I've said my piece on electric vehicles, but they still are a distinct component of our energy crisis solution. With that little preface, I'd like to recommend this Atlantic article on the prospective Chevy Volt. It's a truly inspiring piece about an American car company struggling to stay relevant — and struggling to stay alive — by putting every last chip on the table and looking to the heavens for just a little intervention. Here's a flavor:
Given the challenges, standard procedure dictates first building and
testing the battery, and only then designing a car around it. That
process, however, would take until 2012 or 2013—time GM does not have
if it wants to beat Toyota. The only hope of meeting the 2010 deadline
is to invent the battery while simultaneously designing the car.
Just-in-time inventory is common now in the car business, but
just-in-time invention on the Volt’s scale is new to GM and probably to
the modern automotive industry.
Many in the industry will tell you there’s a good reason car
companies don’t do things this way. Toyota, which is proceeding much
more cautiously with its own plug-in car, has made no secret of its
belief that neither GM nor anyone else can keep the Volt’s promises.
When I called Menahem Anderman, a prominent battery consultant in
California, he said the lithium-ion battery will be expensive—far too
expensive to make sense as a business proposition as long as gas is $3
or $4 a gallon. (“At $10 a gallon we can have a different discussion.”)
Its life is unproven, and unprovable in the short time GM has allotted.
To deliver tens of thousands of vehicles in 2010, Anderman said, “they
should have had hundreds of them already driving around for two or
three years. Hundreds. Not everybody can say it publicly, but
everybody in the high-volume industry is saying, ‘What are they
thinking about?’” An executive with a GM competitor, after making some
of the same points, offered forthrightness in exchange for anonymity:
“They’re making a huge mistake.”
The people at GM understand very well the reasons they’re not
supposed to do what they’re doing. They offer a variety of retorts.
Batteries will improve and get cheaper. Gas prices will rise. They have
two decades’ worth of experience with electric drive. They have smart
algorithms to test the battery. Strict new fuel-economy standards will
vindicate the business case. But, at bottom, what they say is that the
challenge is part of the point. They have something to prove.
In conversations with everyone from staff engineers to Rick Wagoner,
the chairman and CEO, I heard references to the Apollo program. “John
Kennedy didn’t say, ‘Let’s go to the moon and, you know, we’ll get
there as soon as we can,’” Wagoner said in a recent interview in his
office, atop a high-rise in Detroit. “I asked our experts, ‘Guys, do we
have a reasonable chance of making it or not?’ Yes. ‘Well,
then, let’s go for what we want rather than go for what we know we can
do.’” With the Volt, GM—battered, beleaguered, struggling for
profitability—hopes to re-engineer not just the car but the way the
public thinks about cars, the way the public thinks about GM, and the
way GM thinks about itself.
