Inside the $2 Billion Michigan Battery Plant Building Cells for Tesla and Toyota

Most of us think about batteries only when the range number on the dash starts dropping faster than we'd like. But the cells inside your car — and inside the wall-mounted battery that might one day back up your home charger — come from enormous, spotless buildings that almost nobody gets to see. InsideEVs just toured one of them, and the details are worth a read for anyone who buys EV gear.

The building in question is LG Energy Solution's gigafactory in Lansing, Michigan. It's half a mile long, a quarter mile wide, and 2.8 million square feet, sitting on a 226-acre site with a price tag north of $2 billion. Robots do most of the work. Automated guided vehicles shuttle raw materials down hallways of bright white light, and humans mostly supervise.

From GM Joint Venture to Solo Act

The plant was originally planned as an Ultium Cells joint venture between LGES and General Motors. That changed. After federal EV tax credits ended and EV sales growth came in slower than forecast, GM sold its stake last year, leaving LGES as the sole owner.

It wasn't an isolated breakup. The same stretch saw restructurings involving Ford and SK On, GM and Samsung SDI, and Stellantis and LGES. As InsideEVs puts it, the industry is dealing with regulatory whiplash in the U.S. after most government support for environmentally friendly projects was pulled.

What's Actually Rolling Off the Line

Here's the part that matters for Tesla owners. The Lansing plant has started producing lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) pouch cells for Tesla's energy storage systems, part of a $4.3 billion supply deal the two companies signed last year. The plant will also supply energy storage batteries to Michigan's DTE Energy.

LGES hasn't walked away from vehicle cells, either. The facility is also building nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cells for the upcoming all-electric Toyota Highlander, and the company says it could supply more automakers down the road. InsideEVs notes it's reasonable to assume those same cells could end up in the mechanically related three-row Subaru Getaway and the more premium Lexus TZ.

LGES is also among the first companies bringing LFP production to the U.S. China dominates the chemistry and its commercialization today — even though LFP was first developed stateside in the 1990s.

Switching Chemistries Isn't a Flip of a Switch

Robert Lee, LGES's head of North America, explained at a media roundtable why converting a plant from EV cells to storage cells is harder than it sounds.

"It's not easy. LFP coating is thicker and then there are slight differences in the manufacturing process, so you do need to put in some new equipment and validate them in order to build batteries."

LGES thinks the investment pencils out, because storage demand is exploding. Citing Wood Mackenzie research, the company says the U.S. added roughly 25 gigawatt-hours of energy storage capacity over the past decade — and 100 GWh this year alone. Average project size has jumped from about 10 megawatt-hours to 1,000 MWh, driven heavily by AI data centers, utilities, and renewable projects. LGES expects its North American storage arm, LGES Vertech, to turn profitable by the fourth quarter of this year.

Lee also made a broader point about the grid we all plug into:

"There's a lot of great infrastructure upgrades that we need in this country. 20 years ago, we had something like twice the power generation of China. Today, they have two and a half times more power generation than the U.S. As a nation, we have to invest in our grid and energy infrastructure."

Why an EV Owner Should Care

• Domestic LFP is finally real. LFP is the chemistry known for durability and tolerance of frequent full charges. More of it built in North America means a more stable supply for the storage products that pair with home charging.
• Storage demand is propping up battery plants. Sluggish EV sales hurt, but data center and utility demand is keeping this factory — and its workforce — running.
• More cell sources, more EV choices. An electric Toyota Highlander with U.S.-built NMC cells widens the field beyond Tesla, and that's good for everyone shopping for a charger, an adapter, or a road-trip kit.
• Grid investment is the real bottleneck. Faster public charging and reliable home charging both trace back to grid capacity. Storage buildouts like this one help.

One Last Detail From the Tour

A battery plant is nothing like a car factory. There's no clanking metal, no moving assembly line, no crew of workers bending and twisting to install parts. It's quiet, heavily automated, dust-free, and practically odorless. Cells are so sensitive to contamination that the reporter had to wear a full white gown, safety glasses, a hair net, and shoe covers — then get blasted with high-pressure air and change shoe covers three separate times while moving between sections of the plant.

It's a good reminder of how much precision goes into the pack under your floorboards. Treat the rest of your setup with the same care: a quality charging cable, a properly rated adapter, and a roadside kit in the frunk are cheap insurance for a very expensive battery.