that certainly the rest of the US industry um it’s come down considerably from there um you know people like me
Have been writing that really Tesla you know at some point the laws of gravity are going to apply because I don’t believe that Tesla will make 50 million cars a year at any point in the given future um owning half the world’s auto market but um GM and Ford and all of
Those guys desperately want some portion of that we can do EVS EVS are cool Advanced Tech and by the way we also bought crws we can do autonomous vehicles and we are going to squeeze extra money out of our Buy by having all of these Digital Services
You know the goal for many of those announcements in addition to pioneering technology was to get the stock price up the point of what I wrote and the financial analysts got it was GM stock price hasn’t risen in 10 years which is not a great thing because inflation has
Gone up and all the rest it remains a very profitable company but I think what that says is the street remains to be convinced that GM knows what it’s doing in EVs and I think you know I would have said this about 2023 but it didn’t
Happen I think 2024 will be a pivotal year because if GM has not shipped six figures of ulms by the end of 2024 I think it will look really bad for them it looked pretty bad last year quite frankly 13,000 timm EVS I I have to agree that it’s but you
Say that they you know if they don’t ship out six figure of these EVS but I don’t even see that really happening I mean maybe they could do it but it’s it seems to be a trend with Legacy automakers to severely overpromise like to make these very lofty goals whatever
It might be like 100% EV by 2030 and then they step back or like we’re going to build these battery manufacturing plants and then they step back we’re going to invest this much and then they step back whatever the problem is why like and it it’s not successful right GM
Has had a bad year their EV stories continuously are a big old question mark their decisions you know with even Apple carplay and Android and then it seems just really confusing to me and you know you’ve been in this space longer and you’ve seen the Legacy automakers and
How they function but why I don’t why wouldn’t they take from the new playbook instead why would they stick to old old ways of doing things and specifically this like insular way of doing it which I’ve noted with GM and specifically you know this tier one supplier that did not have the direct
Experience why why do you think they’re being they’ve chosen to be so insular and will they do you think turn outward and recruit that external expertise that is required in my opinion to make a difference and actually get to the numbers that they need to be an significant electric vehicle
Player it’s a great question and Mrs Bara said in one of the analyst briefings that she regretted not bringing in the software team they now have about a dozen highly placed Executives from Apple from Google and the like she regrets not bringing them in considerably earlier um similarly
They just hired Kurt Kelty who ran Tesla’s battery efforts for a decade plus or minus um I had the great Good Fortune to interview in about 2009 I think I’d have to go back and check um we were both a little younger then but um I will share with you I this
Didn’t go in the article but um one of the Tesla people I know said remember how Panasonic said it took four years for the NADA gigafactory their piece of it to be profitable Kurt is responsible for that he used to work for Panasonic he negotiated with him and I thought oh
That’s a good skill um so I will be curious to see how GM suppliers react to some of that but um one of the problems I’ve always sort of identified with Detroit and because I live in a place that isn’t America which is to say New York um
A lot of the people don’t take it seriously but Detroit and the industry is very insular because the way people buy cars there and in the non- coastal most of the non- coastal parts of America it’s very different from the way people buy cars California is obviously
A huge huge Progressive force in terms of reducing pollution etc etc um but I have this argument with uh former colleague who said essentially you know not every person on the face of the planet has as their ideal life owning a detached house on two acres and towing a
14,000lb boat four and a half hours to The Lakehouse behind a turbo diesel 20 foot long pickup every weekend that’s just not all that relevant to the rest of the world’s Auto industry the Detroit t and a half are really good at building those Vehicles those vehicles are like the K cars of
North America K cars being the tiny Japanese cars Limited in width length height and power um that are hugely popular in Japan due to regulatory preferences and irrelevant to the rest of the world now we happen to make a couple million of those big pickup trucks so it’ll last for a while
But I worry about all of the Detroit makers having pulled back from the rest of the world especially because it is quite clear from the point of view of the Chinese government that they have now served their purpose and they should go home now please so so that brings up
A question let’s say they solve the module issue which it sounds like they’re well on their way to okay maybe the real production issues are go coming out I I spoke to the Honda people same people you spoke to they are overly confident that they can get 40,000 Year
One 70 did you get I was amazed they were like there is no question we’re getting those cars okay good yeah I I everyone I spoke to it I don’t know if there was a briefing before the thing or if they truly believe that they can get
That many of course but that was that was a huge shock I’m like okay well GM’s got all these issues what how are you feeling about the partnership they’re like we’re totally confident software is on our own track blah blah blah blah blah can we talk about the cars for a
Second let’s say the production stuff does get solved Y is there enough so the I agree with you John that the EV Market is not slowing down I can also just look at the interest in Eves from our viewership numbers only increasing the the Topic’s getting stronger and I think
There’s this wave of EES are dying no demand we we just did a story on Mercedes but you know not having enough demand but are their cars actually that desirable right now all of these questions come up uh does GM have the right products to sell for this volume
Is the Blazer is the equinox are the Honda prologue Acura ZDX Silverado EV Hummer Eevee which is a low volume showcase but are these the right products at the right time what’s your opinion I think the answer differs a little bit depending on product Hummer Halo whatever I four years ago I wrote
An article that said the Hummer has only one mission to prove EVS are badass done ticked off fine um the lyric nice enough car um Cadillac is doing an interesting job of Reinventing itself but as as I keep having to point out they sell more Cadillacs in China than they do in North
America and have done for almost 10 years so you have to view any vehicle from Cadillac that is sold in both markets as much as a addressing a Chinese market um and Cadillac is just not that huge a force at this moment numerically in the US market again compared to Lexus um but
The Chevrolets so I tend to think that Ford had the right track in making an F-150 that drops more easily into Fleet usage the word upfitting is something I heard a lot about at the F-150 Lightning drive and not at all from GM in regard
To the Silverado or or as um some of the old people call it the Avalanche eval lanche um I know one I know One auto writer who will get one and immediately rebadge it because he has an old one but um the SUVs the Blazer and the Equinox to
Me are the important volume play we’ll see what Silverado does but I think choosing that form factor limited the upside don’t know we’ll see um but I very much want to drive a Blazer I very much want to drive the equinox and um even at 35 I mean I
Am not holding my breath for a $30,000 Equinox but even at 35 given that the average vehicle transacts at 47,000 now down from 48,000 um a 35,000 $250 to 300 and something compact SUV although it’s a big compact SUV is actually worthwhile plus I think the the last Factor
Silverado’s been on TV a lot um the Hummer is sort of a known quantity at that point the lyric is the lyric I have not seen a ton of Blazer EV marketing for very obvious reasons nor for the Equinox they will be fresh product at a
Point when the rest of the industry is actually in a Cadence we haven’t had a lot of fresh volume EVS for a while right so the ev9 is coming and I think that’s going to be huge very good vehicle Hyundai Kia continues to impress um whenever the ex30 arrives the Volvo
In the sort of mid-30s to mid-40s although it’s a very small car that’s an essentially an unusable rear seat so if you’ve got a $35,000 base Volvo that’s really only for two people or you’ve got a $35,000 base Equinox where four people will sit that may be a compelling thing
And you know once the bolt went away and it was a compact hatchback and most Americans won’t even think about compact hatchbacks you know utility vehicle labels or not um if it reads as SUV it’s fully electric if you can get 300 miles of range in one of the models I think
People will consider it one of the things that I’m shocked no one picked up in in that article is that if GM actually sells a quarter million or produces they said 200,000 to 300,000 GM brand alums and then add to that the 40,000 Hondas right so we could
Probably a quarter of a million on the bottom end we could be looking at over 300,000 that’s a couple points more of EV market share right there with every other maker doing exactly what they did last year so GM’s absence out of 2023 actually depressed EV sales or what
I suspect were their natural level always assuming that Chevy dealers can sell the damn things right well that we could do a whole another podcast on the whole dealer equivalent but it does seem like once this problem is solved we are due for a wave of GM electric vehicles
Absolutely and there’s also of course the next gen nextg bolt coming uh at some point uh is what we’re told so I think that’ll have an lfp battery pack and should be priced pretty cheap what’s your impression here’s the thing where are they GNA get those lfp batteries
Yeah probably China what do you think well and that automatically means the most price sensitive EV in their lineup does not get the incentive yeah we’ll see I mean they haven’t announced where yet officially the batteries are coming from so maybe they’ll have something you have a sense because I don’t know gonna
Do for lfp batteries and they’re having some challenges with that yeah massive yeah but yeah I mean I would think that they would I don’t know do you they had so much issues not necessarily right it’s with the casing with the box that’s what you said
With from the GM side of thing yes so do you think they would just avoid all problems now and be like okay we’re going to hand it over to experts even if it’s China who cares like no they’re they they’re going to get that sorted and they’re going to rip that automated
Line is my guess GM China for something different yes over half the GM vehicles sold in Mexico now are made in China which almost no one recognizes didn’t know that the gasoline vehicles um I think GM probably correctly sees the future technology and the one that it
Has to own more importantly and build itself as electric and so it’s China knows very well that it has the lowest cost lfb batteries and Chinese companies setting up in the US to build them and sell them to domestic makers are their own problem we will see what happens with any further or
Tighter um import restrictions Ira Style rules on sourcing of metals minerals and um processing so aside from the battery stuff there was one last topic I wanted to bring up which is software um you know there uh Blazer uh sounds like there is a fix is what I’m hearing uh so
It’s we’re getting very close to seeing Blazer EVS hit the road what what’s your impression of I know your story was mostly on battery pack but I’m treating it as a you know also the overall picture of why did GM’s thing slow down in terms of producing Vehicles software
Is a big component right now for the vehicles that are hitting the road most specifically Blazer EV with the stop sale and I believe the vehicles coming out of Mexico are no longer affected by this software is what I’ve been told um so they just need to update the ones on
The dealer or that have been produced what what’s your impression of software in the conversations you had with people at GM what are they saying what’s what’s the vibe over there it’s a great question actually because some of the conversations I’ve had with Jim and others subsequent to the article hitting
Yesterday morning included that there are actually three different places where there are software problems or there have been um one is the infotainment getting rid of Apple carplay and Android auto um which is apparently not actually the gating factor in what caused the stop sale um although I’m happy to be corrected on
That because that was a background comment only so if any anyone has information that in fact it was the problem let me know let Kyle know first let Francy know first but um so you’ve got that whole infotainment side of things you have charging software and I
Had an entire Chunk on charging problems with L and I just didn’t include it it was going to make the article too sprawly and then the third part is embedded software the stuff that you know runs controllers to do all the rest of what the car does and I’m told that
Actually the newest electrical system had embedded software problems they can be corrected with overthe a updates and thankfully none of my sources said software defined vehicle I was going to have to drink if they did yes um but that the problems with software may have been some combination of embedded systems and
Charging with perhaps this mystery new awesome GM interface that makes Apple carplay and Android auto completely irrelevant uh which I haven’t seen um not being the main problem um even we also know that Apple carplay and Android auto with the current generation of ULM integrates perfectly because the
Prologue has it and that is the exact same car underneath as a Blazer same controllers same everything so yeah I I have never really some of the same controllers I don’t know which controllers my source wouldn’t tell me you know is it a controller for Safety Systems is it a controller
That’s somewhere sitting between the infotainment and the rest of the car don’t know okay yeah I mean what what I’d love to do is is make an open invitation to GM on this podcast is to say come on John can come back let’s talk software tell us what’s going on
Tell you know let’s let’s have an Open Candid conversation because it’s hard for us to guess from the outside looking in and to be totally honest uh Francy and I were at the Chicago Auto Show and we actually had to cut some clips out of the video because we assumed things that
Were totally Incorrect and it was the first time we’ve received some communication from GM who watched the video and was like Hey That’s not accurate you know they were super cool about it and I was just like I don’t have any ability to know this stuff
Unless you tell us so please come on the show and you set the record straight let’s tell the story sounds like we’re coming into a positive year for GM in terms of vehicles manufacturing and also software seems like things are getting all sorted we we’d love to be the outlet
To uh you know tell that story look at Kyle being so optimistic here this is really a change how what have you done with him yeah having woke up on the right side of the bed today but um I do think it’s just interesting to see the the the St
Contrast between startup EV automakers and the Legacy EV automakers that are moving into the space and how disruptive decisions from like GM are quite different than the disruptive strategies that we see from the startups like removing Apple carplay why is that disruptive making things you know trying
To build it out from internally before going external um you know these interesting very Stark differences between them but you know y all seem optimistic that they’re going to fix these problems they don’t have a choice right but um I remain a a skeptic for those 200 plus thousand EVS by the end
Of 2024 just from what I’ve seen in the EV space but John do you do you mirror Kyle’s optimism here um like all good journalists I’ll come down somewhere in the middle um I think my gut just from dealing with automaker engineers and Communications people for 15 years is
That I would not have been able to write that article in as informed a way if GM hadn’t gotten to a confidence level um I had started to get feelings for that sometime late last year but obviously the Q4 numbers were not great I mean bless his heart one of the comm’s
People did say look Q4 sales were double Q3 three but okay great going from 3,000 to 6,000 is not where we were going to be 18 months ago um what they did say though and I did put this in the article is Cadillac has consistently apparently for December and January sold
2,900 lyrics which is 20% of all the Cadillacs they sell in a month so you know that that is a decent amount out for an electric car given whatever cax audience is and I don’t know a lot about its demo and psychographics these days but um I think them giving numbers like
That when GM does not talk about monthly sales anymore just quarterly s just suggests that okay they finally think their head’s above water and they do have the ability if they get the software right to start cranking these out I was surprised that they’ve actually been building lots and lots and
Lots of blazers they’re in Lots somewhere in Mexico and once they get the software right those are all going to hit dealers my local dealer who was going to get their Blazer in early October still has it on indefinite hold because I check in every so often but um
It could happen and I think we’re in late February now I think a couple months from now we’ll know because those cars all three of us will have seen those cars show up on Lots will be offered test drives they’ll be in the media fleets there will be a bucket ton
Of Blazer EV stuff hope to see it John I just wanted to say before we wrap up the show congratulations again on that awesome piece you always uh hit it out of the park with your uh crazy deep dive stories and you do it right you get the right sources old school
Traditional journalist not just Kyle over here spitting FSE stuff left right on the internet so can’t thank you enough I you know the industry wouldn’t be what it is without you and love to have you on the show so uh yeah thanks kind I just wish I had your
Energy sure yeah yeah the volume of video you guys put out is astounding hey we gotta keep up we gotta you know ultimately we have to we want to win at this thing so it’s full send and we’re powered by Starbucks do I get 15 seconds to pitch the side hustle tempting fate
Tours yes go to go ah when I’m not being an EV journalist I’m driving stupid unreliable old cars around the country um which is fun in its own different way um it’s called tempting fate tours just YouTube tempting fake tours um watch our videos and um leave us comments we love
Comments as you guys do we should do a collaboration one day where we get the worst EVs and do something with them it’s a deal okay right we are taking theota and maybe the 58 Riley yeah yeah okay that’ be amazing we should do something yeah oldest Eves that you can find and
Then I just met someone who has a 18 or 1905 something 1910 somewhere around there Detroit electric pretty much unused in their garage uh and I just bought two cars from this lady so I’m like maybe I should pick one of those up too that’d be kind of cool they’re
Fascinating because they don’t have Ria stats they go relay by relay so accelerate interesting clunk clunk clunk ah cool my uh I have two commuta cars that are that way as well oh so yeah well my buddy Tom rymes who’s the other half of tempting fate tours has a
Sebring City car from 1976 that’s now pretty much restored and we’re going to be restoring one of mine back to perfect and then another one we’re dropping a Tesla Drive drink in and we’re going to make it do wheelies you do realize those are trailer tires on there yeah we got
To get some big fat boy tires and actually put some weight in it to get it to hook up but end clearly yeah yeah it’s gonna be funny we’ve got all the weird EVS over here so you know come come on out sometime too attempting fate tours EV Edition this actually could be
Hor I live this would be amazing I love to hear that you’re doing that and we’ll make sure to link everything in the show notes so that everyone can find it and yeah John really pleasure to meet you pleasure to speak to you about this and
Uh thank you so much for coming on to the out ofpc podcast and for your time and energy and telling us not only what you found in the story but how you went about it because I’m I’m sure it was not easy to find all of this out it hasn’t
Been easy for anyone thank you well thank you here’s to the next one here’s to the next one thank you everyone also for plugging into the out ofpc podcast today hope you have an electrifying rest of your day we’ll see you next time on the next episode [Applause] bye-bye
John Voelcker, Kyle, and Francie sit down to discuss the GM’s Ultium Platform. They review GM’s initial goals, their current progress, and the various problems GM continues to face. This episode explores the specific setbacks that prevented GM from delivering EVs.
Thank you again to John Voelcker for taking the time to speak with us! (@TemptingFateTours)
Link to his full article: https://insideevs.com/features/709703/gm-ultium-problems-software-batteries/
We also reached out to GM and received an official response: “GM confirmed that removing phone projection has no relation to the issues leading to the pause in sales of the Blazer EV.”
Enter the Climate XChange raffle here!
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