Following a £100m investment, Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant has become the UK’s first all-electric car plant. Sitting on the shore of the Mersey, just south of Liverpool, the plant produces vans and passenger vehicles like the cutting-edge Vauxhall Combo Electric, which runs on a 52kWh lithium ion battery. The plant’s director, Dianne Miller, recently won an Autocar Great Women Manufacturing award in recognition of her role in the electrification of the plant, a critical part of parent company Stellantis’s aim to halve their carbon footprint by 2030.
We talked to her about hydrogen power, local jobs and why it’s vital that we keep vehicle manufacturing in the UK. We recognise that we need to decarbonise for the future and that’s why our ethos is to get to carbon neutrality as soon as possible – we’ve made it one of our main strategy goals. We also recognise that the Vauxhall brand is 120 years old and for it to stay relevant, we need to offer electric variants for every model we make, which we now do across the board.
Our Vauxhall plant at Ellesmere Port is now 100% electric, which makes it the first such plant in the UK. The major investment has been the development of our battery plant. On an EV, each battery pack weighs about 350kg.
We have 18 people per shift working on the battery packs, and they turn out roughly 120 of them a day. Each pack is made of twelve modules, each of which is about the size of the traditional 12-volt battery in an internal com.
