Glad to see the apparent quick progress on the plant. Hopefully having the docks done means they have started on some of the interior finish out work. Getting the machinery inside, tweaked and retweaked will probably take awhile to finish.
Yeah, they are fitting out the inside now with systems, once the GC is done there is a cleaning process, this plant has to be like a clean room for battery production. Starting a battery plant is a very slow painstaking process and will take most of next year, I would guess we will not see full production until early to mid 2023, you can look at GM's timeline of products releases and see how that coincides with the expected ramp of production at this factory. Cruise Origin and Hummer EV SUV coming early 2023 tells you that is when they expect to be flush with battery production (also Magna is building a factory to build the battery module boxes, and that will not be online until mid next year).Glad to see the apparent quick progress on the plant. Hopefully having the docks done means they have started on some of the interior finish out work. Getting the machinery inside, tweaked and retweaked will probably take awhile to finish.
I think GM is using LFP in China (buying from CATL), but in the USA I think they will stick with NCMA at least for now. Tesla's 4680 is also using NCMA, so they must see this a a good step for right now. LFP might be a good choice for fleet and robotaxi users like Cruise Automation as the charge cycle life is much better, and cost lower. We will have to wait and see...I know GM plans to change the chemistry of the cells over time and we assume that the factory will be flexible enough to handle these changes relatively quickly. I wonder if GM is considering LFP which should be cheaper, but less efficient/energy dense and whether or not these factories could build that as well? Maybe not though as some of the other stuff they are working on like lower cobalt, “American” lithium mining at lower cost, lithium metal, etc may make them superfluous. Just thinking aloud here…