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General Motors has pushed back plans to convert one of its Michigan assembly plants into an electric-pickup truck factory amid a slowdown in demand for electric vehicles.
The move is the latest sign that electric vehicle production and demand may not be as strong as forecast.
GM had been set to begin production of the electric Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra in late 2024 at the suburban Detroit plant.
The company said the plan now is to start it in late 2025.
The delay is happening “to better manage capital investment while aligning with EV demand,” the automaker told The Post on Wednesday.
Though EV sales in the US grew 51% in the first nine months of the year, the advance is well below the 71% sales surge in vehicles for the same period last year.
In addition, the 50% increase in the first nine months of 2023 trails the 65% growth for all of 2022, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing Motor Intelligence data.
While the EV plans are paused, the automaker said it will work on implementing engineering improvements “to increase the profitability of our products.”
A GM spokesperson told The Post that delaying the Orion Assembly plant’s transformation has nothing to do with the ongoing strike by United Auto Workers union against the Big Three — which has shut down major factories, prompting Ford and GM to lay off a combined 500 staffers this month.
GM still plans a significant boost in EV production in 2024 including adding a new shift at a Detroit-Hamtramck factory that is currently building EV SUVs and pickup trucks.
GM is set to begin building the GMC Sierra EV next year in Detroit.
General Motors said on Tuesday it still plans to end production of the Chevrolet Bolt EV at the end of 2023.
GM, which vows to end the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035, sells few EVs in the United States outside the Bolt. Just 2.8% of its total U.S. sales this year are EVs.
Industry leader Tesla slashed prices by up to 20% on many of its popular models at the start of the year after the company’s failure to meet Wall Street’s delivery estimates for 2022.
Tesla will report its third-quarter earnings after the markets close on Wednesday.
Tesla’s price cuts had a ripple effect through the competitive EV marketplace, dropping the average price for an EV from nearly $59,000 in January to $48,000 in September, per the The Journal, which reviewed Cox Automotive data.
Dwindling demand has also caused Ford to consider canceling its own shift in factory production on its electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck, which recently had its price slashed by $10,000 in an about-face by the automaker that just months earlier had raised the prices of its EV models.
Meanwhile, luxury EV maker Lucid Motors has been struggling to hit its production targets, producing just 6,737 vehicles so far this year with a goal to build 10,000 EVs by the end of the year, according to The Journal.
Shares of Lucid — which is run by an ex-Tesla engineer — are down about 80% since the company’s Nasdaq debut in 2021 following a merger with Churchill Capital Corp. in a deal that valued the company at $24 billion.
As of Wednesday, Lucid’s share price sits at $4.65, down nearly 25% year to date, and the company has a market cap of $10.62 billion.
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