General Motors Company (GM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Well, good afternoon and good morning to all, who are joining us at the Jefferies Exane Spring Auto Conference. We are very, very happy today to have Tim Grewe speak to us about GM's electrification strategy. Tim's title is Director of Electrification Strategy. And as we've done before in [indiscernible] the session on discussion between myself and Tim, and then Stuart will do join and ask the questions coming from the audience. So again, welcome. Thank you very much, Tim, for giving us some of your time. And also, just a bit of housekeeping. If you want to ask a question, there is a question box I think top right corner of the screen where you can type in your question for later on. So again, welcome. And I guess I'll start the discussion. The -- I mean, if I look at GM, you probably have on the longest experience of EVs for a number of years, a few iterations, but the commitment has been there for a long, long time. And I think now we look at Ultium and the most recent approach and I think the structural approach and it seems to me that you're going beyond what most OEMs have been doing because you integrate the battery into a single module platform a lot of standardization of drive units that my understanding it can support a whole range of vehicles across your brands and your vehicle requirements. If you look at Ford, there have been more dock in their approach. Stellantis suggested about 4 different platforms, including a body on frame for pickups. And I guess I'm curious if you can explain to us the benefits of such what I call a foundation approach by GM. And what are the benefits of standardizing? We know but what's also the limits of standardizing to the extent that you're attempting to do at GM today.

Well, yes, thank you very much for having me here today. And I have to tell you that and everything in addition to what you said, it's an exciting time to be at GM during this industry transformation, right? Because not only are we becoming the transportation provider for people, but we're also being a full platform provider. And so as you mentioned, we've got this focus where we have the LTM platform with a modular system that can meet pretty much any transportation needs, starting -- we've announced the Equinox all the way up to the big BrightDrop's, which are medium-duty vehicle delivery vehicles. And that's all done with a common cell. And so, however, the industry flexes, wherever a preference shifts with that, we've got the right cell that we're doing in high volume with high quality to feed all of these dynamic times. But in addition to that, we're going more vertical on the value chain. Just this week, we announced a cathode active material plant joint venture with POSCO. We've got cell factories that we have announced. There's actually 3 factories going up in North America. So we're localizing. We're scaling that fundamental value chain and then we're offering these exciting products, but bringing it even one step further as a platform integrator. Just today, we announced with Pacific Gas & Electric that we're going to have a pilot program with them where your vehicle now can sell energy back to the grid, and you can actually have an income stream from your vehicle by having it plugged in with Pacific Gas & Electric, which is a win-win for everybody. It really stabilizes the grid, and it provides another option for the customer if they choose to make it. And so with all of this fundamental technology, right -- we started off with always pushing the battery technology as far as we could. In the early 2010 timeframe, we were able to have the battery technology doing a pretty good 50-mile EV for North America, and we had to put a range extender on it with our Volt extended range EV. Then in 2015-2016, we came out with a low-cost, very affordable 238-mile EV that we then upgraded in 2020 to 259. And it got to be a very practical EV for us to do. But then once we saw the technology, starting in 2017-2018 to actually be a preferred EV, where you can have a common cell, you could have this modular architecture. We decided to say, let's go all in on a dedicated platform. And let's make it so that's reusable across multiple products. And so if you look at the fundamental DNA inside of there, it starts with a cell, and that's got all the cell technology associated with it with a 70% less cobalt than today. It's a larger cell. It's got more capacity. And we build those into manufacturing units. We call them cell module assemblies. And with this foundational building block, it's got a wireless BMS system. So literally, there's a plus and a minus that you hook up for your power you hook up the cooling to it and you're ready to go to reconfigure that for any vehicle need or as some of these platform integrators are coming to us. We've announced literally a big locomotive on the rails with Wabtec, where we're putting all these about 420 of them on a train to actually meet that need. As you can see with a lot of this platform integration trajectory that we're headed, while we're giving more options for the customer whereas opening new markets, increasing the value chain, it's a very unique time where we've got the right people in the right places with the right strategies and are capitalizing those footprints so they're ready for today, but they're also upgradable for tomorrow. And so Philippe, I could talk for 1.5 hours on this, but I'm going to give you a chance to jump in and see where you would like to go a little more specifically.

Yes. Thank you very much and it's very clear. I think it's not easy to always understand the GM's approach because I think this ability to adapt to different vehicle sizes for me was difficult to appreciate in the first place. Now cutting on the Ultium, for example, my understanding is Ultium is designed very much around nickel-rich chemistries. And now we hear more and more about LFP as an alternative and I guess, can you -- is it possible at all to actually adapt Ultium to LFP or am I missing the point that is already compatible with LFP?

It's already compatible with LFP. That's always our option for our customers. And I'm going to go a little deep in the engineering. So pull me back if it's not what you're looking for. But you have parts of the battery, right? And we'll talk about the 3 major parts: the positive, the cathode; the negative, the anode; and the electrolyte that catalyzes it altogether, so it can lubricate the lithium running between those 2. However, you want to mix that cathode. The NCMA, nickel, cobalt, manganese, aluminum, is a leading technology with the lowest cost in the current environment that we have. And it's the lightest weight, okay? If you want to use less nickel, you can go down. And typically, what you want to do there is then increase your electrolyte voltage capability while still meeting life. And so options, you'll hear in the market some people call it a nickel 50 instead of the nickel 90, 95 that we're working with right now. And you have more zeolites that we've developed in the electrolyte so that you can charge it a little bit higher, where you can still get the energy density that you need. If you look at the previous decades technology with the iron phosphate that is also evolving. And a lot of the manganese technology that came out of the NCMA can be used in the LFP where you go lithium, iron, manganese, phosphate and all of our capital and all of our tooling can mix any of that combination, it can actually then extrude it onto our foils at rate, and we have that capability to flex as the market needs it. Now the big thing with LFP today, and I'll throw some engineering units at you, we're going to call it 450-watt hours per liter, is a good state-of-the-art with a fairly heavy mass. And so the current trade-off, unlike our BrightDrop, where you don't want to give up the payload in that medium-duty market or in the Silverado where you want to keep all the capability and have 10,000 pounds worth of trailing capability, the NCMA at volume is still the best value for the customer, but we can flex any time. In fact, if you looked at our Chevrolet Volt, the extended range that I mentioned earlier, we essentially changed the battery every model year because we're flexing with the technology and flexing with the market. Now going forward, you say, "Well, we have a great R&D group and there's a lot of technology companies out there, but how you turn that into reality in high-volume manufacturing with the processes that you have, where you don't want to build a new factory every time you're doing an upgrade on a battery?" And so we've developed something that we call the Wallace Innovation Center. It was named after one of our pioneering early developers on batteries. And this innovation center is truly that. It's got the capability for us internally or technology partners to come in and take the technology and put it at the high volume. We're making 100 million cells in Ohio a year and the processing and the quality control is as important as the fundamental technology. And so we created this Wallace Center where we have all the coders, all the roll presses, all the lamination techniques to say, well, how do you detail that out so that you practice it and then you hit it on a production trial run right away and you can able to convert very quickly. And so one of the key strategies with Ultium was not only leading today, but also being able to flex into the future because, as the industry is transforming here, we have to secure our supply of the raw materials, but then we have to scale it. And we're going to need some flexibility to make that scale be adapting for whatever happens in the global supply chain. And steps that we take with POSCO, and you'll hear some more steps going forward, we announced all the way down to the lithium extraction level with controlled thermal resources on how to say, is a fundamentally lower cost, better way to extract lithium through direct lithium extraction, how do you feed that into our technology? How do you scale with it with Wallace Center? And then how do you deliver it for our customers every model year to keep up with the dynamic time that we're having here? The wireless battery management system then can handle all that variation. And then our cloud systems, we call it Ultium 360, okay? We've got the data farms in the sky to say, well, exactly what's going on? And how do you mix them from a service point of view? How do you take that serviceable cell module assembly and say it could go with a certain model year type replacement and it's always upgradable for the future and the past and having all of that software platform to the Ultium 360 makes it happen. Now you can have -- and I'm -- Philippe, sorry, I'm jumping so far, but I'm really excited about this. Now you can make an intelligent decision with Pacific Gas & Electric. And you say, "listen, I've got capacity, and I've got life, I'm going to really make a lot of transactions with the utility through our platform, and it just does it for you. " It gives you the information to say, "buy low, sell high, and it's very transparent for you with this Ultium 360 connection into the grid with Pacific Gas & Electric, all the way down to the lithium quality that we got out of the ground and then how can it balance all of that in your future reality. " So we have the autonomous vehicles. We've got cruise automation, where you can have your car go do work for you. And we have this Ultium 360 with the Ultifi to say, the car can do work for you while it's parked anywhere as long as it's tied to the grid. And so it's really a transformational time where you need the flexibility, but you need to follow through. You need those data farms in the sky. You need the visualization dashboards. You need the translators, the ETLs, to tie that all together so we can interface with PG&E, we can interface with the customer and we can interface with lithium mine all the way up and down.

Right. Okay. I need to digest some of that. It's quite impressive. And I'm just wondering at this day, I mean, raw material costs are on everybody's minds and what's happening sadly in Russia and Ukraine, it's taken another turn for the worst, and we saw nickel prices spiking a few days ago. So just trying -- how can you tell us -- you've given us some information about how you're going to drive the battery costs down, got an aggressive cost curve, minus 60 and the minus 35 in the new Ultium or next generation. How much of these -- we've known about tightness of some of those materials for some time, how much of that scenario of tightness or rising cost or issues of availability were built into those cost curves you presented back in October? And how much of that needs to be revised or updated today?

So the way I would describe it to you is that we do everything we can to secure the supply so that we're not vulnerable to other things that happen, and then we scale it with innovation and technology. And so if you look at the fundamental materials, right, we have a lot of options to say, I'll stick with the lithium just to make that a consistent conversation here, where most of our lithium comes out of Australia today and it's a spodumene-type lithium that comes through and then turn it into a carbonate and then turn it into a battery. And so we'll work with that value chain through continuous innovation as to how do you get the waste out, how do you get the energy out of processing that material in a long-term contract with the best in the business? And so you're immune from the volatility, I'm not quite sure the media reports that happened with some of the China nickel events of this week, right? We're fundamentally immune from that because we're investing with the value chain, and we're working with them to say, let's go make your product better. And when we do it in a way where we don't restrict the use of the new technology. And so if you look at a lot of our structure here, we think innovation is really driving this quite a bit. And so if we come with some processing technology or the partner comes, we both can take advantage of it, and we've got everything set up ahead of time to say, "Well, how would we even go beyond our current scale to make it happen or if we're so successful to go to others?" And at the vehicle level, we've announced stuff with Honda as to how to make that happen. And that's happening all the way down the value chain as we work through that. And so controlled thermal resources, it's a place called the Salton Sea in California, which is right on a fault line. And so it's got a great potential where literally you drill into that lake bed that's dried up now and then a hot brine comes out. In that hot brine, you can extract energy to have a geothermal electric plant that has more energy than it takes to process the lithium and then you can basically differentiate the lithium and through direct lithium extraction in a close loop process, pull the lithium out, I describe it as a lithium water softener, if you will, and then return that brine back into the earth. So closed loop, not weather-dependent, no drying ponds, technology like that will not only reduce cost, but as we develop that technology with CTR, we'll have a good piece of that innovation that we then can spread even beyond our needs for our batteries. And so if you look at this new transformation, we've announced CTR, we've announced POSCO, they'll take that lithium and they'll turn it into cathode-active material. It will then feed our partner factories to turn the cathode-active material into batteries that then feed our factories that make our vehicles. Or as I mentioned, our factories could then feed locomotive trains or stationary power with PG&E. Just taking the vehicle and doing that energy trading is a great solution, but that same technology is very adjacent to an industrial and utility grade battery farm for some of the renewable needs that we have here. And so if you surround the issue with the right people and the right talent and the right contracts, plus the will to win and give them -- they're masters in their respective area, right? And they've got the vision and the purpose to say, I'm going to go make this happen, but then you give them the autonomy and let the innovation run. And that's how we're able to actually create some of these realities faster than we ever thought we would. And that's why we're continuing to announce an acceleration where we're converting more factories to EVs, but we're also converting industries to be much more efficient, lower cost so that we don't suffer any short-term market dynamic due to some allocation problem in the market because our value chain is strong. If we've always got our pipeline and we're always improving our pipeline, we're fairly immune from those things. So I'm sure that as we scale and as we accelerate our scale, we'll have a little bit of exposure to a commodity market, and we're not planning on rescoping the 60-40 that we talked about before. In fact, we don't know the bottom of the cost curve, and we're trying to improve them, not make excuses that they're going to degrade because of the commodity market.

Right. And how much of your cost curve though is linked to achieving reliable solid state? Or are you made yourself less dependent on that kind of ultimate goal it seems?

I think solid state is a great example of how we compete the innovators. If you look at -- today, it's an electrolyte that feeds either a silicon or graphite or a lithium metal anode. With the hybrid electrolytes that cathode-active material, you still need to get that lithium all the way into that material. Electron needs to come out all the way with it, right? So you have some of these hybrid electrolytes where there's a gel in the cathode material itself and then there's more of a solid state element between that and the anode that goes together with it. And so if you look at some of the patents that are coming out, where there is a solid state and then we've got some development going with solid energy system, and there are some good YouTube -- I don't know if you're familiar with YouTube, but I hope you are on, how they've done that. And it's basically ourselves that they're optimizing around to make that happen or we sell very similar to ours, and we're co-developing that with them. But in competition with that are some of the zeolite additive electrolytes. And so rather than a pure ceramic solid state only that passes that lithium ion, you add some zeolite in and you encapsulate it inside the exact ceramic and polymer of the separated safety for separators of today, and you've got a hybrid separator that competes with the solid separators. And running those all through the Wallace Center to say not only what is the cost of making the separator, but how flexible is it? We went to the uniform stacked electrode. We have flat electrodes. And we did that strategically to say we're going to enable the future technology that doesn't like rolling. And most of the solid state solutions prefer stacked electrode versus the rolled electrode, as we move forward with that. But we're always going to compete it against alternative technologies and separators. And the high zeolite safety reinforced separators are going to compete against that and may the best technology and the best innovation win, and it's going to be a continuum. And so that's why we've built this infrastructure, right? That's why we have our advanced R&D labs that are working in parallel with solid energy systems. And once they get to the point where they're achieving it, and we like to say a lot of this technology has developed on a little tiny button cells, it actually looks like a button, similar to what you would put into a smartwatch or something like that, we'd like to take it to a multilayer self that's got the capability very similar to a tablet cell to prove its durability, prove its cost because that's big enough and you get the interactions with the multiple layers in there to say you're ready to go and start working on the high-volume manufacturing implementation in the Wallace Center. And so as you cross these stages, you then go right to the next stage and quite frankly, they overlap quite a bit because we'll start thinking about, well, now what are the special separator material handling needs that you need out of solid energy systems right now today. And we'll start prototyping some of that in the Wallace Center as we move forward to say, we can do the stack laminations and then we can get the life analysis built off of a representative high-volume manufacturing solution, as we develop this and accelerate it into the market. So definitely, the way I would generically answer your question is that the higher energy densities, okay, whether it be a zeolite, hybrid electrolyte with the new zeolite reinforce safety separators or a solid state separator show benefit because imagine that you can get the battery small enough that you take it out of crash. And today, we have structural battery pack that protects the battery from crash, but imagine that you can take it out of crash and take all that mass out of that structural battery pack, it still is a better enabler for our customers to make that happen and then you can further integrate your solutions. And so today, you mentioned on the Silverado, right? It's a derivative of a HUMMER pack that we're able to flex to get the high, high range capability on that platform, but it's got sister and daughter drive units on it. So it's not the 1,000 horsepower, it's only 660 horsepower, but it's all in the motor factories from a strategy point of view that we do in the battery factories where it's common laminations, common magnets and we can flex those lines between the HUMMERs and Silverados and LYRIQs all the way down. And so I mentioned we got the common cell that we can run the cell plant 24/7 at rate, get maximum operating equipment efficiency, similar strategies occur in our motor and drive unit factors. Instead of a cell, it's a lamination and it's a magnet. And then we can vary -- we keep the rotor diameter the same and all the shafting and gearing and cooling and lubrication the same and then we can scale the stator diameter or the number winnings in the stator or the types of magnets in the rotor to meet any particular need. And so if you look at -- I'll start on the big 1,000 horsepower HUMMER, right? That's essentially 3 motors, right? There's 2 on the rear to do the torque vectoring and there's 1 on the front, all around 250, 270 kilowatts to get all that capability. That same motor can be shrunk all the way down to our all-wheel drive application, which is mainly there for winter traction. That's not really a performance or acceleration technique, and that's down at 80 kilowatts. Now in between, we have our high-volume front-wheel drive optimized system that is right in the middle, 170, 180 kilowatts or you can take a single HUMMER system and do a rear drive like on a LYRIQ that is 250. And so with these foundational building blocks, you can add these applications. In fact that Equinox is going to have a performance version of the LYRIQ in the front of it. And so the rear drive LYRIQ has 250 on the rear, but then you can add an all-wheel drive on the front at 80 or you have the option for a true performance LYRIQ to say I'm going to grab that 180 to 190-kilowatt front-drive system, and I've got a 250, 190 performance LYRIQ. If I get rid of the 250 on the rear, I just go with the front-drive, I've got a great Equinox, as that all ties together. And so what this really enables is with these common building blocks in these common factory techniques even at the vehicle level, like the locator for the suspension are the same, the locator for the packs are the same. It's all structural. It all works on every application. You can just mix and match or make them better. And so a great amount of strategy was put into that entire vehicle manufacturing process to make it all happen. If you look at the BrightDrop, right, they've been operating for a couple of months now with Federal Express, that's essentially a HUMMER pack with a LYRIQ rear drive. And that can go now meet a delivery system with a Federal Express in a very positive business case. So having all those combinations gets you into the market and then you can perfect the market with changing it or tweaking it. And I go back to this Ultifi system with the downloadable software, direct customer information, Federal Express can say, "Well, I want to change the way I use the vehicle in a certain place because it's worth the revenue to me." And now they have the information to make an intelligent system -- sorry, intelligent decision with a forward-looking prognostic and a capability. And so if you're getting into a big holiday delivery-type schedule, you don't need to flex in more vehicles. You don't need to rent more vehicles because you can run your electrics harder and you can do it with the knowledge of how to get that done. And so it's just a revolution in -- I want to say -- it's more the knowledge, it's information. And then how do you make the information accessible for the Equinox driver as well as the FedEx person? And how do they share that information along with the utility like Pacific Gas & Electric? And so it's just very exciting to see the potential and the possibility and having this open architecture. If you look at our Ultifi, it's a Linux-based open architecture, we want the innovators to innovate and realize the benefit of this because they know the business better than we do. We're just providing the information so they can make the better decisions, as they move forward. I jumped around a lot on you. I hope it was linear and logical.

Extremely interesting, and I think we need to follow up with you privately at some point. I want to make sure there's time for questions. And just one last maybe I can get a quick answer from you is just that -- so for a while, still that there was a discussion about batteries lasting 1 million miles. And I think how can the battery pack, can effectively be maybe reused? Now we can talk about recycling that you want, but reusing is actually a more -- is a friendly or a more sustainable process. Are we -- when you think about future product development, are you getting to a point you think the longevity of the battery enables you to transport that battery pack to a new vehicle, for example, and basically better use the resources that go into these powertrains?

Yes. That secondary use was fundamental in our strategy. And we have 24 of the cells in this manufacturing cell module assembly and that can be used anywhere, okay? And so if a customer wants to do an upgrade, because there is an exciting technology that they want to upgrade their vehicle on. There's a lot of value in that battery where they can then sell it to a secondary use. There's quite a bit of demand now on the utility grade upgrades with the renewables, and they've got some very high value to make that happen. And so literally speaking, that cell module assembly has a plus and minus of the power of the battery, it's got the cooling connection and you're ready to go. Everything is WiFi through our wireless battery management system. And it's a cyber secure WiFi with actually 32 channels that can switch. And so for me in my house, right, I've got about 4 WiFi channels and I got to manually switch them. Part of this WiFi -- I'm sorry, wireless battery management system, it's effectively not WiFi, I should stop calling it that, but it's in that frequency spectrum, it can jump between 32 channels, and it can reconfigure the mesh so that if you're having problems through a certain path, you can relay the information through other controllers in the mesh. And so you go from a local area network type of strategy with the WiFi and a client in the server to a mesh where you can route in any way that you want throughout the system and that was part of the strategy of the cell module assembly to provide that value for the customer for the secondary use.

Okay. Shall we leave it there for now. And then Stuart, if you can help us with questions from the audience?

Yes, sure. [indiscernible] thank you for that. Thanks for the insights, Tim. So quite a few similar questions actually coming in around in-sourcing and outsourcing and how you think about that decision? What drives it? And in particular, does it differ when you're thinking about all-wheel drive versus front-wheel drive variance? Do you still need supplier support there? Or can GM gain a competitive advantage by doing some of that independently?

So if you look at our current footprint that we have, okay, we make partner or buy and we're able to flex between all those different solutions when it comes to it. But the fundamental insertion point into a vehicle on all-wheel drive or performance all-wheel drive is what we hold stable in Ultium, but then we open architected so we can always let an innovator come along with an ultimate solution or if there's a low-volume solution, let's -- say there's a special fleet need in a BrightDrop that's very unique that isn't of automotive scale or automotive volume, right? Ultium can accept -- a lot of people talk about the beam axle in that type of a duty cycle as preferred there. We can accept a supplier into that specific BrightDrop solution and have those options to make that happen. So we always make partner or buy currently at scale when we're growing and transforming like that, most of it is make. And that has a lot to do with securing the supply right now. But as the future gets more mature, as a transformation gets more mature in the industry, we can actually do the partner or buy any time that it's right for our customers.

Okay. And then another question, just regarding thinking about the -- your benchmarking, the range efficiency of your vehicles. And what do you think about looking at your metrics like miles of range per kilowatt hour. There's some questions regarding the investment, obviously, it's gone into the Ultium platform on that metric, it's not obviously on things like the Silverado in miles ahead of the F-150 lightning. So what do you think about that?

Yes. So I think the Silverado is a great example of leading the industry, right? I mean our DC fast charge capability is 100 miles in 10 minutes, it's actually a 350-kilowatt capability to make that happen. You've got a 400-mile option if you want that in your vehicle. But with Ultium, you can also offer something down to where the rest of the pack is around 300 miles, and that can just be customer choice. And so as you look at all of these aspects, we designed this specifically with the flexibility to provide that in the future. Now we've done the technology with a structural battery pack, the mixed steel and the mixed welding technology to say, we split the chassis load between the body and the battery pack, and we've designed it specifically, and we think we're leading in the industry to make that happen. And that's how you can turn a HUMMER into a Silverado so quickly because you got that fundamental capability. But Philippe mentioned there may be a frame rails application, 3,500 on a medium duty or things like that. Ultium can also work with the frame rails, if that's what's right for that customer. And if you look at some of our fleet users, they don't want the 400 miles, right? They want to have something that's much more tailored to their specific dedicated route, and we've got that capability to do it. And so when we designed Ultium, there's other platforms out there that are more EV-focused, but they just don't have the capability to do the small vehicles all the way up to the medium duty with common components to drive that operating equipment efficiency in your value chain. And so that's where we are today, it's going to change for tomorrow. And we've got the flexibility to quickly pivot to do what's the lowest cost and best value for our customer in our strategy. And so it's a never-ending competitive benchmark, it's a never-ending value stream optimization to say how do you minimize proliferation so you can get the high operating equipment efficiency, but one is proliferation appropriate? And then how do you say, "Well, I'm going to let partners come in and work on those smaller segments," and that's fundamental to our strategy.

Yes. I mean there's 1 add-on question to those points as well, just on your views really on how the average battery pack size in your vehicles does develop over the next 5 years or so as particularly as infrastructure becomes more dense and that range anxiety starts to die down because as you say, we've got fast charging speeds, do you really need 400 miles of range, is 200 start to be enough? And how do you think about that when planning your product development and battery capacity needs?

For sure, we can flex down to the lowest range vehicle that people want. I mentioned that 24 battery scenario in the 1 cell module assembly. Well, we have the ability with 24 to hook 3 of them in parallel. So it's really 24 divided by 3 from a voltage point of view. Or if on a low-range vehicle, that same cell module assembly can put 2 in parallel for the ultra low range solutions. And so we've got the ability to say we'll stick with the 3 in parallel and instead of doing 10 modules go down to 8 or 6, that's an option. But if there's a particular application where you say, well, no, I'm going to go to a 2P, but I want to get the voltage up for a certain medium duty application, you've got that flexibility. So you can flex it at the cell module assembly level, you can flex it at the pack level and all the systems are integrated together to take that amount of variation. It really comes down to what's the most efficient use of your invested capital and then how do you give yourself options for the future.

Okay. Another question here kind of inevitable not sure how fair to ask it, but obviously, there's a lot of focus on different companies right now separating EV from the ICE business. But maybe more from a -- what was a technical standpoint, how easy you think that would be from a powertrain perspective, having a separate EV P&L at least relative to ICE?

For us at General Motors, we're not feeling any disadvantage to keeping them common. Because of this fundamental building block approach and the ability to say that we've got this data farm with the Ultifi, we've made the investments in the infrastructure and the technology to say we're keeping them together, and we're benefiting from that. Something that you learn on a HUMMER EV when it comes to that duty cycle that we have in the data farm can directly apply to a conventional system. And having that capability to run them the same across to our entire business from a technical point of view is enabling, we don't see it as a problem. We're not hitting -- we're able to accelerate our schedules. We've redefined our process so we can develop a vehicle in half the time when it's an EV. And we've done at all at the same time, while we've capped the traditional business, which is highly regulated, very robust. And this way, you can flex your workforce between the 2 because they've got those common systems and common language -- mostly common culture of the innovation to say, "well, we're going to do what's right and we're going to do what's sufficient, but this year, you can work on the Ultium platform, and you can take those learnings and apply it from the EV Silverado right into the traditional Silverado and just make both of them better." So we're not seeing any problem with doing that because we've made the investment in the infrastructure, we've made the investment in the culture of innovation to make that happen.

Okay. And maybe just 1 last very quick question to finish as we're running out of time. But given everything you've got going on all the different investments and products and technologies coming to market, how confident are you feeling in terms of execution and quality? Is everything going to plan or any delays that you're worried about?

Production heaven is not always heaven when you're working on this. But we've got -- we have a thing we call launch team, okay, with dedicated resources to go catch issues early in that ramp up and in that scaling and make sure that it's very transparent to the customer. Now so far, all of our launches have been when we said we would do them, right? We haven't delayed the launches yet. And we've got a lot more coming in the next year or so. But as everybody knows, bringing in a 100 million cell battery plant, 45-gigawatt hour battery plant in Ohio, while you're in parallel ramping up 1 in Spring Hill, is going to have challenges. So we're expanding our workforce today. If you look at what we're doing in Warren, Ohio, it's by Youngstown, Ohio, we partnered with a local university to feed that operator skill set and taking that best practice and doing it down in Spring Hill and replicating it and having the launch teams from Warren, Ohio, go to Spring Hill is working. Now Warren, Ohio, was our first battery plant, but we actually hired our leaders and our plant operators to operate the LG facility in Hammond, Michigan, this last summer. So by doing these launch teams and these preparations, we're minimizing it, but the launch teams are a bit busy, and we're going to keep people more supportive to make sure we meet these deliverables.

Okay. Well, good luck with the launches. And yes, thank you for your time. I think we're just about out of time. So thank you, everybody, for joining us at the BNP and Jefferies Spring Auto Conference. And thanks again, Tim, for your time and insight. Have a good day.

My pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you very much.