General Motors gives up on electric delivery vans
Fedex, DHL, Walmart and Hertz reserved electric delivery vans from GM, but few were purchased. The Brightdrop plant in Canada is idle.
The Brightdrop is no longer manufactured, and new models are not in sight.
General Motors is no longer building electric delivery vans. Reasons include ongoing losses with electric vehicles and unexpectedly low demand. The GM management does not believe in an imminent turnaround. This is bad news for the small Canadian town of Ingersoll, where GM built the e-vans called Brightdrop until May.
At that time, 1,200 employees were sent on forced leave. In November, half were supposed to start working again in a single-shift operation, but this will now not happen. The factory in Ingersoll has no other tasks. The production of Brightdrops will not be moved to another GM location. The company still wants to sell existing stock.
"The changing regulatory environment and the elimination of tax credits (for the purchase of new electric cars, note) in the US have made the business even more difficult," GM Canada writes. "The decision is part of a larger shift the company is making in its electric vehicle production capacity." This is expressly not to be understood as criticism of the Canadian workforce.
Zevo 600 and 400
Brightdrops are electric vans designed for delivering goods and for service calls. They are based on GM's Ultium platform. The Brightdrop 600 has a cargo volume of almost 17,000 liters (approximately 600 cubic feet), and the Brightdrop 400 has a cargo volume of just over 11,000 liters (you guessed it: approximately 400 cubic feet). The biggest selling point was the included software. It is intended to help optimize business and fleet operations by displaying location data and battery status in real-time, as well as allowing remote commands and managing charging processes.
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GM first introduced the Brightdrop Zevo 600 electric delivery van at CES in Las Vegas in early 2021, and the smaller sister model Zevo EV410 in September of that year. Production in Ingersoll began at the end of 2022. The EV410 was initially renamed Zevo 400; since the current model year, they have been operating under Chevrolet Brightdrop 600 and 400, respectively. Production already stood still for half a year in the winter of 2023/24, at that time due to a shortage of batteries.
Great interest soon waned
Initially, interest was high: Fedex ordered 500 Brightdrops at the beginning, followed by another 1,500. Network operator Verizon and DHL Canada reserved unspecified quantities. One fleet manager wanted a total of 18,000 e-vans, Walmart 5,000, and car rental company Hertz even fantasized about 175,000 Brightdrops. In reality, only a four-digit number of vehicles were likely delivered from 2022 up to and including September 2025: 6,148 in the USA and a smaller number in Canada.
That is not enough for profitable production. Under President Donald Trump, the US stopped its subsidies for electric vehicles in September. Furthermore, Trump is pushing for a withdrawal from the ban on internal combustion engines -- not only in his own country, but he also wants to pressure other countries to do so. GM is now adapting to these market conditions and is generally reducing production volumes for electric vehicles. For Brightdrops, this means a reduction to zero. Nevertheless, GM CEO Mary Barra writes to her shareholders GM CEO Mary Barra writes that "electric vehicles remain our North Star."
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