GM Plans European Comeback With Only EVs, Starting in Scandinavia
By this fall, the automotive giant is expected to start shipping electric cars across the pond.
General Motors sells a very limited number of vehicles in the European market, just a few hundred per quarter. After selling the Opel and Vauxhall brand to the PSA group in 2017, the Detroit automaker has maintained no European-specific brands and has no manufacturing base across the pond. Now it's set to return, and it has a plan. It will sell a multitude of electric vehicles, at first in Nordic countries, under its existing brands. Sales are reportedly set to begin this fall.
According to Automotive News, the automaker's prime target is Norway, followed by Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. To GM, Nordic countries may be good places to start, due in part to petrostate Norway's only slightly paradoxical plan to only allow sales of emissions-free vehicles by 2025.
The Cadillac Lyriq is reportedly the first car on the automaker's list to be sent overseas (safe journey, friend). But GM can barely make enough of them to satisfy demand domestically. It will have until the end of this year to ramp up production to satisfy demand stateside before the cars get shipped to Northern Europe. The only other Cadillac EV that has seen any official press is the ultra-luxurious Celestiq, but there are allegedly no plans to sell it in Europe — at least initially.
Other cars likely to be sent abroad include the smaller Chevy Equinox EV and perhaps the Chevy Blazer EV as well, seeing as it and the Lyriq are very similar underneath. Larger electric cars like the Silverado EV and Hummer are probably not well suited to the tastes of most European car buyers.
GM still has some infrastructure in the U.K. and Ireland. It recently opened an advanced European design studio in the English midlands and expanded its Irish IT Innovation hub. Those facilities pale compared to its North American operations, but they're certainly something.
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