Bottled Lightning

by Seth Fletcher

  For the Volt’s devotees, particularly the thousands of people who followed every twitch of the project on gm-volt.com, an independent site run by a New York neurologist with a strong obsession with the Volt, Wagoner’s dismissal raised obvious questions about the car’s future. New bosses like to make big changes, right? Would the Volt fall victim to the same kind of short-term cost-cutting mentality that may have killed the EV1? Bob Lutz sent reassurances to the readers of gm-volt.com. “Thanks for your concern,” Lutz wrote. “Volt will survive and prosper. We know the numbers better than the Government … we furnished them! First-generation technology is expensive, but you can’t have a second generation without a first generation. Common sense and intelligence will prevail, here!”

  To prove that the Volt was still alive, less than two months later General Motors began inviting journalists to visit Warren and drive a prototype for themselves. My visit came on a perfect spring day in mid-May, approximately twenty-four hours after the Obama administration reinforced the importance of cars like the Volt by announcing historic, strict new nationwide fuel-economy standards—a fleetwide 35.5 mpg by 2016, a 40 percent increase over existing standards.

  In an immaculately clean Tech Center garage across the street from a decorative lake, Bob Lutz arrived to give some introductory remarks. “I’d just like to remind members of the media at all times, dial yourself back about twenty-seven months to the Detroit auto show of January 2007, when we showed the concept Volt and announced that we were exploring lithium-ion technology,” he said. Remember the scorn, the contempt, the instant criticism from “a famous automobile company that starts with a ‘T,’” he pleaded. “Here we are two and a half years later, and we are totally confident about the technology.”

  Volt vehicle line executive Frank Weber, a lean, towering, bespectacled German, provided further caveats. Don’t pay much attention to road noise and handling, because the next year and a half is all about dialing that stuff in. Don’t pay attention to the interior, because this car is, after all, far from a finished product—it’s a Chevy Cruze fitted with the Volt power train. This drive was about propulsion, about batteries and motors. “The public still has the opinion that electric cars are handicapped,” he said. “We want to prove that it’s capable of being the first car in the household.”

  Our test track was GM’s busy corporate campus, its lawns thick with Canada geese. Recently hatched goslings fell in step behind their mothers as they marched about the grassy lakeside lawns. The cars themselves were obviously engineering projects, with wires and cables from monitoring devices emerging here and there. With Weber sitting shotgun, I got into the driver’s seat, fastened my seatbelt, and politely eased the proto-Volt around the campus as if circling a mall, looking for a parking spot. As with any electric car, the motor was silent. Any sound was road noise, a constant crunching and whining of the tires against the pavement. Weber assured me that he was not happy with the level of road noise and that much of it would be hushed out over the next year and a half.

  After a few laps around a campus lake, I realized what was so remarkable about the car: that once I forgot about the novelty of the silent electric drive, and once I stopped thinking about the hype and the controversy, the Volt seemed unremarkable. In a good way. A refined, nicely equipped version of this would be a real car—not a glorified golf cart or a conventional vehicle clumsily retrofitted with a giant battery and an electric motor. The Volt prototype resembled nothing so much as a silent version of any late-model compact car.

  “Go over by the lake and do some heavy acceleration,” Weber said. I stopped the car at the beginning of the longest stretch of road I could find, waited until it was clear of geese, and then floored it. As we rolled forward, quickly but not wildly, the part of my brain trained to expect a crescendo of engine roar in moments like this was alarmed. Within a matter of seconds, I was at 55 mph and out of road. I did it again, psychologically prepared for the lack of internal-combustion drama, and it was exhilarating, if anticlimactic.

  Back in the garage, as the small crowd dispersed, Tony Posawatz was grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Like the other GM engineers in attendance, he seemed to be blocking all thoughts of financial apocalypse. Instead, he was buoyant. Next week, the first of seventy-five production-intent prototypes was set to arrive. The things the Volt team could control were, in fact, under control.

  Two weeks later, General Motors filed for bankruptcy.

  Across the Pacific, Nissan was preparing the first purely battery-powered mass-market car of the twenty-first century, a mysterious electric vehicle that the company promised would be cost competitive with any other conventional compact car. Nissan had been touring a battery-powered version of its Cube crossover around the United States, but like the Volt mule, the Cube was just a shell for the power train. Still, we knew what the Volt would look like; we had no idea what Nissan’s electric car would look like, or what it would be called. And so in July I found myself in Japan, attending the debut of Nissan’s electric car.

  It had been clear for some time that Nissan was serious about its electric-car plans. Nissan and its ally Renault had announced their intention to build a purely electric car in February 2008, and since then they had been aggressively lining up partnerships with national, state, and local governments around the world in an effort to spur the construction of electric-vehicle infrastructure. By July, the Nissan-Renault alliance had made partners of governments from Denmark to Israel to Oregon to Tennessee.

  Journalists from around the world descended on Nissan headquarters that weekend. The test drives happened at Nissan’s Oppama Research Center, a seaside facility a half hour south of Nissan’s headquarters in Yokohama, a city of more than three million people that blends into Tokyo as one vast megacity. In Oppama, the landscape was a deep wet green. The sky was pregnant with rain, and lush, green loaf-like hills stacked the coastal plain around the test track.

  After coffee and a technical briefing, it was time to drive a mule version of Nissan’s electric car, its drivetrain implanted in a Japanese-market Tiida hatchback. The car was powered by a floorboard full of lithium-manganese-oxide batteries, the same basic chemistry that Compact Power would be using in the Chevy Volt. The batteries were built by a joint venture of Nissan and NEC under the aegis of Automotive Energy Supply Corporation; NEC was actually the first company to commercialize lithium manganese oxide, starting in 1995.

  As I sat down in the driver’s seat, my Japanese handler, sitting in the passenger seat, seemed nervous, as if he half suspected that one of us gaijin were likely to drive off the track and start yard farming. I pointed the car through a matrix of traffic cones, eased onto the track, and hit the electron-dispensing pedal. Acceleration was brisk, and before I knew it my passenger was asking me to slow down. On this slick professional track, the silent ride gave the sensation of gliding. The experience was much like driving the Volt, but with far more interesting scenery. As we circled the track, a brown, bearded-looking raptor glided lazily overhead.

  After a bus ride back to Yokohama, we visited Nissan’s new global headquarters, an airy, ultramodern building that gives the impression of being 99 percent glass. The official christening of the building was scheduled for the next day, and the construction crews were still working to make the place presentable. Construction workers’ cigarette smoke hung in the air, and the smoky-café smell was wildly incongruous in this soaring, open, ecofriendly office building.

  We were ushered into an auditorium, and there it was on the stage: a bubbly, cornflower-blue hatchback that we weren’t allowed to photograph and whose name we weren’t yet allowed to know. The car was cute but covered in odd design flourishes, like bulging-eyeball headlamps that dominated the front end, and an oddly concave rear. The interior was attractive and subtly high-tech, with digital gauges, touch-screen navigation, and a glowing blue half sphere for a gear shifter that looked as if it were designed to read the driver’s palm and power the car on his o
r her karma. The car’s GPS system would track its state of charge and communicate with a central data center, which would allow it to display your range at all times on the navigation screen as a highlighted radius around your current location.

  The official reveal of the car happened the next day, a Sunday, during the inauguration of the company’s new headquarters. On the ground floor of the soaring-ceilinged atrium, Nissan staged an auto-show-style press conference, in which blandly pleasing finger-picked guitar music played over the loudspeaker as secret doors in the light-studded wall behind the stage parted, and Nissan’s electric car—the Leaf, we then knew it was called—emerged.

  The Nissan Leaf was even riskier than the Volt. To be fair, Nissan wasn’t in government receivership, but the Leaf was an enormously expensive bet that the conventional wisdom about electric cars—that they’ll never catch on because people won’t buy a car that has limited range and takes hours to repower once its electron tank is empty—was simply wrong. Nissan had taken a holistic approach to the electric car, recruiting the kind of allies that could build the necessary infrastructure. The company also made stunning claims about the car’s cost—that it would be priced about like any other car in its segment, and even at that price, it would be profitable in its first generation.

  CEO Carlos Ghosn and a cast of Japanese eminences, including the former prime minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, and the mayor of Yokohama, sat inside. Ghosn gave his speech in English. “The inauguration of Nissan’s global headquarters and the arrival of the Nissan Leaf are exciting events in the life of our company,” he said. “Both are clear signals that Nissan is decisively turned toward the future.” He spoke of a “zero-emission future,” a “new era in the automotive industry.” The Leaf, he said, was the first step.

  “From the outside this family hatchback may appear as another real-world attractive Nissan car, born and developed here in Kanagawa Prefecture. But in fact this car represents a real breakthrough. For the first time in our industry history a car manufacturer will mass-market a zero-emission car, the ultimate solution for sustainable mobility. As its name suggests, the Leaf is totally neutral to the environment. There is no exhaust pipe, no gasoline-burning engine. There is only the quiet, efficient power provided by our own compact lithium-ion battery pack.”

  By the summer of 2009, the idea that the Volt was nothing but a concept had been replaced by broadsides against what the production vehicle had become—its looks, which plenty of people thought were bland and pedestrian compared to the 2007 show car; the very concept behind its drivetrain; and so on. The bizarre ongoing debate over the Volt, unprecedented for a car that was still a year and a half away from production, recalled a comment that George Westinghouse made during the late-nineteenth-century “War of the Currents”: “Thousands of persons have large pecuniary interests at stake, and, as might be expected, many of them view this great subject solely from the standpoint of self-interest.”

  Each automaker held differing yet fairly predictable views on why the Volt made no sense. The critiques were predictable because they always favored the technology in which the carmaker had invested the most money. Although Toyota had announced plans to build a test fleet of five hundred lithium-ion-powered plug-in Priuses, in May Bill Reinert of Toyota told a National Academy of Sciences panel that plug-ins were still hamstrung by high cost and battery issues. Carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz and Audi, on the other hand, who had been working for years to perfect clean diesel engines that could meet American particulate-pollution standards, tended to argue that while electric drive was interesting, diesel was the best way to quickly reduce petroleum usage. In September 2009, Johan de Nysschen, president of Audi of America, called the Volt a car for “idiots.” Smacking electric drive in favor of the diesel engine sometimes drove the employees of the big German automakers to an irrational, almost faith-based dismissal of electrification. I once talked to an engineer for Mercedes-Benz who was adamant that all batteries, no matter what they were made of, were environmentally disastrous. What are we going to do with all these batteries? Dump them all in landfills? He asked me the question with a smug, almost contemptuous grin. Well, they can be reused, or recycled. But they’re toxic! he said. Not if they don’t contain any toxic metals, I replied. I don’t care! They’re batteries!

  The highest-profile spat began when Elon Musk appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman on April 29, 2009. A hoarse Letterman grunted out a fawning introduction. “This is gonna be exciting, because here’s a guy doing something to try and make things a little better for the eight billion humans who inhabit this planet,” he said. “He has been called the Henry Ford of his generation. He is the CEO and chairman and product architect for Tesla Motors, currently producing the only highway-capable electric vehicle available in North America. Please say hello to Elon Musk.”

  First, Letterman and Musk ran through the basics. The cost of the car: $100,000. The reason for starting with a high-end sports car: “The goal has always been to make low-cost cars, but when you have new technology it takes time to make it lower cost and mass market,” Musk said. “If you think of the early days of cell phones or laptops or any new technology, it starts off expensive. You remember that giant phone that the guy in Wall Street walked down the beach with, and that was cutting-edge technology—well, it’s the same thing with cars.”

  Letterman pointed out that electric cars are not exactly a new technology, and Musk delivered a one-sentence version of the history of the competition between gas and electric. The reason gas won, Musk said, was the range issue. “Now with the advent of lithium-ion batteries, we can now address the range issue.”

  “So the real breakthrough is the batteries, then,” Letterman said. “How to store that electricity.”

  “Yeah, it’s the single biggest breakthrough.”

  Letterman brought up the EV1. Musk replied by referring to Who Killed the Electric Car? “Chris [Paine, the film’s director] shows how much people really wanted EV1,” Musk said. “They wanted it so much that when the cars were forcibly taken away from them and crushed, people who had those cars held a candlelit vigil for the destruction of those cars. Now, when is the last time you heard of anyone doing a candlelit vigil for the destruction of any product, let alone a General Motors product?”

  This line drew a sustained round of laughter. The trash talk quickly escalated, and almost all of it came from Letterman.

  “What if the electric car movement had not been killed off twenty years ago? Would that be a means of keeping these factories”—GM factories—“open today?”

  “With the benefit of hindsight, General Motors probably wishes they had done an EV2 and an EV3 after the EV1 instead of crushing them,” Musk said.

  “Doesn’t it make you a little angry that we’re all pretending like, ‘Whoa, we got an electric car!’” Letterman said. “It’s not like someone landed from Mars. We had them at the turn of the century! It’s frustrating to me. Is it frustrating to you?”

  Yes, Musk said, it is. But he made a gesture of goodwill toward GM. “I really thought that the incumbent car companies would do this,” he said. “Bob Lutz of General Motors was kind enough to credit Tesla with the inspiration for the Volt. You know they’re coming out with a plug-in hybrid, the Volt.”

  And the Volt insults began. “The Volt has a range of forty miles,” Letterman said. “That’ll get you down the driveway and back. ‘I gotta go pick up—Take the electric car! Call me if there’s trouble at the curb!’ I mean it’s insane! I mean forty miles is the range on the Volt, that’s ridiculous, isn’t it ridiculous? And General Motors is all, ‘Oh, boy, we got the electric car.’ I mean, that’s crap!”

  Wild applause.

  Commercial break.

  “I drove your car,” Letterman said after returning from commercials. “I was skeptical. I thought, ‘This is for guys in Topanga Canyon selling sprouts.’ But the thing is bulletproof. I thought that the first time I charged the thing my house
would catch fire. It goes like a bat out of hell,” he said. “Between you and me, the first time I drove it I was worried that it would magnetize my nuts.”

  Musk laughed awkwardly.

  “You know, fuel-cell cars, that’s a load of crap too,” Letterman continued. “You know: Oh, hydrogen! It’s gonna make its own hydrogen! They’re talking about twenty years from now. Maybe twenty years from now. So I think that these automobile companies—and it couldn’t be a worse time for them to be doing this—are just shining people on. Because if they were actually working on technology that was gonna be in showrooms, they wouldn’t have to be closing down plants and filing for bankruptcy.”

  Once again, wild applause.

  And in Detroit, wild fury. Mark Phelan of the Detroit Free Press published ten things Letterman should know about the Volt. About a month later, GM got Bob Lutz on Letterman to run defense. Letterman began by asking about the EV1—more politely, now that he was in the presence of a company man. Respectfully, if the EV1 had continued, wouldn’t that have kept the company’s financial problems away?

  “I’d like to say yes, but the answer is really no,” Lutz said. The batteries weren’t ready, the cars cost $100,000 apiece to build, the maintenance of the fleet was costing a fortune, and the finance guys eventually said, ‘Enough.’” He continued, “What has only recently become available is a battery that will store enough energy” to make an electrified car practical.