Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [72]
Jon knew the statistic: 80 percent of America’s daily trips are forty miles or less; the fuel economy would be infinite. A sixty-mile round trip would require burning gasoline from the tiny engine for twenty miles: the rough calculation for a trip that size would be 150 mpg! The smaller, less expensive battery pack, coupled with the overall range of three hundred miles or more, would make this vehicle ideal: fuel-free for most daily trips, coupled with the ability to go long distances at any time, just like a conventional gasoline-powered car. I was sold. I wish I had Jon’s original, inkspattered drawing. It is truly a piece of automotive history.
The next step was to share the concept layout with Ed Welburn, vice president of global design. The car’s layout would provide the designers with potentially heroic proportions, and Ed quickly decided the Volt concept would be as arresting visually as it was innovative technologically. We were on the way.
With huge pride and enthusiasm, I told Rick Wagoner that we were creating a vehicle with a goal of 150 mpg on sixty-mile trips. His reaction was muted at best, but again, no “stop work” edict. Part of the vast GM empire did, however subtly, begin to strike back. I was subjected to one PowerPoint presentation after another, presided over by learned hybrid engineers, explaining why Volt was a dumb idea. In the final analysis, they said, it’s a sequential hybrid (meaning that the second power source only comes in when the first is exhausted) as opposed to a parallel hybrid (like Prius) where the two power sources, gas and electric, constantly work together for optimal performance. Sequential hybrids, they argued (correctly), are less efficient than parallel.
However, if we insisted on the Volt sequential concept, they, the hybrid engineers, knew how to make it much more efficient: we’d program it to run the gas engine every ten minutes or so, to keep the battery optimally charged, and with the resulting gain in efficiency, we could squeeze out more ultimate range. “Stop, stop!” I cried. “This isn’t about absolute, terminal efficiency. This vehicle is about giving the lover of electric vehicles a pure electric battery-powered driving experience 80 percent of the time. They don’t want to hear a gasoline engine cutting in all the time. It ruins the whole experience.” Undaunted, they droned on about “maximum efficiency,” thus demonstrating yet another instance where extremely intelligent people could not grasp a very simple concept: the customer wants forty full miles of blissfully silent, fuel-free electric driving.
More presentations would follow, most showing some huge flaw in the concept. I always had Jon Lauckner at these; the engineers could razzle-dazzle me, a simple marketing MBA, but they couldn’t stand up to Jon Lauckner’s rapierlike analytical skill. “Aha!” he would shout. “You’re forgetting [such-and-such]. Let me just quickly rerun those numbers with the proper inputs this time. . . . Ah, yes, just as I thought, you’re wrong, and I’m right! But thanks, guys.This has been really interesting.”
The organization, more comfortable with what I call “the oily bits,” i.e., complex mechanical assemblies like transmissions and hybrid drive systems, gradually accepted the reality that we were planning to execute a Volt concept car for the 2007 Detroit auto show.
Meanwhile, in Design, Ed Welburn turned the Volt project over to his best advanced teams for both exterior and interior. A substantial number of alternative themes were imagined, sketched, and sculpted