Bottled Lightning

by Seth Fletcher

  At the Los Angeles show, GM had unveiled a plug-in hybrid version of the Saturn Vue, due to arrive whenever the lithium-ion batteries were ready. Wagoner went on, “Now we’re making another significant and important step in our commitment to an electrically driven future. Today I’m pleased to announce that GM has begun production work on E-Flex, a family of electrically driven propulsion systems”—a notable advance, Wagoner said, because of the wide variety of fuels that could be used. “And now it’s my pleasure to introduce the latest evidence of that commitment. A dynamic concept vehicle based on E-Flex technology, a sleek design that’s already generating a lot of electricity in its own right.”

  The room began to rumble as the screen split in two. Blue lightning bolts and sparks and zaps and flashes overwhelmed the stage before giving way to a sound track of gentle electronica. A disembodied female voice announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, the 2007 Chevrolet Volt Concept.”

  The car looked great—low and brawny, with a wide stance, a glimmering silver paint job, and a long hood that in the visual language of gas-driven cars telegraphed power. Bob Lutz was sitting shotgun. He stepped out of the car and shook Wagoner’s hand, and the two posed before the Volt for photos. Then, standing beside his baby, Lutz began speaking into his lapel mike. “Well, here it is,” he said. “The Chevrolet Volt, an electrically driven car from General Motors. I am shocked, truly shocked. A GM electric vehicle is an inconvenient truth.” The audience greeted the reference to Al Gore’s recently released movie with awkward laughter.

  Lutz described the drivetrain and the specifications. Forty miles on lithium-ion batteries alone. If you’re one of the 78 percent of Americans who live within twenty miles of work, and you charge the car every night, “You will never need to buy gasoline during the entire life of the vehicle,” he said, and that line drew enthusiastic applause. “And you would save five hundred gallons of gasoline and eliminate 4.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the tailpipe.” If you drive sixty miles a day, you’ll get the equivalent of 150 mpg, he said. Use E85 and you’ll get more than five hundred miles per equivalent petroleum gallon. “I’m honestly as excited and as passionate about this program as I have ever been about anything that I’ve done in my forty years in this business.” Lutz finished his remarks and welcomed to the stage Jon Lauckner and Tony Posawatz—“huge driving forces behind this”—and, as is ritual after these press conferences, the reporters and photographers in the audience swarmed, crowding around the GM principals to get a quote or a shot or a few minutes of on-scene footage.

  The press devoured the Volt story. A GM spokesperson told the Detroit Free Press that the Volt reveal earned ten times the attention of a normal auto show press conference. Yet much of the coverage exhibited excitement about the car as a concept—and only as a concept. Given GM’s dismal track record with electric cars and the theoretical nature of the vehicle, it was hard to take the Volt too seriously. The common refrain: Nice-looking concept car, but did you just say it runs on batteries that don’t yet exist? A photo caption from The New York Times’s online coverage of the show put it wryly: “The Volt is truly the car of the future. It’s a theoretical 150-mile-a-gallon automobile based on batteries that are not yet available.”

  Toyota, which couldn’t abide the Volt stealing any glory from its Prius, was happy to help fuel the skepticism, and they based their argument on the batteries. In various interviews, Toyota executives said that lithium ion was too dangerous, too expensive, and worst of all, there wasn’t enough readily accessible lithium in the world to support the auto market. GM executives tried to counter the cynics, with mixed success. “This program is not a public relations ploy,” Jon Lauckner told the Times. “We are dead serious about taking this technology into high-volume production.”

  “You saw what the reaction was,” Lutz said to me. “It was incredible. Both positive and negative. I mean, it was generally first a huge wave of positive press, and then there was the acid reflux.”

  5

  THE BLANK SPOT AT THE HEART OF THE CAR

  Skepticism about the Chevy Volt wasn’t based only on suspicion of General Motors’s sincerity. It was also about the fact that the history of the electric car is a parade of extraordinary failures stretching back to the late nineteenth century.

  The idea that electricity could be used as a locomotive force emerged in the 1830s, when early experiments with electric motors proved that the technology could move a rail-riding vehicle. Electric motors, however, were rare at the time, and it took another three decades for them to become common. Their spread was the result of the arc-lighting boom, the rapid increase in the number of public light sources that ran on steam-powered dynamos. It’s a very short leap from the dynamo to the electric motor, and as Michael Brian Schiffer puts it in his history of the early electric car, by the late 1870s, “All at once, it seems, many people on both sides of the Atlantic began to appreciate that the components needed for electric traction were nearly at hand.”

  In the late nineteenth century, American and European scientists and engineers were busily inventing new ways to move people around without horses, which filled the streets with manure, were difficult to care for, and sometimes simply died on the spot. The bicycling craze began in France in the 1860s, and by the 1890s it had spread to America, where the bicycle gave city dwellers a taste for “touring”—riding out of town to see the countryside. In 1859, the Belgian engineer Étienne Lenoir built the first usable internal combustion engine, and in the late 1870s the German engineer Nicolaus Otto built his four-stroke “Otto cycle” engine, which found wide use in automobiles. Karl Benz patented his seminal Otto cycle–powered three-wheeler in 1886, and by the 1890s companies such as Peugeot were also selling gas-powered cars.

  But the electric trolley, not the gas-powered car, led most directly to the advent of the electric vehicle. The first complete system of electric trolleys, the work of the American inventor Frank Julian Sprague, was installed in 1887 in Richmond, Virginia. Trolleys quickly became popular in cities across the United States and Europe, but then came a backlash: in dense urban areas, particularly Manhattan, the tangle of overhead power wires from trolleys (in addition to the wires from emerging electric-lighting networks) became an eyesore and a major public safety concern. The natural alternative, of course, was to power trolleys using batteries. Power a trolley by battery, then take it off the rails and let it roam wherever the driver wants to go, and you have an electric car.

  The first electric passenger cars were creaky open-air tricycles, like the 4-mph banshee that the British inventor Magnus Volk revealed in 1888. A man named A. L. Riker is given credit for creating America’s first electric car, a trike that doubled the top speed of Volk’s vehicle. A pack of inventors soon began chasing the electric car. At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the only car on the grounds was a 20-mph electric invented by an Iowan named William Morrison.

  Electricity was still basically magic in these days. The Wabash Plain Dealer described the unveiling of an arc-lighting system thusly: “Men fell on their knees, groans were uttered at the sight, and many were dumb with amazement.” With electricity still such a novelty, it’s not surprising that people were slow to consider the idea that vehicles powered by this strange force could replace the horse. Yet reporting on the Columbian Exposition, the magazine Electrical World made this prediction: “The day does not seem so very far distant when carriages as well as other vehicles will be moving around our streets propelled by electric motors that receive their current from concealed batteries, and therefore effect a further emancipation of the millions of animals now performing this service.”

  Throughout the 1890s, electric, gas-powered, and steam cars all improved. In 1895, the brothers J. Frank and Charles E. Duryea built the first American gas car of note, and the following year a young Henry Ford began dreaming of the invention that would soon make him rich. In 1894, two Philadelphia inventors, Pedro Salom and Henry G. Morris, built the 4,250-pound
Electrobat, which could reach 15 mph and, if driven gingerly, run as far as one hundred miles on a charge of its sixteen hundred pounds of batteries. Salom and Morris soon founded the Electric Carriage & Wagon Company, which was associated with Philadelphia-based Electric Storage Battery Company (ESB), which owned another fledgling electric-car concern, the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC). Soon Salom and Morris would build a radically improved Electrobat 2, which was two-thirds the weight and reached 20 mph. This coalition—Salom and Morris, ESB, EVC—launched electric taxi service in a number of U.S. cities, with the largest enterprise in New York. The group also had a reputation for patent-sharking and monopolistic behavior, which is why it earned the slanderous nickname, drawn from the element found in ESB’s batteries, of Lead Trust.

  The bicycle magnate Albert Pope saw where things were headed and wanted in. And so on May 13, 1897, in Hartford, Connecticut, he unveiled his Columbia Electric Phaeton Mark III, an eighteen-hundred-pound vehicle made light by hollow, bicyclelike frames, and propelled up to 15 mph in a thirty-mile radius by 850 pounds of lead-acid batteries. According to Schiffer, the Mark III was “the first American automobile of any kind to be produced commercially in more than trivial numbers.”

  The electric cars of the day were extravagances, some costing up to $5,000 (nearly $130,000 today). But that was the passenger-car market. By 1900, electric delivery wagons, trucks, buses, ambulances, and taxis were roaming city streets across the country. Still, charging was a problem, particularly for people with AC power, as was battery maintenance, which involved manually maintaining the levels of water and acid in the electrolyte. As Charles Duryea told Horseless Age, “a set of batteries was worse to take care of than a hospital full of sick dogs.”

  Meanwhile, drivers, mostly men, were coming to enjoy the freedom of touring the countryside in gas-powered cars, never worrying about the lack of a charging station (you could get gas at the general store). And as touring became the primary reason people bought cars, the electric vehicle became less attractive. As Duryea, ever the gasoline champion, once phrased it, a horse or even a bicycle would take you farther in a day than an electric car. Gas cars were getting faster and more powerful. To stereotype, men didn’t mind the noise and the fumes, and gas cars became masculine touring cars. Electrics were for women—clean, quiet, refined. Even the Electric Vehicle Company eventually started building gas cars.

  Then, on June 16, 1903, Ford Motor Company was born. The Model T, the legendary everyman’s car introduced in 1908, would forever change transportation. By 1910, there were nearly half a million cars registered in the United States. Most were powered by gasoline. A year later, Charles Franklin Kettering invented the electric self-starter simply by doing what the experts of the day said was impossible—overstraining an electric motor for the brief moment it took to turn over the gasoline engine, which worked fine as long as the motor could rest between exertions. When a self-starter appeared on a gas-powered Cadillac in 1912, it eliminated one of the electric vehicle’s last remaining advantages.

  Many in the electric-car industry realized what was happening, and they responded with an advertising blitz designed to convince the public of the electric’s inherent superiority to the gas-powered car—of its reliability, silence, cheap upkeep, and at last, its decent range per charge, its ability, finally, to “tour.” (That, at least, was the argument. Everyone was aware of the drawbacks of limited range and long charging times.) Infighting began in the industry. Electrical utilities complained that electric cars weren’t catching on sufficiently because they were too high-end—that what was needed was a Henry Ford and a Model T for the electric market. Carmakers liked to point out that electric utilities, instead of taking the obvious step of advertising their core product by using electric vehicles in their own commercial fleets, too often relied on the gas-powered cars that were robbing them of potential profits.

  Before long, electric cars were stigmatized as the aristocratic grandmother’s car. World War I put all but the strongest car companies out of business. “That any firms lasted past the war is testimony to the wealthy woman’s loyalty to the electric car,” as Schiffer put it. The last proper, commercially available electric cars were off the market by the beginning of the 1930s. “In the end,” Schiffer writes, “there was no Henry Ford of the electric car because there was no mass demand for inexpensive electrics.”

  As the gas car colonized the world, the electric vehicle went into deep, cryogenic hibernation. Aside from isolated oddities such as the 1959 Henney Kilowatt, a production electric car that the National Union Electric Company built with the Eureka Williams Company and Exide in a vain attempt to resurrect the technology, the electric car was nothing but a wistful longing for idealistic engineers. Fewer than fifty Henney Kilowatts were built.

  Not until air pollution became an issue in the 1950s and 1960s did the major automakers even pretend to show an interest in electrification. Why would they? Petroleum power had made them kings. Even when they had no choice but to address the environmental consequences of their products, they put far more effort into blocking the Clean Air Act than they did developing the technology to comply with it. It’s not surprising that an industry that went to the mat to avoid putting catalytic converters on its cars was unserious about building electric cars.

  Nonetheless, beginning in 1966, Detroit did produce a few electric prototypes. General Motors produced the Chevrolet Electrovair, a Corvair converted to run on expensive and impractical silver-zinc batteries. GM followed the Electrovair with a line of hilariously pocked experimental city cars, one of them a gas-electric hybrid and one a pure EV powered by twelve lead-acid batteries. That one, the XP512E, looked like a clown-car version of an AMC Pacer. In 1967, Ford of Britain’s research staff revealed its tiny electric city car, the eighty-inch-long Comuta, which never made it into production. American Motors put more effort than its competitors into sexing up its prototype. The AMC Amitron looks like the swinging London vision of the car of the future. Interestingly, the Amitron was designed to run in part on an early lithium battery chemistry, lithium nickel fluoride.

  After the clean-transportation push of the 1960s and 1970s ceased, the next opportunity for an electric-car revival came in September 1990, when the California Air Resources Board (or CARB, the agency created in 1967 as a result of the air-quality wars) mandated that automakers make 2 percent of the cars they sold in the state emission-free by 1998. That number would rise to 5 percent in 2001 and rocket to 10 percent in 2003.

  The regulations were a direct response to General Motors CEO Roger Smith’s announcement on Earth Day of that year that the company was putting its Impact electric-car concept—as the EV1 was then known—into production. The Impact concept car had grown out of the Sunraycer solar-powered car, the product of a collaboration of AeroVironment (the Los Angeles company behind the Gossamer Condor, the first human-powered aircraft), GM, and Hughes Aircraft. Sunraycer won the 1987 World Solar Challenge, a highly publicized race across Australia. It was a public-relations coup for GM, and on that success the three companies built the unfortunately named Impact, which Smith first unveiled at the 1990 Los Angeles Auto Show.

  The Mandate—it’s become a proper noun—spawned the doomed electric-car boomlet of the 1990s. GM and its competitors produced small numbers of electric cars in order to continue doing business in California, the largest market for automobiles in the United States. But although its own CEO inspired the Mandate, GM complied only grudgingly. The company clearly hated doing a car program on someone else’s terms. GM repeatedly said that there would be no market for electric cars—that nobody wanted them—and they continued saying this even after events proved them wrong. When GM announced a small test-fleet program called PrEView, in which fifty Impacts were loaned to volunteer drivers for two weeks in order to collect data on the car’s performance, they expected a weak response. Instead, they had to close the phone lines. Some twenty-four thousand people called asking to participate in the program from
Los Angeles and New York alone.

  It’s not exactly trafficking in conspiracy theory to say that GM undermined its electric car from the start. This oft-quoted New York Times article says quite a bit:

  General Motors is preparing to put its electric vehicle act on the road, and planning for a flop. With pride and pessimism, the company, the furthest along of the Big Three in designing a mass-market electric car, says … it has done its best but that the vehicle has come up short … Now it hopes that lawmakers and regulators will agree with it and postpone or scrap the deadline.

  Regulators eventually postponed the deadline, but they didn’t scrap it. Still, it’s a miracle that the EV1 was built. As Michael Shnayerson tells the story in his book The Car That Could, the EV1 project nearly had its legs cut off numerous times. The small team of engineers responsible for the EV1 were as passionate about the car as GM executives were ambivalent, however, and they scrounged for resources and struggled until they made the car a reality.

  When the EV1 was launched in 1996, it was available only for lease, and only in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Tucson, though eventually San Francisco and Sacramento would get EV1 programs too. Lease rates were generally $499 a month at the car’s launch, but that dropped to $349 the following spring. To deal with the quirks of leasing an electric car—making sure customers understood range limitations, holding their hands through the process of installing charging stations in their garages—GM hired a team of specialized salespeople called EV specialists and stationed them at Saturn dealerships in the cities where the EV1 was available. That first generation ran on more than a thousand pounds of lead-acid batteries built by Delphi and got 70–140 miles to a charge, mostly because of its incredible aerodynamic efficiency. GM claimed that the car’s drag coefficient of 0.19 made it as aerodynamic as an F-16 fighter jet.