General Motors Corp is planning to make a come back to the electric motor business. The largest automaker announced on Tuesday that the company is planning to build its own electric motors for hybrid and electric vehicles, starting from 2013.

In order to lower the costs and improve the quality and reliability of the electric motors for the vehicles, the company is planning to make the motors in-house instead of getting it from other companies.

In a conference call with the reporters ahead of Tuesday’s announcement, Pete Savagian, engineering director for hybrids and electric motors, said, “ We need to not only buy the parts, we need to really understand them.”

GM however hasn’t revealed where the company is planning to build the electric motors but it said it will invest more than $246 million to build the electric motors.

The company also did not tell how many motors it is planning to build. “This isn’t the first time GM has built electric motors. It built them for its EV1 electric car in the mid-1990s, and some of the engineers of that car worked on the new motors,” Savagian remarked.

GM has been quietly developing a new electric motor since 2003, and will be the first US-based automaker to manufacture its own.