General Motors has officially pulled the plug on its BrightDrop electric delivery van. The play follows months of inactivity at GM’s CAMI Assembly plant in Ingersoll, Ontario, where production has been suspended since April 14 due to next to no interest from buyers—commercial or otherwise—along with deteriorating market conditions.
BrightDrop managed just 274 sales in the first quarter of 2025—a fraction of what GM had expected when it launched the EV-only brand with a plan to reshape urban logistics. If you remember back to earlier this year, GM was stockpiling the vans in just about any empty lot it could find. At the time, it was positioned as a move to get as many over the border before tariffs kicked in.
Production was originally scheduled to resume in mid-July, then delayed until November. Now, the program has been canceled outright, leaving CAMI’s future uncertain.
“These Bright Drop vans are a specialized electric delivery van for commercial customers and, quite simply, we just have not seen demand for these vehicles climb to the levels that we initially anticipated,” said Kristian Aquilina, GM Canada’s president and managing director. “This has nothing to do with tariffs or trade. It’s simply a demand and a market-driven response.” Hourly employees at the plant will receive six months’ pay and lump-sum compensation, as stipulated by GM’s labor agreement with Unifor.
“The situation has continued to evolve, whereby the growth in demand that we’re expecting still hasn’t taken place,” said Aquilina. “And in addition to that, you have regulatory conditions, and EV adoption, and our main customer in the U.S. continued to flatten or fall. So, really, as we looked ahead and assessed the future — we didn’t see it continuing.”
The automaker says it will work with the union and both levels of government to determine “next steps for the future of CAMI.” This is the second Canadian auto plant within a week to find itself in purgatory after Stellantis yanked Jeep Compass production away from its Brampton, Ontario, plant.
GM’s aging gasoline vans—the Chevrolet Express and GMC Savana—remain in production nearly three decades after their debut. Those vans print money for the automaker, but were expected to go out of production next year, a plan that’s probably not going to happen now in the current regulatory and political climate. The vans are available with an optional 6.6-liter V8 and a basic architecture dating back to the 1990s.
[Images: General Motors]
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