Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [71]
There was much discussion. The fuel cell people said it was the wrong time to switch horses. If we suddenly went with batteries, people would see it as an admission of the fuel cell’s shortcomings. “No batteries, no EVs. We need more money on fuel cell programs.” The technical community (primarily Powertrain) weighed in with the fact that lithium-ion, while storing more than twice as much energy as the next best chemistry, was better suited to long, slow drain, as in laptops and mobile phones, than “power” requirements, as in cars or cordless power tools. Finally, CEO Rick Wagoner weighed in: “Bob, we lost over one billion bucks on EV1. How much do you propose we lose this time?” I did not “win” that meeting, and the specter of Toyota domination over GM continued unabated.
I brought the idea up several more times, and was always silenced primarily by the argument that lithium-ion would not work. Powertrain and GM Research sent a series of battery engineers to my office to explain to me in no uncertain terms the severe limitations of lithium-ion chemistry. They just about had me convinced when the California start-up Tesla Motors announced the creation of a Lotus Elise–based two-seat roadster, powered by 6,835 laptop batteries, with a top speed of 140 mph, acceleration time of zero to sixty in four seconds, and a range of two hundred miles.
Naturally, this gave me the lever I needed.Armed with the Tesla press clips, I once again harangued the ASB, arguing that somebody out in California with far more battery experience than we had obviously decided that lithium-ion would work and was betting a lot of money on it. How could we, the world’s largest and, arguably, most technologically capable car company in the world, declare the lithium-ion battery not feasible for motor vehicles when some outfit run by a couple of dot-com billionaires was making it work?
This time, the meeting got me very tentative permission to investigate a lithium-ion EV as a concept. It was, in retrospect, less permission than absence of prohibition. Whatever . . . I ran with it.This might be called the germination of the Volt.
Hours after the meeting, I sat in my office with Jon Lauckner, now overseeing all VLEs globally. We schemed about creating the GM “reputational shock therapy” vehicle we had both sought after for so long.
Lauckner listened, not so patiently, to my all-electric dream. When Jon has a thought that simply has to get out, he starts banging his knees together repeatedly. Banging them now, he said, “Look, I know you’ve got your heart set on an all-electric, but let me show you why that’s a bad idea. With lithium-ion, you get, assuming an efficient car, five miles per kilowatt/hour. So, to get a hundred-mile range, you need twenty kilowatt/hours. But since you never want to drain the whole battery because it impacts battery life, we’d want a thirty-kilowatt battery. That’s huge. And even if we got the world’s best price on a lithium battery, you’d be talking a thousand dollars per kilowatt, or a thirty-thousanddollar battery pack. And you don’t even have a car around it. And you’d still only have a hundred-mile range on a good day!” He paused, and then continued: “Now, here’s my idea.”
With that, on a lined pad and using his expensive, gold-nibbed fountain pen, Jon laid out what was to become the ChevroletVolt. Pushing