Aspen Aerogel and GM

[Smorgasbord1]

@wsm007

And this is what the GM CEO said on 23 July in their ER:

I’ll pull out some specific quotes from that:

@Mary Barra

…deferring Buick’s first EV which had been planned for 2024…
…third-party forecasters now see the EV market growing steadily, but more slowly than it did over the last few years…
…the Orion assembly as a battery electric truck plant … new timing is six months later than our plan…

I’ve learned to discount automotive OEM promises, because they often don’t deliver. For instance, does anyone here recalls GM’s previous promise to have “30 new EVs by 2025”? That’s clearly not happening.

MotorTrend summed up the ER call those quotes are from with:

What a difference a year makes. General Motors spent the day telling investors that it has its act together when it comes to EVs and software, having weathered manufacturing hell, software snafus, and slowing demand.

And even when new models come out, there can be problems, as the Blazer EV rollout and stop-sale earlier this year showed.

I’m also not impressed by cherry-picked data. Looking at sequential, or even YoY data at best for me shows a turn-around from a pretty bad year for GM’s EVs.

@wsm007

In Q3 2024 GM EV sales set another record for the quarter, up 60% year-over-year to 32,195 total deliveries, up 46% from the second quarter.

But that second quarter was down from the first quarter:

Chevrolet delivered 11,217 EVs in Q2 (down 20% year-over-year)

@wsm007

Also remember that GM is just getting going with their EV launches - they are starting from a very low base and now ramping aggressively, albeit less agressively than they would have done a couple months back. But still, they are taking share in a secular growth market. So yes, there is customer concentration for ASPN. But that customer is ramping quite nicely.

In addition, ASPN have other customers that are even earlier in the ramp-up: Honda, Toyota, which should in time reduce customer concentration.

Yes, it could be that GM isn’t just recovering from a bad EV sale spell (they discontinued the Bolt and new models weren’t ready in time, or had stop-sale almost immediately), and now they’re on an actual growth path. Even so, customer concentration remains a huge issue for ASPN, as Honda is only using it via GM’s Ultium packs and who knows what Honda will do for future models. And Toyota remains an intentional laggard for BEVs, with its current model bZ4X quite uncompetitive.

But, OK, let’s say GM is growing its EV sales well. Will they remain effectively ASPN’s only thermal barrier customer? What is Ford using instead of PyroThin? What about Mercedes, BMW, Audi, etc? Yeah, I know ASPN claims they have design wins and production programs, but we’re not seeing that in the numbers. Is this something about to happen later this year?

And with these other companies not really using PyroThin, how can you be so sure the new non-Ultium battery packs GM will design will also use PyroThin? GM and Aspen Aerogel actually collaborated for years on this design/product specifically for Ultium. So, I think future use in non-Ultium packs remains a question.