GM bets big on batteries: A new $2.3 billion plant cranks out Ultium cells to power a future line of electric vehicles

In April of 1966, a shiny white Chevrolet Impala became the first car off the assembly line of a new General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. It was the glorious start of what became a checkered history for the area. This blue-collar town survived an infamous labor strike in 1972, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of GM in 2009, and a string of unmemorable small cars-including the Chevy Vega and Cavalier-before emerging as a symbol of industrial rebirth with the production of the Chevy Cruze in 2010. □ But things soon went to hell again, and GM shuttered the plant in 2019. Even then, the pain wasn't over. The plant became a political football for President Trump, who urged local residents not to sell their homes, because of jobs he promised to restore. He later rebuked GM for not building COVID-19 ventilators in a factory it no longer owned. (By that time, GM had sold the mothballed plant to Lordstown Motors Corp., a long-shot electric-truck startup.) □ Now, nine-lives Lordstown is getting another chance to play a significant role in the automotive future. Whether it succeeds hinges on the biggest multibillion-dollar question in the global auto industry: Can GM, or any legacy automaker for that matter, transform itself into a true rival to Tesla, whose electric cars-and sky-high stock price-dominate the EV space? To do that, it'll need better, stronger, more-affordable batteries. That's where GM's Ultium project comes in.