GM is investing $900 million in battery facilities and pushing a "Zero-Zero-Zero" vision to compete with Tesla. Battery engineer Andy Oury, motivated by concern for his children's future, convinced GM's CEO to commit to electric vehicles. The rivalry intensified after Biden excluded Musk from a 2021 EV summit, pushing Tesla's founder toward Trump.
In August of 2021, President Joe Biden made a political blunder of historic proportions. Mr. President, this sucker's quick. He held an electric vehicle summit at the White House and didn't invite Elon Musk or anyone from Tesla. Not long after that, hello Detroit, Biden went out of his way to credit GM with leading the electric vehicle revolution. You electrified the entire automobile industry. I'm serious. You led, and it matters. These moves did not sit well with Musk. Come on up here, Elon. And most certainly led him toward a very public and deep-pocketed embrace of Donald Trump. You remember.
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Yeah. Wow. The truth, of course, is that it was Tesla that reshaped the auto industry. I love Tesla. Tesla turned electric cars into a reality. GM, like all the other American automakers, was an EV laggard, which is what brings us to this. For this is the Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center, just outside of Detroit. The scientists and engineers inside of this building would like to make the case that GM now takes electric vehicles seriously, like very seriously.
This is Godzilla.
And the GM representative tasked with delivering their message is this man.
My name's Andy Oury. I'm a battery engineer at General Motors.
Thank you. A few years ago, Andy had something of a soul-searching moment.
I've got kids and I wanted to make sure that the planet is better for my kids than it was for me. And I said, I've gotta do something about getting to an all-electric future.
He decided he wanted to put his MIT brain toward combating climate change. And he wondered if GM actually felt the same way.
After working in batteries for about 10 years, I was trying to figure out, was this company really serious about electric vehicles? And I was like, you know what, I'm going to email the CEO. And I emailed the CEO and I said, you know, our mission statement, it could really relate more to the environment. And she said, hey, I've forwarded this to our communications team. Don't worry, we're working on something. And it was about a year later where I finally got to learn what they were working on. It was that Zero-Zero-Zero vision.
Lumen is listening. The Zero-Zero-Zero vision stands for zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion. And it's around the zero emissions that Andy will argue GM has done more than you might have noticed.
I think we've been quietly building an electrification powerhouse right under everybody's noses. We've invested between the Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center and the Battery Cell Development Center next door close to $900 million in those facilities to make full-scale prototype cells at rate.
