General Motors Co. said today that it will spend $3 billion to retool one of its main Michigan auto plants for the production of electric and self-driving vehicles.

The lion’s share of the planned investment, $2.2 billion, will go directly into facility upgrades. GM said that it will bring in new “machines, conveyors, controls and tooling” as well as more than double the plant’s workforce from around 900 employees today to more than 2,200. 

The automaker will spend the remaining $800 million on buying new equipment for the suppliers that will support the facility. Another portion of the budget will go toward financing unspecified “projects” related to the initiative.

The plant, known as the Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly because it sits on the border between Detroit and the nearby town of Hamtramck, has served as a GM manufacturing hub since the mid-1980s. The facility will produce electric pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, as well as the self-driving Origin shuttle the automaker’s Cruise subsidiary debuted last week. The four-wheeled, electric Origin (pictured) features an interior with no steering wheel or pedals that can hold six passengers. 

GM expects that the first electric vehicle will roll off the production line in late 2021. Manufacturing of the Origin is set to begin “soon” after, though no specific time frame has been shared as of yet.

GM will build the Origin at the same facility as the pickup trucks and SUVs because the shuttle is based on the same chassis that the automaker plans to use in many of its upcoming electric vehicles. The hope is that using a single frame across multiple models will provide economies of scale in the long term, thereby reducing the self-driving shuttle’s price.

It’s one of several design decisions GM has made in a bid to drive down the Origin’s total cost of ownership. The automaker also equipped the shuttle for an extraordinarily long service life of a million miles or more, six times greater than what the average car can handle, and the onboard autonomous navigation systems sit in modular compartments. GM said the modular architecture will make it possible to perform upgrades without the expense of a complete overhaul.

The automaker plans to make the vehicle available via a ride-hailing service that will be launched at an unspecified future date. The announcement of the $3 billion manufacturing investment comes as Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo LLC, which operates a rival autonomous ride-hailing service, is scaling up production capacity as well. Waymo last year opened a self-driving vehicle hub in GM’s hometown of Detroit where Chrysler Pacifica minivans and electric Jaguar I-PAC SUVs are retrofitted with autonomous driving hardware.

Photo: Cruise