Sometimes, timing is everything | The Star

In this life, timing is everything — almost. Take General Motors.

In December, I had a chat with Scott Bell, GM Canada’s president and managing director, about the resumption of fossil fuel-powered light-trucks manufacturing at the rejuvenated GM plant in Oshawa.

Literally a day or two later, GM announced it would spend a billion dollars – that’s “illion” with a “b” – to transform its CAMI Assembly facility in Ingersoll, Ont., from automobiles (they put the Chevrolet Equinox together there) to large electric delivery vans.

“Wow,” I thought, “I got a good story out of the interview I had with Bell but if I’d waited a day or two, maybe I’d have gotten a better one.”

Okay, so a week ago Thursday, GM took a huge step along the electric highway. It announced that it will phase out internal combustion engines worldwide by 2035 – 14 years from now – and replace them with electric- or hydrogen fuel-cell-powered vehicles.

Oh, and the Cadillac brand will lead GM’s electrical revolution.

Fine, except that four days later, last Monday, Feb. 1, Cadillac unveiled two of the most powerful cars it has ever built, the 2022 Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing and the CT4-V Blackwing. Those two gorillas were really built for the race track (although most will be driven on the street) and they run on — guess what? — gasoline.

Timing.

So Tuesday of this week, I sat down to have another chat with Scott Bell. I didn’t plan to put him on the spot about this other stuff but I was really curious about, in particular, the investment in Ingersoll, where the EV delivery fans will be built.

How did this all come about? Was this the result of long-term corporate planning or was it a spur-of-the-moment decision?

“It was a secret to many people, even within our own company,” he said. “It was exciting to make that announcement, both externally and internally. We are talking over $2 billion in investment in Canada (the Oshawa and Ingersoll facilities) and this is work that is happening as we speak and this will all be on the production line by the beginning of next year and perhaps even the end of this year.”

He said GM saw an opportunity for the CAMI plant a few years ago when the delivery van business started to explode because of the success of e-commerce.

“It accelerated quickly last year and we knew we needed a place to build an electric van. Our negotiations with the union at CAMI weren’t scheduled before September but with the momentum we’d built at Oshawa (with Unifor), we felt it was a good time to sit down to see if we could strike a deal and get going.”

Bell said the deal secures the future of the plant at Ingersoll and secures the employment. He said the new van and the new Equinox would be built together for the next while before transferring to full production of the van.

Talking about the electric van, Bell said the company has a team of engineers in Oshawa and Markham working on future projects all the time.

“The challenge for our company,” he said, “is always to try to think outside the traditional new car, (new) truck, crossover and to determine what opportunities are out there.

“We could see parcel and food delivery really starting to boom,” he said. “When COVID hit, the need grew. That’s why (GM) launched a new business called BrightDrop that offers electric delivery vans and other technology and services to companies like FedEx, which we worked with locally during the development.”

(BrightDrop, incidentally, offers a product called EP1, an electrically powered pallet to move packages, and the EV600, which is the commercial electric truck that will be built in Ingersoll.)

“We were working on an overall solution and we feel that BrightDrop is the answer,” he added.

I reminded him that California has decreed that all delivery fleets will have to start becoming electric-only by 2024 and that GM obviously had a big jump. I asked him if the EV revolution was evolving even faster than the industry had expected.

“There is an excitement in the air, for sure,” he said. “Global warming is real and we’re trying to find a solution to cure that. In this context, these delivery vans are growing. Consumers like that door-to-door service.

“There is a need to bring a clean solution to this business and we’ve found ways to do that. I wasn’t around when the horse and buggy was going away and the idea that the automobile was coming but I imagine there would have been the same feelings.

“What would life be like (today) if clean solutions could be found to simplify your day as a consumer. There’s a lot of hype building here and we’re right in the thick of it, which is very cool.”

Norris McDonald is a retired Star editor who continues to write for Wheels under contract. He reviews the weekend’s auto racing every Monday at wheels.ca.