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The American automotive giant, General Motors (GM), will start a new line of electric battery business, where it seeks not only to reach drivers of electric vehicles, but also households and commercial customers.
The new electric battery business line has been named GM Energy and will offer a range of products that will further integrate the automobile into Americans’ daily lives.
GM Energy seeks to offer a portable battery to American drivers that will primarily serve to power their electric vehicles (EVs); in addition, the battery’s charge can also be used to provide American homes with electric power in the event of power outages.
The next business area consists of offering batteries for commercial customers such as retail companies, industries or other companies with high power consumption.
In case they are not fully consuming their powerful energy reservoirs, companies will have the option to sell the energy they do not consume to the electric grid during peak hours.
General Motors moves into Tesla’s territory
With this new line of electric battery business, the race for the American market accelerates with Tesla, who not only competes with GM in the business of selling EV’s, but now also in the manufacturing of energy storage units.
In the last quarter of 2022, Tesla obtained revenues of $866 million from its electric battery business line. Last June, Toyota began selling batteries for energy storage for residential use in Japan.
As the U.S. electric car market grows, so does the digitization of vehicle functions
As a result of this digitalization of the automotive industry, more and more information can be extracted by companies about drivers’ habits, such as the average distance they drive or the speed at which they drive.
This amount of emerging information leads American automakers to compete in a market where companies like Meta or Alphabet are more familiar, data analytics.
Using data collected from Google Maps users, Alphabet has launched self-driving car pilots, while Tesla has been collecting data on the route of its models for years to launch its own driverless cars. For GM, it is a nascent business and one in which Tesla has a considerable head start.
Data on Americans’ driving habits are not only of interest to automakers, but also to insurers in determining their auto insurance rates.
GM seeks to diversify its business lines
Last year GM created its BrightDrop division, which seeks to sell electric vans and software services to commercial customers. The carrier FedEx is already in the customer portfolio of this new line of business.
GM is working on a software tool that will help with the use of energy storage for both its EV drivers and commercial customers, as well as with the sale of the energy stored in the batteries to the electric grid.
Recently, GM launched a pilot with California’s electric utility, PG&E, to allow drivers of its EV’s to use the battery in their electric cars to power their homes during power outages.
GM’s efforts to diversify its business lines have not always been successful; a couple of years ago the company discontinued its car-sharing service, Maven, following the onset of the pandemic; that same year the automaker also saw the financial collapse of an electric truck start-up it invested in, Nikola.
