GM’s is betting its EV survival on LMR

The FT article on GM’s lithium manganese-rich (LMR) push reads, on the surface, like a familiar innovation narrative: bold leadership, unproven chemistry, long timelines, big upside. That framing misses the point.

GM is not choosing LMR because it is elegant. GM is ending up at LMR because its option set has collapsed.

Let’s look at the context.

US support for EVs has weakened. Incentives are being rolled back. Sales are falling well short of expectations, with EV volumes down sharply after the 2021–22 peak. GM alone has already taken $6bn+ in write-downs tied to its EV transition.

At the same time, Chinese manufacturers — BYD being the obvious example — continue to scale. They offer vehicles that are cheaper, increasingly competitive in quality, and vertically integrated across batteries, materials, and manufacturing. They have cemented a structural advantage.

For a Western OEM, this creates a three-way constraint:

1 You must reduce costs to compete with Chinese vehicles.

2 You must reduce reliance on Chinese battery supply chains.

3 You must offer consumers something affordable and competitive with an ICE car now — not in a decade.

There is no chemistry on the shelf that satisfies all three.

LFP is cheap and proven — but dominated by China.
High-nickel chemistries deliver performance — but remain expensive and input-constrained.
Solid-state is not ready at scale for automotive, and probably won’t be there in the next decade.

That leaves LMR.

LMR is not new. The industry knows it well — and has avoided it just as consistently. Voltage fading, durability issues, and manufacturing complexity kept it out of mass production. Every major battery maker has looked at it and walked away.

GM has decided not to. This decision tells you just how desperate things are.

Kurt Kelty, hired to spearhead GM’s EV effort, put it plainly:
“If LMR has failed, then I have failed.”

That’s an unusually direct statement for a public OEM executive. It reflects the reality: this is not a pilot or a side bet. GM is staking its ability to stay globally relevant in EVs on a chemistry that has never been proven at scale.

From a board perspective, this is a brutal position to be in.

Do nothing, and you drift into irrelevance outside a shrinking ICE-only US market.
Follow incumbents, and you stay structurally uncompetitive.
Bet on an unproven chemistry, and you absorb execution risk that the industry spent a decade avoiding.

None of these options are comfortable and none are obviously wrong.

LMR promises a middle ground: lower reliance on nickel and cobalt, cost closer to LFP, performance above it — at least on paper. If it works, GM narrows the cost gap without surrendering control of its supply chain.

If it doesn’t, the downside is not limited to a single platform. It reinforces the broader problem that Western OEMs are facing: the gap with China, which is not just about subsidies, but about industrial systems that compound advantage over time.

That is what makes this decision interesting — and uncomfortable.

I see this as not a story about one chemistry winning or losing. I see this as a case study in how strategic choices look when every safe path is gone.

And I don’t envy today’s automotive boards.

They are operating in a world where:

• industrial policy is unstable,

• supply chains are geopolitical,

• consumers are price-sensitive,

• and competitors are way ahead.

In such a world, betting on LMR is not bold; it may simply be the least bad option left.

Whether that is enough — and whether it arrives in time — remains an open question.

Link to the original FT article (paywalled): https://www.ft.com/content/178c1115-05ab-45ef-b18f-7dc3869db3ff