General Motors announced that Factory ZERO, Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center, the company’s all-electric vehicle assembly plant, is the first automotive plant in the US to install dedicated 5G fixed mobile network technology. Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband service is operating now at Factory ZERO, with its exponential increases in both bandwidth and speed supporting the ongoing transformation of the plant as it prepares to begin producing EVs in 2021.

Verizon Business announced GM is one of its first enterprise customers to use 5G Ultra Wideband service. Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network has considerably faster download speeds and greater bandwidth than 4G networks.

Factory ZERO is being completely retooled with a $2.2-billion investment, the largest ever for a GM manufacturing facility.

Factory ZERO will be GM’s flagship assembly plant in our journey to an all-electric future. Installing 5G at Factory ZERO is an essential step in the transformation of this plant, and signals how important advanced manufacturing is in the ongoing race to an EV future.

—Phil Kienle, GM vice president of North America Manufacturing and Labor Relations

Key benefits of 5G in a manufacturing plant include reliability, speed and sheer scale. 5G’s massive bandwidth offers the possibility to manage thousands of devices across Factory ZERO’s more than 4 million square feet of space, with ample capacity to support emerging technologies.

Both the upcoming GMC HUMMER EV and the Cruise Origin will be built at Factory ZERO on GM’s Ultium battery platform. Ultium is flexible enough to build a wide range of EVs—cars, trucks and more—and is the heart of GM’s future EV lineup (earlier post).