GM confirms CEO of commercial electric vehicle unit BrightDrop is leaving


  • Brightdrop Llc

  • General Motors Co

DETROIT, Nov 16 (Reuters) – General Motors (GM.N) said on Thursday it was reorganizing its BrightDrop electric commercial vehicle unit to make it less independent and reduce costs, and that the unit’s head, Travis Katz, would be leaving.

GM said CEO Katz was leaving at an unspecified date, but did not elaborate on the reason for his departure.

GM said BrightDrop, the unit it launched in early 2021, will no longer operate separately from the parent company. When it was first launched, officials talked about BrightDrop as a startup within GM that had operational freedom.

Now, its teams will be fully integrated into GM, “so our work is more efficient,” it said.

“Bringing BrightDrop fully into GM means the beginning of a new chapter,” GM said in a blog.

In October 2021, GM said it expected BrightDrop’s revenue to top $10 billion by 2030 with low-20% profit margins.

GM said it still intends to build up production of the BrightDrop Zevo vans, which is expected to resume next year and will be supported by the launch of the Ingersoll plant’s new battery-module operations.

BrightDrop idled the Ingersoll plant in October due to delays in the delivery of battery modules that power the vans.

Katz, a longtime tech entrepreneur who joined GM in 2020 from venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In March 2021, he described himself as a “nontraditional person to find in the automotive world” and said GM had given him “a lot of leeway” to set pricing and business strategy.

Reporting by Joe White, Ben Klayman, David Shepardson and Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by Jonathan Oatis, Cynthia Osterman and Tom Hogue

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Joseph White

Thomson Reuters

Joe White is a global automotive correspondent for Reuters, based in Detroit. Joe covers a wide range of auto and transport industry subjects, writes The Auto File, a three-times weekly newsletter about the global auto industry. Joe joined Reuters in January 2015 as the transportation editor leading coverage of planes, trains and automobiles, and later became global automotive editor. Previously, he served as the global automotive editor of the Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw coverage of the auto industry and ran the Detroit bureau. Joe is co-author (with Paul Ingrassia) of Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry, and he and Paul shared the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 1993.


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