On Monday morning, General Motors President Mark Reuss announced that GM will renovate its Detroit-Hamtramck facility in Michigan at the cost of $2.2 billion to become a factory just for battery electric vehicles. The factory will begin building a BEV pickup truck starting in late 2021 and will also produce the electric autonomous taxi pods to be used by Cruise.

GM says it will also invest $800 million in supplier tooling and related startup costs for BEV production, and when the revamped factory is fully operational, it will create "more than 2,200 good-paying US manufacturing jobs."

Additionally, in Ohio, GM's Lordstown factory will be the site of a joint venture with LG Chem—which is putting in $2.3 billion—that will churn out lithium-ion cells to power the Detroit-Hamtramck-built BEVs.

This isn't the first bold BEV announcement from the US' largest automaker, which was an early pioneer of electrification. In October 2017, Mark Reuss told assembled journalists that the company had a flood of new BEVs on the way, including two Bolt-based vehicles within 18 months. It later transpired that those two BEVs would in fact be built in China strictly for the Chinese market.

The renovations at Detroit-Hamtramck, which currently operates one shift building Cadillac CT6s and Chevrolet Impalas, will begin in February.