‘I want to see red’: General Motors is teaching its engineers to fail fast and ‘speak fearlessly’ as they take the EV battery fight to China

The General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich., still looks the way Eero Saarinen drew it in the 1950s: low glass-and-steel boxes set on a grid, end walls of glazed brick in saturated colors, massive man-made lakes, everything in its right place. The campus was dedicated in 1956 and has been a National Historic Landmark since 2014. As Fortune walked around on a recent site visit, it felt like a massive public high school.

Fitting in like a bright Lego set is the $900 million investment in the Battery Cell Development Center (BCDC), a massive light-gray rectangle, and the Innovation Center, which resembles a blue-and-yellow battery pack sitting on top of a historic building.

If GM is a giant campus, longtime GM battery engineer Andy Oury is the cheerful science teacher, polo shirt tucked into his blue jeans, driving around in his large (all-electric) Silverado. Just the weekend before, he said, he drove it 220 miles to Traverse City, where he powered his camper off the truck all weekend and towed a wood chipper around town. 

Oury joined GM in 1999 and became interested in batteries about a decade later, as GM began work on the Chevrolet Volt. This plug-in hybrid convinced him GM was serious about electric transportation, he told Fortune. Oury reports to Kurt Kelty, a battery lifer who spent over a decade each at Panasonic and Tesla. About a decade ago, Oury said, he noticed on LinkedIn that Kelty was leaving Tesla, and he called his boss at the time: “Hey, you’ve got to try to hire this guy.”

Kelty, now GM’s vice president of battery and sustainability, told Fortune that the battery operations and research labs have been a massive investment at a time when Detroit is largely reeling from a failed bet on EVs. The federal EV tax credit expired at the end of September 2025, and GM took about $7.6 billion in EV-related charges last year, although that was a fraction of Ford’s and Stellantis’ similar charges in their EV divisions ($19.5 billion and $26.5 billion, respectively). GM says these charges are not comparable as it is sticking with EVs as its end-game scenario.

The battery plant is still very much a work in progress, expected to come online as fully operational later this year. Anselmo “Mo” Gallegos is the director of battery cell development, responsible for rapidly scaling up science class into an industrial process. If Andy is the cool teacher, then Mo is the brainy grad student, grinning from behind his glasses or safety glasses, and he’s also prone to food metaphors. Every battery maker has a proprietary formation protocol, the final charging process that brings a cell to life, he said: “a recipe to get the perfect donut at the end of it.”

Walking me around the ovens and mixers, some of them a tangle of pipes and wires that recall the bombastic 1960s art of Marvel Comics great Jack Kirby, Gallegos casts himself as a chef seeking just the right mix of ingredients. Batteries, he said, are “a mix of chemistry, mechanical interfaces [and] dark, dark black magic.” The ovens are where the proverbial cake can be overbaked. “Is it going to stick? Is it going to crack?” he said. “You get your cake out of the oven and sometimes it’s got cracks along the top. We hate that.”

Mo’s team is ramping up to make a couple thousand full-size cells a day, and Gallegos’ job is to work out the process so that every one of them comes out smooth, no cracks. Before building the BCDC, GM couldn’t build a cell like this at all. Engineers drew one on paper, took it to a partner like Samsung or LG and asked, in Oury’s words, “pretty please, will you put this together?”

What the plant is built to prove is a big bet on chemistry. Much of the world’s cheap EV battery supply runs on lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, a chemical that China dominates. GM is betting that its next generation of electric trucks and full-size SUVs will run on something else: lithium manganese-rich, or LMR, cells, which swap out much of the nickel and cobalt for cheaper, more plentiful manganese and extra lithium. GM’s LMR cells use about 30% to 40% nickel, Oury said, compared with roughly 85% in the high-nickel cells currently being used. GM says LMR can deliver roughly a third more energy density than leading LFP cells at comparable cost — and Gallegos and Oury are scrambling to start commercial production with partner LG Energy Solution in 2028.

Kelty explained that GM has been working on LMR for more than a decade and considers it........

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