General Motors will be upping its investment in electric vehicle charging infrastructure by nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars, in a bid to lure drivers who may otherwise be leery of charging availability to EVs.
The automaker said it would spend nearly $750,000,000 through 2025 in order to create more access to public, home and work chargers. The investment also has significant implications for GM’s Ultium Charge 360 project.
This isn’t the first time GM has invested in charging. The automaker last year announced a partnership with EVgo, a popular charging network company, for the installation of more than 2,700 DC fast chargers over five years.
Charging availability is consistently cited in surveys as one of the primary reasons why people are hesitant to transition to an electric vehicle. A recent survey from Consumer Reports found that around half of the respondents said “not enough public charging stations” was holding them back from purchasing an EV.
What’s unclear is whether this will go toward a proprietary charging network — like Tesla’s Supercharging network, which boasts over 25,000 chargers in nearly 3,000 stations around the world — or whether this money will go toward another partnership. There was a lot of talk throughout the investor day of GM becoming a “vertically integrated” OEM with revenues from subscriptions and services — and GM also teased that this investment would help support a new initiative it’s calling “Ultium Charge 360,” which sounds to us a lot like a subscription. But we’ll have to wait and see.
Other GM Investor Day news:
- GM aims to build Netflix-sized subscription business by 2030
- GM says it will double revenue by 2030, take EV market share from Tesla
- GM to introduce new hands-free driver assistance system in 2023, starting with Cadillac
- GM, General Electric agree to develop rare earth materials used in EV manufacturing
- GM’s growing portfolio of ‘really affordable EVs’ includes $30,000 crossover
source https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/06/gm-is-upping-its-investment-in-charging-infrastructure-to-increase-confidence-in-evs/
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