Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [74]
Their purposeful pessimism was not without foundation. After the lithium-ion chemistry was invented in the United States, it was massively adopted and produced in Japan in small-format batteries for laptops, PDAs, and mobile phones. But this early “lithium-ion cobalt” chemistry would not scale up for larger applications: while its energy storage properties were excellent, it required extreme care in its manufacture. Even the slightest short circuit could result in runaway heating, followed by fire.
The theme of the technical seminar was “Toyota knows best. Toyota is conservative!” And they even made the statement that, unlike “some other” automobile company, Toyota would never, ever place the safety of its customers at risk. It is strange, and a further manifestation of the pro-Toyota bias of the mainstream media, that in 2009 and 2010, the period when ten million Toyotas were recalled for unintended acceleration and failing brakes (on the pious Prius, of all cars), not one journalist ever reminded Toyota, despite thirty or more deaths being blamed on its failed engineering, of its claim never to put the customer at risk.
The conviction that lithium-ion was unsafe was a rare (but not unique) example of Japanese hubris. Since that country was the world’s largest producer of advanced batteries, with a seemingly insurmountable lead on everyone else, it never occurred to them that research would accelerate in the United States, France, Germany, China, and Korea, all of whom labored to find lithium chemistries that would match cobalt, but without the downside of thermal instability. In the United States, an MIT-originated start-up developed a very promising chemistry, as did SAFT in France. The leader, though, based on GM’s exhaustive analysis of the world’s lithium-ion producers, was the Korean company LG Chem, which ultimately was to win the competition to supply cells for the Volt. In this combination, the cobalt in the early “portable device” batteries was replaced by nano-phosphate, a benign and ultrastable compound.There are variations on this theme, and massive research continues, but the salient fact is that the (then) infallible, success-crowned, omniscient, and omnipotent Toyota Motor Company didn’t realize that the rest of the world was moving beyond lithium-ion cobalt!
The press was now in somewhat of a quandary. GM said we were confident it would work while Toyota said it was a PR scam and would never work. Test question for the reader: given the reputations of the two companies in 2007, with Toyota’s profits, sales figures, and reputation on a meteoric rise, and bumbling old GM (“The problem with GM is they just don’t make any products people want to buy”) still struggling, who were they going to believe? You guessed correctly, and so the backlash of “GM will never build it because Toyota says the batteries won’t work” became a major, but not fatal annoyance: the fascination with the car was still overwhelming.
The bloggers joined the fray: on the positive side, a New York neurosurgeon and car enthusiast by the name of Dr. Lyle Dennis soon started a Volt fan site and quickly attracted tens of thousands of members. The good doctor’s efforts on behalf of Volt were so massive and effective that an official GM site could not have been as effective if, indeed, it could have matched it. Dr. Dennis, or “Dr. Lyle” as we called him, was a tireless advocate and true believer, attending every Volt event we held for the media and adding immeasurable amounts of “third-party” credibility. (One does wonder when he found time to actually operate on patients, though.)
On the negative side, we had a garrulous, cantankerous, heavily opinionated electric-vehicle fanatic from California named Douglas Korthoff.There was nothing about GM, theVolt, lithium-ion, or me personally that he didn’t despise. An embarrassment to the entire West Coast electric vehicle