Welcome back to EV News Daily and welcome to a special bonus podcast edition looking only at the General Motors news that I think warrants a good 10, 12, 15 minutes maybe of discussion on its own.

So before GM's investor event yesterday, they broke the news that they were going to discontinue ultium.

That's the name that's been used since, well, they started this kind of trajectory of EVs, really.

It's a joint project with LG.

In fact, the business is called Ultium Cells LLC.

And it's General Motors and LG making pouch cells with a certain type of chemistry that could be scaled up and scaled down, make millions of these things, have one cell, one format, one chemistry.

Look, times have changed, and now they realize that maybe that's not the way to do it.

Maybe they want the help of others.

Like, loads of car companies, Tesla included the OG cell maker with Panasonic.

That relationship was rocks solid, just Tesla and Panasonic, but eventually

in came the likes of Samsung and C-A-T-L and LG. And we think maybe B-Y-D with blade batteries. And so

if Tesla can do it, anyone can do it and say we need a broad range of cells. And well, that

doesn't really make sense to call your tech ultium technology if half

the companies you're buying technology from is in competition with LG, who your

Altium platform is with.

So you'd be asking, well, is this an ultium car or is it a non-altium car?

That whole thing breaks down.

And so they had to kind of get rid of it.

It was an unfortunate decision because it's once again another misstep in GM's grand plan.

But does it really matter?

Was it just a marketing term?

What did Altium mean more?

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