General Motors is closing the Brownstown Battery Assembly Plant south of Detroit, a company spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch, in a closure first reported by Automotive News. The plant assembled battery packs for Cadillac’s flagship electric car, the Celestiq, and both electric drive units and battery packs for the Chevrolet Corvette E-Ray plug-in hybrid.
GM said the closure is not related to its electric vehicle strategy. The company leased the site and the lease was nearing its end. Employees and work at Brownstown will move to other GM facilities, though the company would not confirm which ones. InsideEVs, reporting the Automotive News account, put the plant at 480,000 square feet, opened in 2009, to be decommissioned by next summer when the lease ends, with staffing already down from about 300 at its peak to fewer than a dozen after output cuts, and affected workers offered jobs at other area facilities.
The context is a broader retrenchment, whatever the stated reason for this site. GM exited its battery plant joint venture with Samsung in Indiana earlier this year, and in 2024 it pulled out of a 2.5 billion dollar battery plant in Lansing, Michigan, leaving LG Energy Solution in charge. The federal law signed last year repealed incentives to produce and sell electric vehicles, and GM has since pared back its public comments on electrification without abandoning it.
GM continues to build electric models including the Chevrolet Silverado EV and the limited run Chevrolet Bolt, is researching lithium manganese rich and sodium ion chemistries, and is rolling out a 900 million dollar facility to speed commercialisation, TechCrunch reported. It is also weighing a new use for a shuttered 300,000 square foot hydrogen fuel cell plant in Detroit whose GM and Honda programme ended without a path to profitability.