[whynot]

Almost the final nail in the coffin of Australian built ICE vehicles. I seriously doubt that AU car manufacturing will rejuvenate when EV technology becomes more affordable.


Below is an interesting extract from the tail end of an article in the Wall Street Journal, and reproduced in The Australian a few days back. The whole article is definitely worth a read if you have a subscription to the Australian.

Both pieces of Ms Barra’s two-pronged strategy — exiting low-growth businesses while ploughing the capital into an electric future — were on full display early this year.

In February, GM said it would end its Australian Holden brand, a once-dominant brand and staple of the country’s car-crazy culture, known for rugged pick-up trucks and muscular sedans.

In Australia, car enthusiasts and politicians vented a sense of betrayal.

“General Motors may think the rich history of the Holden brand in Australia is worthless, but I think it’s priceless,” said one politician, Queensland Senator James McGrath, according to Australia’s Courier-Mail newspaper.

Then, in early March, GM invited hundreds of dealers, analysts and journalists to its suburban Detroit engineering centre. Ms Barra made her biggest statement yet that GM was betting its future on electric cars.

The CEO strolled the floor as visitors ogled a dozen future all-electric models, some several years from seeing the inside of showrooms — a rarity in an industry where future products are cloaked in secrecy. The models ranged from brawny pick-up trucks to a Cadillac that one executive said would be priced above $US200,000.

GM said it would spend $US20bn developing electric and driverless cars through mid-decade. It is targeting sales of 1 million electric-car sales annually by then. In Ohio, near a factory it closed last year, construction began recently with partner LG Chem on a battery-cell plant bigger than 40 football fields.

Still, it will be many years before electric vehicles take off, analysts say. High battery costs are likely to keep prices higher than conventionally powered cars through most of this decade, and a dearth of charging stations in the US will dampen consumer interest, they say.

So far, the early offerings from incumbent car companies have failed to achieve anywhere close to Tesla’s success.

As Ms Barra showed off GM’s future battery-powered cars, she was also confronting a new threat: a rapidly-spreading global pandemic. GM spent the spring scrambling to borrow more than $US20bn amid a multiweek factory shutdown from COVID-19, during which it bled billions in cash.

In June, Ms Barra sat with top executives inside GM’s design dome, a circa-1950s auditorium where generations of leaders have reviewed big Cadillac sedans with gaudy tailfins and Corvette sports cars.

This meeting was different: Ms Barra and her team sat at a large table, wearing masks, to decide which future vehicles were on the chopping block. Details of each model, from minor facelifts to major new entries, were spread across large digital wall charts, including launch dates and sales targets.

Some were delayed, others scrapped altogether. By the end of the meeting, all of the electric-vehicle projects on the board emerged untouched, along with a nearly $US3bn renovation of a Detroit factory and nearby facility to build them, Ms Barra said.

“The situation allowed us to look at things with a very clear eye,” she said.