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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n courtesy of General Motors<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n 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<\/em>. 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: \u201cHey, you\u2019ve got to try to hire this guy.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelty, now GM\u2019s vice president of battery and sustainability, told Fortune<\/em> 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\u2019s and Stellantis\u2019 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.<\/p>\n The battery plant is still very much a work in progress, expected to come online as fully operational later this year. Anselmo \u201cMo\u201d 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\u2019s 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: \u201ca recipe to get the perfect donut at the end of it.\u201d<\/p>\n courtesy of General Motors<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n 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 \u201ca mix of chemistry, mechanical interfaces [and] dark, dark black magic.\u201d The ovens are where the proverbial cake can be overbaked. \u201cIs it going to stick? Is it going to crack?\u201d he said. \u201cYou get your cake out of the oven and sometimes it\u2019s got cracks along the top. We hate that.\u201d<\/p>\n Mo\u2019s team is ramping up to make a couple thousand full-size cells a day, and Gallegos\u2019 job is to work out the process so that every one of them comes out smooth, no cracks. Before building the BCDC, GM couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s words, \u201cpretty please, will you put this together?\u201d<\/p>\n What the plant is built to prove is a big bet on chemistry. Much of the world\u2019s cheap EV battery supply runs on lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, a chemistry 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\u2019s 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 \u2014\u00a0and Gallegos and Oury are scrambling to start commercial production with partner LG Energy Solution in 2028.<\/p>\n Kelty explained that GM has been working on LMR for more than a decade and considers it homegrown. \u201cWe\u2019re not licensing this from China,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re developing this here.\u201d If it works, GM gets a cheaper, longer-range battery for its biggest vehicles that doesn\u2019t depend on Chinese technology. If it doesn\u2019t, GM will have wagered on a chemistry that, by Kelty\u2019s own account, most of the industry considers a long shot.\u00a0<\/p>\n courtesy of General Motors<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cOur data showed one thing,\u201d Kelty said: \u201cthat this actually made sense.\u201d The question inside GM became why the company wasn\u2019t already moving. \u201cIt took a voice saying, the reason we\u2019re not doing LMR is because it\u2019s us. It\u2019s our own broken mentality. So let\u2019s fix that,\u201d Oury recalled. The hurdle, he said, was \u201cactually more momentum-based or emotion-based rather than data and business-based.\u201d<\/p>\n When GM made the call, Kelty said, the team had supporting data to get it perhaps 60% to 70% of the way to the decision. \u201cWhat we had to do was make that last leap and say, \u2018You know what? We\u2019re going to get the next 30% or 40% of the data and make it there.\u2019\u201d He called it a \u201ctestament to the trust in the team.\u201d GM hasn\u2019t fully abandoned LFP; in July 2025, it announced it would convert its Spring Hill, Tenn., cell plant to produce LFP cells, but GM chose LMR for its biggest vehicles.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a big change for America\u2019s No. 1 automaker, which has long produced, to recall Alfred P. Sloan\u2019s famous phrase, \u201ca car for every purse and purpose\u201d\u00a0 \u2014\u00a0and whose employees pride themselves on being A students who know all the answers. Leaders at GM told Fortune<\/em> they\u2019re trying to grow a different kind of high achiever: someone who challenges inherited constraints, works from incomplete information, admits what won\u2019t get done and uses early failures to learn faster, without missing core deliverables. But it\u2019s not easy to accept a few Bs when you\u2019re used to being an A student.\u00a0<\/p>\n courtesy of General Motors<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n When Kelty joined GM in February 2024, he began a new quarterly process with his team. At the start of each period, he spends an hour one-on-one with each direct report, agreeing on goals. He describes his job in three parts: \u201cset the direction, set the priorities, and then remove obstacles.\u201d At the end of each quarter, the work is marked red, yellow or green.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the quarter, when we look at it, there should be some red lights on there,\u201d Kelty said in an interview with Fortune<\/em>. \u201cAnd if there isn\u2019t, then to me that means that they didn\u2019t stretch far enough. So I want to see red.\u201d<\/p>\n The goals have to be measurable, he said, citing something he might assign in batteries: \u201cWe\u2019re going to make the cells, the cells are going to cycle 500 times and they\u2019re going to have at least 90% retention by the end of the quarter.\u201d His teams now run their goals through AI to check that each one has a metric attached, he added. \u201cI want to make sure that we have some stretch targets in there,\u201d Kelty said. \u201cI don\u2019t want just goals that they\u2019re doing already.\u201d<\/p>\n At GM, Kelty said he found a team that treated the quarterly scorecard like a report card. \u201cThe team was just paranoid that everything had to be green because that\u2019s kind of the GM culture,\u201d he said, adding that he comes from a culture where \u201cif everything\u2019s green, you obviously are not stretching hard enough.\u201d<\/p>\n At his first staff meeting, Kelty asked his new direct reports to bring their top priorities for the year and the top two things they would not<\/em> do. Several called Oury to ask whether their new boss was serious. As a longtime GMer, Oury said the instinct was to never say no, \u201cbecause it always feels like you have the resources to get it done.\u201d But the truth, he said, is that \u201cno company, no matter how big they are, has the resources to do everything. So having that \u2014\u00a0building that muscle of saying no and prioritizing \u2014\u00a0is super important.\u201d<\/p>\n Kelty puts it more bluntly: \u201cIf you don\u2019t have a list of things you\u2019re not going to do this quarter, then I assume you have too many people.\u201d<\/p>\n It took about a year for the team to buy in, Kelty said. What helped was an example. At a meeting with his leaders, he shared an anonymized quarterly review, full of red lights. \u201cThey didn\u2019t hit hardly anything on their targets, but I gave them the highest ranking of all of you,\u201d he recalled telling them. As he put it to Fortune<\/em>, \u201cThe person that got the most red actually was the highest-performing person on my team.\u201d<\/p>\n Some reds are delays. Some are experiments that didn\u2019t work out. Either way, Kelty said, \u201cLet\u2019s move on.\u201d<\/p>\n The finance chief, Paul Jacobson, has steered the company into a position where Kelty has room to dig deep and experiment. The former Delta Air Lines CFO has held the same position at GM since 2020 and on his watch, GM has generated annual cash of about $10 billion since 2021, compared to an average of $3 billion for the five years prior, while buying back roughly a third of its shares since late 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n He said he learned from the airline sector to take out what he called \u201cself-imposed cyclicality\u201d from piling-up inventory and price slashes during soft demand. That cushion pays for bets like Kelty\u2019s, he said. \u201cWhat we really want to do is create a continuous stream of healthy cash flows.\u201d The company recorded $185 billion in revenue and $2.7 billion in net income in 2025, with 2.85 million cars sold domestically, a 17.2% market share.\u00a0<\/p>\n Victor J. Blue\/Bloomberg via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n Jacobson has run a bit of a stretch experiment in public. At GM\u2019s 2021 investor day, he laid out 10-year targets that were unusual for an automaker to put on paper, including $20 billion in annual digital revenue by 2030. Jacobson told Fortune <\/em>he thinks the market discounted that heavily at the time, and is now more focused on quarterly performance. GM stock\u2019s price-to-earnings multiple is one of the lowest in the S&P 500, he noted, even though it has generated over $10 billion a year in free cash flow for almost five years now.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cPeople take a view that\u2019s more historical,\u201d he said. \u201cThey look at the GM of the \u201990s and the 2000s and the restructuring era versus really looking at what\u2019s going on today.\u201d<\/p>\n Sterling Anderson, another former Tesla executive, may be the clearest sign of how far GM is willing to go to remake itself: it handed one of its most important jobs to someone from the tech world. And it handed him a distinctly tech-flavored job title: chief product officer.<\/p>\n Announcing his hire in May 2025, GM President Mark Reuss said the company had \u201can opportunity to evolve the way we build from the ground up, with tighter integration between software and hardware, shorter development cycles, and an unwavering focus on a seamless customer experience.\u201d CEO Mary Barra said Anderson was joining \u201cat a critical time as our industry continues to reinvent itself.\u201d<\/p>\n Holding a master\u2019s and PhD in robotics from MIT, Anderson developed MIT\u2019s groundbreaking semi-autonomous vehicle safety system, Intelligent Co-Pilot, and later led Tesla\u2019s Autopilot program before co-founding autonomous trucking company Aurora. He joined GM after conversations with Barra, Reuss, Jacobson and the board of directors and told Fortune<\/em> he made the decision for three main reasons: GM\u2019s trajectory, vision and scale.\u00a0<\/p>\n IAN MAULE\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n The car is \u201cthe most complex robot you and I and most of us will probably ever own,\u201d he said. What surprised him in those conversations, he added, was GM\u2019s \u201cappetite for transformation.\u201d \u201cI saw a much higher neuroplasticity in this leadership team than I\u2019ve seen from many others in this and related industries.\u201d<\/p>\n Anderson said he\u2019s especially pushing a \u201cno sacred cows\u201d mentality. \u201cEngineers thrive when you take the constraints off the problem.\u201d For instance, he said he challenged a team to come up with voice-controlled in-vehicle experiences, and a four-person team had a prototype running in a Cadillac Lyriq about 30 days later. Old GM would have asked, \u201cWho\u2019s the supplier we can go talk to and integrate a module?\u201d he said. Now, his product org gives out an award called \u201cBig Swings,\u201d for \u201ceffort that swings through the fences, whether successful or not.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Anderson described GM\u2019s overhaul of product development as \u201ceffectively the third phase in the evolution of product development for humanity,\u201d built on \u201cprobabilistic, large data-requiring methods.\u201d In plain terms, that means fewer handoffs between departments, shorter timelines and more decisions made by simulation and data instead of trial and error.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt is definitely a philosophical bent,\u201d Rashed Haq, GM\u2019s VP of Autonomous Vehicles, said of Anderson. Haq, who came from a robotics background before joining GM in 2020 to work on its self-driving unit Cruise, added that many leaders in the physical AI space have to \u201cthink very deeply\u201d about these issues. \u201cI think everybody in [autonomous vehicles] thinks of [the car] as a robot. When we had been hiring, we either hired people from a deep, [machine learning] background or robotics background,\u201d he added. He estimated that half of his team has PhDs in robotics, and the other have PhDs in deep learning or machine learning.<\/p>\n Some aspects of the new GM are taking on a downright Big Tech-ish tone, evoking the radical candor from the halls of Amazon\u2019s \u201cdisagree and commit\u201d or Bridgewater\u2019s \u201cradical truth and radical transparency.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n About a year-and-a-half ago, Kelty said, GM began encouraging employees to open a disagreement with a set phrase: \u201cI want to grant myself permission to speak fearlessly.\u201d Whatever follows afterward is understood to be fair game. It\u2019s part of how the LMR debate broke open, Oury said. Recently, on a call with a senior vice president listening in, Kelty said an engineer from a neighboring group used it on him: \u201cKurt, I want to have permission to speak fearlessly. What you said is absolutely wrong. It is not the way we should be going.\u201d Kelty grinned. \u201cIt\u2019s great to have that.\u201d<\/p>\n Jason Fischer, a 28-year GM veteran who leads the AI push inside engineering, described the old instinct as a hunt for perfection. \u201cThe old GM would have been like, \u2018Wait till this is the most perfect,\u2019\u201d he said. He said the end result is the same high standard as always, but the company is taking pains not to \u201cstifle innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n Fischer turned to a high-school metaphor to refer to himself as a perpetual learner. \u201cI tell people I\u2019m a B-plus student,\u201d he said, in the sense of always having more to learn. He joked, \u201cIf you ask me an answer, you\u2019ve got an 89% chance that I\u2019m going to give you the right answer.\u201d It\u2019s essential for using AI, Fischer told me during Fortune<\/em>\u2019s site visit, as he stood in front of a TV where a digital car slid off a course of cones until engineers tuned its calibration in simulation, something he said would otherwise take months with a physical car and a human driver.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I use AI, it gives me the wrong answer most likely because I gave it the wrong engineering prompt,\u201d he said, arguing that this B-plus approach is worth it because of the scale of the efficiencies. \u201cAI actually enables engineers to have some time back to do what we should be paying them to do,\u00a0and that\u2019s innovate.\u201d<\/p>\n Few people have a job like Fischer\u2019s, said Haq, who added that he swaps notes with him at least once a week. Fischer is \u201ccreating how we should work, the future of how we should work, and how to infuse AI into our entire process.\u201d Haq does this for autonomy, but Fischer does it across all of GM engineering.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fischer\u2019s education in failing fast started with GM\u2019s self-driving acquisition, Cruise, where Fischer was assigned in 2017. Nearly 20 years into his time with the company, Fischer started spending two weeks of every month in San Francisco, embedded in a startup environment with a team of roughly 40 people that later grew to thousands. When senior GM product executive Doug Parks heard Fischer was breaking some rules, he called him into his office. \u201cI don\u2019t want you to break the rules anymore,\u201d Parks told him, as Fischer described the conversation. \u201cI want you to completely destroy every rule that we have at General Motors and I want you to document it.\u201d<\/p>\n GM folded the work into its own teams in 2024, buying out Cruise\u2019s outside investors. Haq said GM skipped robotaxis but kept autonomy engineers, along with a lot of the code and \u201ca lot of the methodologies,\u201d which are now going into the next-generation Super Cruise, GM\u2019s autonomous system set to launch in 2028. The original robotaxi thesis assumed that \u201ccar sales would go down, rideshare would be dominant,\u201d Haq said, and that simply \u201cnever played out.\u201d He noted that rideshare still accounts for less than 1% of vehicle miles traveled.<\/p>\n Fischer, for his part, said he was innovation-pilled by his time at Cruise, citing the electrification of the GMC Hummer, which needed to come together in record time. GM is hoping to move toward a two-year vehicle development cycle, he said, with weekly \u201ctall pole\u201d reviews of whatever is holding up each job function. He said he was confident: \u201cI\u2019m convinced that we\u2019re going to be able to do things just as fast as China.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #red #teaches #engineers #fail #fast #speak #fearlessly #China #fight<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The General Motors Technical C… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1369,173,535,5694,2368,3045,4259,10645,1655,6763,1019,8361,9532],"class_list":["post-7610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-250-years-of-innovation","tag-china","tag-disruption","tag-engineering","tag-engineers","tag-fail","tag-fast","tag-fearlessly","tag-fight","tag-general-motors","tag-red","tag-speak","tag-teaches"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/images-2.jpg?format=webp&w=1440&quality=75\"\/)
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<\/div>\nRed light, green light<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The view from the CFO\u2019s office<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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<\/div>\nThe oracle<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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<\/div>\nThe B-plus A student<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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