GM creates new electric vehicle organizations and tools to support its new electric vehicle programs

GM is taking seriously its new electric vehicles that will hit the market in the new years and will support them with a new organization and tools for electric vehicles.

As we reported yesterday, GM announced an acceleration of its EV plans with 30 new EV models by 2025 at the Barclays automotive conference.

GM also announced at the event that it is putting together a new EV organization and has appointed Travis Hester as its chief EV officer.

Hester is a 25-year GM veteran with a mechanical engineering background.

Most recently, he led the customer experience at GM.

Here’s where his new role in GM leadership and the new EV organization within the company fits in:

As part of her role, Hester is developing a new program called Ultifi. He said:

While Ultium underpins our upcoming EV hardware, Ultifi underpins our commitment to customer experience for those EVs. It’s a digital unification platform that spans the entire journey – buying, onboarding and ownership.

• Here are the key elements of Ultifi:
  • We will simplify the buying and purchasing experience for electric vehicle buyers, with new levels of transparency, speed and convenience.
  • With our dealer network, we will use electric vehicles as an opportunity to greatly improve our industry’s use of e-commerce and digital retail.
  • You can see the first evidence of this with HUMMER EV: clear and simple pricing and a fully digital booking system.
  • Whether customers choose to shop and shop online, visit the showroom, or a combination of both, we will optimize these experiences.
  • We have also rapidly improved existing online tools such as SCD, with many more coming in 2021.

It will involve GM’s entire experience and service implementation for its electric vehicle programs.

Take by Electrek

Unless we start a brand new EV company, I think this is the best move GM could have done.

They need to have a group that works solely to promote electric vehicles within the company without having to worry about their traditional gas-powered business.

Now, I understand that they may still face some pushbacks, especially at the dealership level, but I also think this is definitely a step in the right direction.

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