Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [76]
The initial, small Volt team was soon replaced by a large, formal one featuring the finest minds the corporation could muster. Some were veterans of the now-defunct EV1.They brought huge value in their wealth of experience and practical wisdom on this kind of project. Others were new hires: we had been producing gasoline- (and diesel-) powered cars for nearly a century, so there was little in-house expertise in the company when it came to electrochemistry or dealing with the management of several hundred volts of electricity. It was here that I finally appreciated all of GM’s fuel cell work (which I often had derided as “nice to have, but hardly essential”): the “power electronics,” or high-voltage energy management system, differs little between a fuel cell vehicle (essentially an EV that produces its own current) and a vehicle that stores its energy in batteries. Between the old EV1 veterans and the fuel cell team, we were able to quickly assemble more electric vehicle expertise than any other car company that I am aware of. Still, we needed to hire many young (and old) engineers to work in areas we’d simply never had to focus on before.
The Volt team, now numbering several hundred, was led by Frank Weber, a six-foot-five German vegetarian and one of GM’s foremost engineers and leaders, transferred to Detroit from Opel. His unique combination of dynamic, no-nonsense leadership and technical acumen gave wings to the Volt program.
Despite Frank’s drive and optimism, he (correctly) saw the “productionizing” of Volt as a multiyear program, with a launch date of late 2012. This, for all kinds of reasons, was unacceptable, and over anguished protests we forced a production date goal of November 2010 onto Frank and the team. Frank simply said, “We will try.”
“No,” I replied, “you will succeed.”
“Yes, we will certainly try to succeed.”
“No, you will succeed.”
This exchange continued over weeks and months until Frank and the team, somewhat amazed at the lack of any major disasters with early batteries and prototype hardware and software, began to accept the timing.
The battery was clearly the big risk and the big unknown. It was the industry’s first foray into a lithium-ion battery designed specifically for automotive propulsion. A very careful screening of all global producers of lithium-ion batteries, measuring such parameters as engineering capability, quality, production capacity, safety, and the energy storage capacity of their particular chemistry, resulted in the selection of LG Chem.With their vast experience and well-funded research program (with a lot of financial support from the Korean government), along with their expressed willingness to establish a cell manufacturing facility in the United States, they seemed to be the logical partner.And we were not disappointed. From the initial, cobbled-together prototype battery, through a series of iterations involving changes to chemistry for better energy storage and life, LG Chem always met or exceeded expectations.The confidence level in the LG Chem cell technology was so high, in fact, that GM made history of sorts by announcing, in July 2010, that the Volt battery pack would carry an eight-year, hundred-thousand-mile warranty.
On September 16, 2008, the centennial of General Motors, Rick Wagoner, Fritz Henderson, and I rolled out a full-size, realistic mock-up of the production-intent Cruze-architecture-based Chevrolet Volt. Both old and new media gave the event extensive coverage, and not surprisingly, much of it was negative: the Volt enthusiasts, as well as the detractors, were understandably shocked at the amount of change from the original daring but hopelessly impractical design.
But the practical arguments