For nearly a century, Detroit automakers like General Motors led the world in engine design and mass manufacturing. That helped them maintain a large share of global car sales at least through the late 1990s, even as German and Japanese automakers entered the market.
Now, batteries are the competitive battleground, both for electric vehicles and storage. GM is betting that investing in next-generation technology is the best way to gain an edge, pouring $900 million into first-of-its-kind research and prototype facilities on the same campus where GM has innovated in cars for decades in the Detroit suburb of Warren, Michigan.
The company has big ambitions, even as the final phase of the project is still under construction: multi-floor warehouses so large that one has its own substation, and is bustling inside with contractors, equipment suppliers, and HVAC technicians. GM aims to fill missing links in the U.S. battery supply chain that have forced the industry to rely on Asian cell makers — such as the South Korean and Japanese conglomerates LG and Panasonic, respectively, or China’s CATL and BYD.
Until now, North America has lacked some critical steps in the battery development pipeline that sit between the lab and churning out hundreds of thousands of full-sized battery packs per day at gigascale factories, GM officials told Latitude Media during a tour of its new campus last week. Those steps, described colloquially as “the Valley of Death,” involve testing larger and larger prototypes to ensure they are manufactured with the highest performance at the lowest possible cost.
It’ll be challenging to catch up to Chinese manufacturers that are ahead, in terms of scaling up production lines. But GM is a frontrunner in the Western market and aims to meet growing U.S. demand for cheaper batteries for EVs and storage — especially domestic batteries that qualify for tax credits.
As Mo Gallegos, head of GM’s Battery Cell Development Center, put it in during the tour: “When you understand how cells are made from the ground up, you become a better buyer and a better partner, as well as influence the broader industry.”
The China threat
While lithium-ion batteries so far make up the bulk of the market, GM hopes that its in-house expertise will give it an advantage in the U.S. over Asian competitors for two new battery chemistries.
One, known as LMR or lithium-manganese-rich, could theoretically make for cheaper EV batteries with 400 miles of range on a single charge. Meanwhile, sodium-ion has a lot of potential for storage, company officials said, even though it has lower energy density than standard lithium-ion.
That’s because sodium-ion batteries are more durable in a wider range of climates, from extreme heat to freezing cold. They potentially wouldn’t need to be paired with costly cooling technology — currently a standard feature of “refrigerated batteries in the desert,” as Andy Oury, GM’s business planning manager for battery, propulsion, and sustainability, described it. Sodium-ion also burns at lower temperatures, making it easier to avoid fires.
Crucially, from a geopolitical standpoint, the U.S. has an abundant amount of sodium and the technology doesn’t rely on Chinese-controlled supply chains for lithium, cobalt, or nickel. All of these advantages could help keep the combined capital and operational expenditures of sodium-ion batteries 20% lower than lithium-ion over the lifetime of an asset, GM estimates.
The automaker introduced LMR last year under its joint venture with LG Energy Solution, and aims to commercialize the chemistry in 2028. GM has a similar timeline for sodium-ion, although it just started prototyping sodium-ion battery cells in June.
For more on GM’s move into LMR batteries, listen to Kurt Kelty, GM’s VP of batteries, on this episode of the Catalyst podcast:
GM hosting research and development and new prototype factories all within the Warren campus is the linchpin of that plan, serving as the proving ground for new batteries before eventually scaling up to gigawatt-scale production. The company’s Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center was completed in 2022, while the Battery Cell Development Center is expected to wrap up construction this year. These capabilities are also integral to the automaker’s bid to prevent the U.S. from repeating its lithium-ion market. China made well over 80% of lithium-ion batteries in 2025, according to the International Energy Agency, and even factories in the U.S. and Europe rely on imports from China for a majority of their components. China also controls much of the mineral supply chains.
That imbalance led the Biden administration to enact federal tax breaks for U.S. battery makers, which Congress largely preserved in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill — albeit with stricter criteria for companies with ties to “foreign entities of concern,” meaning countries like China and Russia. The law did eliminate consumer tax breaks for EVs, weakening sales and prompting several automakers, including GM and Ford, to repurpose their EV battery capacity for energy storage. The latter is widely seen as the more promising market, now that electricity demand is soaring thanks to the data center boom, electrification, and reshored manufacturing.
China’s battery leadership is unlikely to shift in the nearterm, the IEA said in February; that includes for sodium-ion batteries, given that nearly all of that manufacturing capacity announced so far was located in China. That said, technology innovation could diversify supply chains as long as the U.S. can drive down production costs.
Batch-cooked batteries
That’s the key reason why GM is investing in its own know-how. Oury said it’s been a constant struggle to get the U.S. battery industry to focus on lowering costs rather than just maximizing energy density. And while LG is a great partner, GM hasn’t been a cell manufacturer itself, and therefore didn’t have the authority or expertise to make decisions about new chemistries or production processes, or to switch to more local suppliers.
In short, GM wanted its own test kitchens. Throughout the tour, officials repeatedly used baking analogies for its new battery R&D capabilities. Electrode slurries made of mineral powders, binders, and solvents are swirled together in mixers resembling a Kitchen Aid. These slurries are rolled onto long sheets of aluminum and copper, which are then sliced and baked. These slices are layered into battery cells before entering “formation,” the final step of manufacturing that involves charging and discharging a newly assembled battery cell for the first time to activate its internal chemistry. The finished product is like a twice-baked cake.
GM officials described the formation step as the “secret sauce” of the battery industry. “Cell makers don’t discuss this because it determines battery quality,” Oury said.
Once the BCDC is complete later this year, GM will have battery test kitchens at three different scales spread across its 700-acre campus in Warren, which first opened in the 1950s with a keynote address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Wallace can make about a dozen full-sized prototype battery cells per week, while the BCDC is expected to make thousands.
These trial and error phases help avoid expensive missteps before moving into factories with gigawatt-hours of production capacity, and give GM greater visibility into manufacturing costs.
Advances in virtual engineering, digital twins, and AI computing also allow the company to model more battery chemistries on the front end. Radu Theyyunni, director of global propulsion virtual engineering, said his department simulated hundreds of thousands of versions of LMR technologies before GM built the first prototypes. The same methodology is being applied to sodium-ion, from the atomic level all the way to the cell and battery pack.
“We can tell in a matter of days how changes to the battery chemistry will affect cost, range, performance, and safety,” Theyyunni said.
While the action is currently taking place within the single-square-mile campus, GM plans to transfer the breakthroughs that emerge in Warren to factories with gigawatt-scale plants. The company already announced plans to make LMR batteries at sites in Ohio and Tennessee under its joint venture with LG Energy Solution.
A similar site has yet to be selected for sodium-ion technology. It remains a nascent industry, especially in the U.S., but GM isn’t alone in its interest. The automaker in June announced a partnership with Peak Energy, which was founded in 2023 by alumni of Tesla and Northvolt and is similarly working on lowering the cost of sodium-based, utility-scale storage.
The two companies plan to collaborate on new cells, where GM will retain exclusive manufacturing rights and Peak will incorporate the technology into its storage systems. As Cameron Dales, co-founder and chief commercial officer of Peak Energy, told Latitude Media in June, partnering with a player with the manufacturing legacy of GM can be a major boon.
“We’re at the very early days — kind of where LFP was 10 years ago, on the steep improvement curve,” Dales said. “But as a small company, we don’t necessarily have the resources or the scale to fully realize all of the potential and the projects that are on our roadmap by ourselves.”
