How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrical Car, WIRED
How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrified Car
Ten years ago, the room where I’m standing would have been packed with a earsplitting roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one shuddering atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop glazes used joysticks to adjust its throttle and blast. ¶ Today, however, this former engine testing facility at General Motors’ Warren Technical Center, outside Detroit, is almost dead silent. From one end to the other—across a space toughly the size of two soccer fields—the room is blanketed with the low-frequency hum of cooling fans, interrupted only by the occasional clack of a keyboard and, on this particular morning, the chatter of Larry Nitz’s voice. ¶ “Let’s take a walk,” he says after we’ve lingered in the doorway a moment. A voluble stud with a head of gray curls, Nitz is chief of electrification at General Motors, and this facility—the largest automotive battery lab in North America—is his domain.
GM CEO Mary Barra, February two thousand sixteen Photo by: Joe Pugliese
In place of all the old V-8s, a grid of eighteen massive cobalt blue boxes, each ten feet high and eight feet broad, now predominate the lab. They look a little like walk-in freezers, which isn’t too far off. They’re climate simulators, Nitz says as we file past row after row of them. Battery chemistry is fiendishly sensitive to temperature and humidity, he explains, and electrified cars have to hold up in every kind of weather. So inwards each blue chamber, GM has created a virtual Yukon winter or Florida summer or Arizona spring. The enclosed batteries—not the familiar 40-pound bricks that need a hop commence from time to time, but 1,000-pound behemoths built to power an entire car—are hooked up to testing equipment that charges and discharges them in patterns designed to mimic the ways
people drive in cities, in the suburbs, and on the highway. The tests run twenty four hours a day and in muffle, generating terabytes of data.
But Nitz hasn’t brought me here just to showcase me a bunch of blue boxes. Near the end of the room, he eventually stops us in front of a large industrial dolly. Sitting on top is a slick black alien-looking thing, about the size and form of a very thick rectangular kitchen tabletop. It’s three feet broad and six feet long and has dozens of plastic-tipped, copper-colored wires protruding from its surface in a sprawling mess of metallic spaghetti.
This dark monolith is the thing I’ve come to Detroit to see. It’s the technological heart of what promises to be the most significant vehicle General Motors has produced in decades: the very first truly mass-market all-electric car. “This,” Nitz says, “is the battery pack for the Bolt.”
E LECTRIC VEHICLES have been available to American consumers for the better part of two decades. The very first EVs looked like science projects only a Sierra Club member could love, while today an all-electric luxury sedan—the Tesla Model S—is routinely described as the coolest car on the planet. Early electrical cars had a maximum range of fifty miles; today’s highest-rated EV—again, the Model S—can go as many as three hundred miles before it needs to ass-plug in. And yet, for all that progress, fully electrified vehicles still make up less than one percent of US auto sales. There’s a straightforward reason for this: The only one that goes far enough costs far too much.
Most of us simply can’t shell out more than $70,000 for a Tesla. But comparatively affordable electrics like the Nissan Leaf still travel only about eighty miles on a charge—not far enough to dispel the dreaded “range anxiety” that such a low number provokes in most American drivers. A two thousand thirteen investigate by the California Center for Sustainable Energy found that only nine percent of consumers said they would be pleased with an electrified car that can go one hundred miles on a charge. Increase that range to two hundred miles, tho’, and seventy percent of potential drivers said they’d be sated.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called two hundred miles the “minimum threshold” for broad public adoption of electrical cars. Suggest that kind of range at a price that’s affordable to the average consumer and the potential market for electrics abruptly looks a entire lot thicker. Get there very first and that fresh market could be all yours.
In its long history, General Motors has managed to kill the electrical car not once but twice.
That’s why, over the past duo of years, a number of major automakers—General Motors, Nissan, Volkswagen—have lined up with plans to suggest an electrical car with (yep) approximately two hundred miles of range, for a price somewhere around the average cost of a fresh American car, about $33,000. They all hope to do so quickly, as fuel efficiency requirements are ratcheting up every year. And they all hope to get there before media darling Tesla does. Musk—billionaire, celebrity, space and solar-energy mogul, would-be colonizer of Mars—has said since two thousand six that Tesla’s “master plan” is to work toward building an affordable, long-range electrified car. And in two thousand fourteen he said that purpose was in look: In two thousand sixteen Tesla would unveil a car called the Model three with a sticker price of $35,000 and two hundred miles of range. Production would embark in 2017.
In brief, the electrical car business has taken the form of an old-fashioned race for a prize—a race in very soft sand. There’s no Moore’s law for batteries, which are chemical not digital. Cell development is all slow, arduous trial and error. When your purpose is to drive energy efficiency up while driving costs down on a mass industrial scale, there aren’t many shortcuts or late-night inspirations to be had. But now it looks pretty clear who the winner will be. And it ain’t Tesla.
General Motors very first unveiled the Chevy Bolt as a concept car in January 2015, billing it as a vehicle that would suggest two hundred miles of range for just $30,000 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit). Barring any unforeseen delays, the very first Bolts will roll off the production line at GM’s Orion Assembly facility in Michigan by the end of 2016. As Pam Fletcher, GM’s executive chief engineer for electrical vehicles, recently put it to me with a certain smirk: “Who wants to be 2nd?”
For GM, the Bolt stands to suggest a head commence in a fresh kind of market for electrical cars. But for the rest of us, there’s a broader significance to this news. It’s not just that Chevy will likely be very first. It’s that a car company as lumbering and gigantic as GM, with infrastructure and manufacturing capacity on an epic scale, has gotten there first—and is there now. Tesla is nimble, innovative, and joy to witness, as companies go. But the Bolt is far more significant than any suggesting from Tesla ever could be. Why? Think of the old eyed about how long it takes to turn an aircraft carrier around: It’s slow, and there’s not much to see at any given moment. But the thing about people who actually manage to turn one around is: They’ve got a freaking aircraft carrier.
Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, is a company lifer who has spent years shepherding the Bolt into existence. Joe Pugliese
B EFORE WE GO any further, let’s pause for a moment to relish just how richly ironic it is that General Motors is about to take the lead in the electrified car race. GM is, after all, a company that went bankrupt just seven years ago and survived only with the help of a federal bailout; a company whose board of directors was described by President Obama’s auto czar, Steven Rattner, as “utterly docile” in the face of forthcoming disaster; a company that has been the butt of jokes about its lackluster, unreliable, macho cars for years; a company that churned out Hummers while Toyota gave us the Prius. And even more to the point, we’re talking about a company that has a long history with electrified vehicles—the way South Park has a long history with Kenny.
That’s right. General Motors killed the electrified car. More than once.
In the earliest days of the auto industry, electrified cars were about as popular as their combustion-powered counterparts. Just like today, they were cleaner and quieter but more limited in range than the competition. Plus, they didn’t require a arm crank to start—an annoying feature of early combustion vehicles that at times resulted in cracked fingers. But in 1912, Cadillac, GM’s luxury arm, came out with the very first electrified starter for gas-powered vehicles. Electrified cars died out shortly thereafter, and in a cloud of harass GM surged to become the world’s largest carmaker.
Fast-forward eighty four years, and for a brief interlude it looked like GM was about to take the lead in bringing electrics back. In 1996, in response to a California mandate that required automakers to have zero-emissions vehicles ready for market by 1998, GM flipped out the EV1, the very first mass-produced electrified vehicle of the modern era. The funny-looking two-seater had a range of about fifty miles and was suggested for lease to consumers in California and Arizona. It was impractical, dinky, and entirely fated. It earned a petite coterie of devotees but held little appeal for mainstream consumers. It used almost all unique parts, forfeiting the advantages of GM’s scale. And even as GM’s EV1 team was busy building the car, GM’s lawyers were lobbying hard, side by side with the other big automakers, to get California to back off its requirement.
Charging Through History
In the early days of the automobile, electrified cars outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles on America’s rutted, manure-strewn roads. But even as the internal combustion engine became the automobile’s superior power source, the desire of the electrified car never died. —Jordan Crucchiola
Slide: one / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety one | Iowa chemist William Morrison builds the very first successful American EV. It tops out at fourteen mph. The 768-pound, 24-cell battery makes up half the vehicle’s total weight.
Slide: two / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety seven | The Pope Manufacturing Company—builder of the Columbia Electrified Phaeton Mark III—becomes the very first large-scale EV maker in the US. Electrical taxis pop up in Fresh York. Wiki Commons
Slide: three / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred | Ferdinand Porsche is credited with creating the very first gas-electric hybrid, the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus. COURTESY OF PORSCHE
Slide: four / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seven | The most successful EV manufacturer of the early 20th century, the Detroit Electrical Car Company, embarks producing vehicles, ultimately making more than 13,000 of them. GETTY Pictures
Slide: five / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eight | Henry Ford’s Model T kicks off the modern age of combustion-engine-powered cars. CORBIS
Slide: six / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred twelve | GM’s Charles Kettering invents the electrical starter, eliminating the need to hand-crank gas-powered cars, which were already cheaper than EVs. Now they’re lighter to use too. COURTESY OF GM
Slide: seven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred thirty nine | The Detroit Electrical Car Company shuts down, pretty well marking the end of the very first era of electrical vehicles. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Slide: eight / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy one | EVs arrive in space! The electrical lunar rover ferries astronauts around the moon. It’s raunchy to find an EV anywhere on Earth, however. GETTY Pictures
Slide: nine / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy two | Spurred by federal incentives fastened to the Clean Air Act of 1970, engineer Victor Wouk modifies a one thousand nine hundred seventy two Buick Skylark to make it a gas-electric hybrid. The government awards him $33,000 for the design but doesn’t take the idea further. COURTESY OF EPA.GOV
Slide: ten / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy three | The Arab oil embargo, with its resulting high oil prices and fuel shortages, scares the US into thinking about EVs again. GM develops an urban electrical concept prototype. ALAMY
Slide: eleven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy four | Sebring-Vanguard’s toylike CitiCar debuts at the Electrified Vehicle Symposium in Washington, DC. It has a top speed of thirty mph and can travel forty miles on a single charge—in warm weather. CORBIS
Slide: twelve / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eighty six | Oil prices fall again. Never mind about those EVs, bring on the SUVs! ALAMY
Slide: thirteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety six | Responding to a California mandate requiring zero-emissions vehicles, GM comes out with the EV1. Popular Science calls it “a turning point for the fledgling electrified car industry.” But the cars end up getting recalled. CORBIS
Slide: fourteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety seven | Toyota introduces the Prius and sells Legal,000 units in the very first year of production. It becomes the world’s very first mass-produced gas-electric hybrid vehicle. ATSUSHI TSUKADA/AP PHOTO
Slide: fifteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand six | Tesla Motors debuts its Roadster at the San Francisco International Auto Demonstrate. It can travel more than two hundred miles before needing to recharge. Celebrities like it. ALAMY
Slide: sixteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand nine | Nissan rolls out the Leaf. The fully electrical car can go about eighty miles on a charge and reach ninety mph. It will eventually become the top-selling electrified vehicle in the US. GETTY Photos
Slide: seventeen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand ten | GM releases the Chevy Volt, the very first commercially available plug-in hybrid, with a gas engine that supplements the electrified drive once the battery is depleted. GETTY Pictures
Slide: eighteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand twelve | For around $70,000, drivers can now buy Tesla’s Model S, a luxury electrical sedan with two hundred eight miles of range and a 302-hp motor. The Fresh York Times calls it the most fundamental switch in automotive design since the Model T. And it looks amazing. RUARIDH STEWART/ZUMAPRESS.COM/CORBIS
Slide: nineteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand fifteen | General Motors unveils the Bolt concept vehicle, a four-door hatchback that promises to go two hundred miles on a charge and sell for about $30,000—just below the average cost of an American car. GETTY Photos
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Right around the time the EV1 was ready to hit dealerships, California weakened its mandate, relieving the legal pressure on automakers to suggest zero-emissions cars. And after a few lackluster years marketing its electrified automobile, GM unceremoniously dumped the money-bleeding EV1. It declined to renew the leases on the toughly 1,100 cars it had put on the road, recalled the vehicles, and—with an inadver&timid;tently theatrical flourish—crushed almost all of them and piled their carcasses in a junkyard. The experiment cost the company about $1 billion and was a public relations disaster. Years later a documentary that dramatically recounted the EV1 saga, Who Killed the Electrical Car?, helped cement the perception that a feckless GM had committed technological infanticide.
By the mid-2000s, executives realized what a colossal mistake they had made. After railing out the ’90s with a doubled-down commitment to its traditional profit centers—SUVs and light trucks—GM sustained $8.6 billion in losses in 2005. Toyota, which boasted $9 billion in profits that same year, was on the brink of surpassing GM as the world’s largest carmaker. The Japanese hard was railing to victory on a reputation for economical, fuel-efficient cars, especially the Prius, an egg-shaped hybrid that delivered fifty miles per gallon and sold in the hundreds of thousands.
All of that pissed off Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chair for product develop&timid;ment at the time. A cigar-chomping veteran of the car industry with a penchant for irascible quotes—he once panned GM’s cars for looking like “angry kitchen appliances”—Lutz was especially attuned to the big narratives that drive public perception of the auto industry (while under the surface, most of the real activity is driven by recondite stuff like regulation, industrial and trade policy, labor economics, and logistics). Lutz hated how the Prius had put a saintly halo on Toyota, which sold slew of SUVs and pickups, while hapless GM was mocked for making the Hummer. He also took notice when Silicon Valley upstart Tesla made a major splash with its public debut, announcing it planned to make a lithium-ion-battery-powered luxury sports car.
And so Lutz, a boy who would later announce that global heating is a “total crock of shit,” began lobbying GM’s leadership to make the fattest, greenest play possible. He didn’t want GM to just build a me-too hybrid to challenge with Toyota. He dreamed GM to build a fully electrified car that almost anyone could afford to buy and that wasn’t limited by range. He wished, in effect, to build the Bolt. But the technology wasn’t there.
The car that GM actually built at Lutz’s insistence—the Chevy Volt—went on to become one of the most talked-about American vehicles in decades, for a entire host of reasons, many of them symbolic. But in-house, says Tony Posawatz, the engineer who led the team that developed the Volt, it was very clear that this was going to be a transitional car—a warm-up for GM’s electrical long game.
For the Volt, GM lodged on a design that was neither a Prius-style hybrid nor a unspoiled electrified car but something in inbetween called an extended-range electrified vehicle. The setup would combine a plug-in battery strong enough to serve as the car’s main power train, plus a motor with a petite gas engine that would work as a generator, creating electro-therapy to keep the vehicle going when the battery was depleted. But even that hybrid design compelled GM engineers, to a remarkable extent, to become cavemen rediscovering fire.
Being inwards the Bolt feels a bit like flying economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane.
Almost everything switches when you opt for a fundamentally different power train, so GM’s greatest advantage—more than a century of practice building cars—was all but moot. Car structure was different, since they were building around a battery, not an engine. The brakes, steering, and air conditioner were powered differently. Fresh systems, from electromagnetics for the motors to onboard and off-board charging, each came with its own learning curve. The engineers didn’t have established tests to go after. Just turning on the car required finding the ideal sequence of electrical signals from more than a dozen modules. “Oh my God, it took us forever to get the very first Volt to begin,” Fletcher says.
Then there was the battery. Lithium-ion chemistry was a fresh thing ten years ago, and the Volt team quickly discovered how much of a ache in the neck it is. “Batteries wear out just sitting there, and they wear out when you cycle them,” says Bill Wallace, GM’s head battery engineer. “And then they wear out if you over-discharge them, or if you overcharge them.” They’re enormously sensitive to temperature. They switch form as they charge and discharge. They can also catch fire.
In brief, all these problems were fresh to a company whose practice lay in what Lutz calls “the oily bits.” So the team set about developing the expertise it lacked. GM established a curriculum with the University of Michigan to train battery engineers. It packed a vacant building in Brownstown, Michigan, with the equipment to make battery packs. The engineers created test procedures and wrote them down as they went. They modeled different use cases for the Volt, from a woman in northern Minnesota who ass-plugs in every night to a boy in Miami who drives one hundred miles a day. They built the battery lab and brought in the blue environmental chambers, then used them to see how the battery would stand up to each situation. “We invented the idea of what the lab should be,” Fletcher says.
The Volt project was still in its infancy when the US economy tanked in 2008, sending GM into shock. The company began losing $1 billion a month and embarked cleaving off limbs in desperation, eliminating or selling its Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Hummer brands. The Volt project could lightly have fallen under the ax as well—but instead it took on an outsize significance. President Obama seized on the car as one reason GM was worth a $40 billion bailout, holding it up as a sign that the bankrupt automaker could adapt. The Volt ultimately went on sale in December 2010, to accolades (“A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet.” —The Wall Street Journal) and jeers (“roller skates with a plug” —Fox News).
As for actual drivers, they were pretty into the Volt. The car posted stellar customer satisfaction ratings, and almost seventy percent of its drivers were fresh to Chevy. The trouble was that there simply weren’t many buyers. In 2011, GM’s CEO at the time, Dan Akerson, told reporters he wished to produce 60,000 Volts the next year. To date, Chevy has sold about 80,000—total. The Volt was a powerful symbol, but it wasn’t that significant a vehicle. Buyers soon had more innovative cars to choose from. The all-electric Nissan Leaf hit the market at around the same time as the Volt, for a similar price. In 2012, Tesla introduced its first-generation Model S, with upwards of two hundred miles per charge.
But the real significance of the Volt was that it gave GM a brand-new manufacturing and engineering platform for electrified vehicles, where it had had none before. “Once you make the leap, and you have a big battery, and you have electrified motors,” Posawatz says, “you’ve done all the hard stuff.” And then you might just see an chance to gun for the finish line.
O N THE MORNING of April Two, 2014, US senator Barbara Boxer glared down from behind a microphone in a Senate hearing room in Washington, DC, requiring answers from America’s industrial problem child, General Motors. The company had just instituted its largest recall ever, after reports that faulty ignition switches on millions of cars from the 2000s had been responsible for numerous deaths and injuries. Boxer, as part of a congressional investigative committee, was castigating GM’s fresh CEO, Mary Barra, who had been in the job a mere three weeks. “Woman to woman, I am very disappointed,” Boxer said. “The culture that you are indicating here today is a culture of the status quo.”
Barra sat there, practising the studiously neutral, calmly repentant facial nonexpression of someone getting grilled by Congress. The main theme of Barra’s testimony was that the old GM—with a docile, nodding bureaucratic culture that swept problems under the rug—had died with the company’s two thousand nine bankruptcy, bailout, and restructuring and that the fresh GM was different. But the “culture of the status quo” charge wasn’t so effortless for Barra, of all people, to deflect: She’s not only a GM lifer, she’s a second-generation lifer. Her dad was a die-maker for Pontiac, and she commenced with the company when she was Legal. (She’s fifty four now.)
On the other mitt, Barra had a strong arm in a lot of the most transformative stuff going on at GM. Chief case in point: Not long before she became CEO, Barra had been tapped to run development of fresh products, the position once held by Lutz. So by the time she was hauled before Congress in two thousand fourteen to reaction for the company’s past sins, she had been overseeing the efforts of GM’s electrification gang for three years.
When I walk into Barra’s office one latest fall day, she’s standing in front of her desk wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, and an Apple Witness. (Offsetting the Steve Jobs vibe just a bit is a calendar on the wall that shows a fluffy white cat in the backseat of an Opel Corsa.) As Barra tells it, the process to develop the Bolt truly took off when GM’s team was regrouping after a major setback. In 2012, GM invested in a California startup called Envia, which had developed a fresh battery that posted incredible spectacle numbers. Envia promised to produce a 200-mile battery by fall 2013. But its technology turned out to be a flop.
Not only is GM likely to win the race, it may have the winner’s circle to itself for some time.
So in spring 2013, GM’s senior leaders and the most significant figures on its electrification team gathered in the virtual reality room of the company’s Design Center to assess the situation. “We embarked to go, ‘OK, what can we do?’” Barra says. Was there another route to two hundred miles? The EV folks hesitated but commenced pulling together different elements—improvements in battery life, cost savings in motors—that, combined, might represent a way forward. “We can thrust our way toward 200,” Fletcher recalls thinking.
The meeting turned into a full-on brainstorming session, one that ended, Barra says, with what looked like a viable path to the Bolt: “And we all went, ‘Let’s do that.’”
And so the design team set to work devising a car that would appeal to consumers well beyond the ecowarrior, early-adopter demographic. Some flashy ideas were thrown out early on: A carbon fiber assets? Lightweight but too expensive at this price point. Suicide doors? Eye-catching, but they added mass without functional benefits. Capped wheels? Good for aerodynamics, but they signaled something science project–y. “It’s got to look like a serious car,” design lead Stuart Norris says. The team delivered as spacious an interior as possible, with upright glass to make the relatively petite car feel more substantial and a raised driving position for a commanding view of the road.
Meantime, the technical folks set about making Norris’ design go two hundred miles on a charge. At their most basic, batteries are made of powders, the morphology of which—grain size, distribution, how they’re trussed together—is key to the power and energy of each cell. LG, General Motors’ battery provider, had cooked up a noticeably improved cell that retained energy capacity particularly well when it got hot, as lithium-ion batteries tend to. That meant Chevy could use a smaller cooling system and stick more cells in the battery pack for more range. LG also improved the battery’s conductivity, so the ions flowed quicker, translating to quicker acceleration (the Bolt can go from zero to sixty in seven seconds).
As soon as the battery was ready, engineers at GM’s Michigan proving ground hacked together a bastard car using the front half of a Chevy Sonic and the rear of a Buick Encore. They called it the Soncore and fitted it with the Bolt battery pack and motor, using the Franken-vehicle to make sure the propulsion system worked. That way, once the real Bolt bod was in development, the teams responsible for the car’s chassis controls, vehicle dynamics, and suspension tuning could get right to work.
As two thousand fourteen bled into 2015, Chevy engineers built about one hundred Bolt prototypes, shipping them around the US for real-world testing to verify the findings of the battery lab. The cars went to Arizona and Florida. The team drove them up the California coast and negotiated San Francisco traffic. They ran the prototypes over rough roads, looking for ways to reduce noise and stimulation (extra-tricky in a car with no engine to mask odd sounds). They chose specially developed Michelin tires to minimize rolling resistance and improve range. Working prompt, they made thousands of switches to the car, permanently looking for ways to improve. By the time I arrived for a test-drive, in October, the team still had more than five hundred open work orders to finish.
T HE Very first TIME I lay eyes on the Bolt, it’s packaged in swirling black-and-white camouflage—the effect known as dazzle—designed to hide its kinks and lines from cameras. That’s about as flashy as things get. There are no gull-wing doors or retracting treats like on some Teslas. The Bolt sits on modest 17-inch wheels. It shows up to be a nice, of-the-moment-looking hatchback, like a Prius C or a Honda Fit with a shorter bondage mask and taller roof. The main thing that indicates its revolutionary potential is the dashboard, which tells me I have one hundred ninety two miles of range, a number I’ve only seen in Teslas.
Josh Tavel, the Bolt’s chief engineer, invites me to take a seat behind the steering wheel and, from the passenger seat, starts showcasing me around the interior. He commences with the caveat that the vehicle is only about eighty percent done—thus the big crimson emergency stop button just above the cup holders and the fire extinguisher in the backseat.
As I put the Bolt into drive and begin exploring the GM Technical Center’s eleven miles of roads, Tavel gives me a tour of the interior. It’s decked out with a bunch of digital-age bells and whistles: On the dashboard is a high-definition Ten.2-inch touchscreen. There’s a special space shaped to hold an iPhone 6, with a charge port right there, and a console compartment that fits a tablet. The rearview mirror can pipe in a display from cameras on the back of the car. The car also associates private settings with different keys, so it knows whether you or your spouse is driving and tunes the radio appropriately. The backseat is remarkably roomy for a compact car, especially when it comes to headroom. I’m taller than average, and there are three or four inches inbetween my head and the roof.
Overall, being inwards the Bolt feels a little like flying in economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane. You’ve got a screen, an outlet to butt-plug in your phone, enough legroom, and some sleek appointments. It’s not very first class, but it doesn’t knead your nose in that fact the way some economy cabins (and some GM cars) do.
When I meet with Barra after my test-drive, we begin by talking about the big-picture stuff: how the car could fundamentally switch public attitudes toward electrified vehicles. But she quickly moves on to the little things: the roominess, the connectivity, how the trunk opening is shaped so you can slide in that bookshelf you bought at Ikea. “No one’s gonna buy two hundred miles if it doesn’t come with a fine vehicle,” Barra says.
C HEVROLET SAYS it is on track to embark delivering the Bolt by year’s end. If that happens, it’s fairly possible the company will have the winner’s circle to itself for some time. It now emerges that the next Nissan Leaf will have one hundred ten miles of range—a modest improvement over the current model. Volkswagen is at least two years away from its target. (It’s also tied up with a potentially ruinous scandal after cheating on emissions tests for millions of its diesel vehicles.) And Tesla has a track record of running about two years behind its production targets. But all the automakers will need to embark building attractive zero-emissions vehicles somehow, and soon. It’s significant to understand that the market for electrical cars is still driven less by corporate profit-seeking than by government arm-twisting. In the US, federal fuel standards require automakers to achieve a fleet average of toughly thirty four miles per gallon in two thousand sixteen and forty nine mpg by 2025. On top of that, ten states won’t let automakers operate unless they sell at least some zero-emission vehicles. All the automakers have to figure out how to get there.
Photo by: Joe Pugliese
If you’ve noticed certain names missing from the list of contenders for the race to two hundred miles—chiefly Toyota—that’s mainly because Japanese and German automakers have focused on hydrogen fuel cell cars, an embryonic, expensive, and zero-carbon-emission technology that has its own problems, like a lack of national fueling infrastructure. Other automakers have responded to the rising tide of mandates with vehicles developed solely to meet requirements and avoid fines (shades of the EV1). The resulting cars are less than compelling and a ache for automakers. In May 2014, Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne actually asked people not to buy the all-electric version of the Fiat 500, telling, “Every time I sell one, it costs me $14,000.” But the math of electrical vehicles may begin to switch with a mass-market EV like the Bolt, whose sales numbers could be in a different league. Barra wouldn’t disclose a sales goal—Chevy got pretty burned after missing its announced target for the Volt. Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Karl Brauer says that anything more than 50,000 units a year would be a giant coup. A number like that would make the Bolt the best-selling unspoiled electrified ever, ahead of Tesla and leagues ahead of Nissan’s Leaf and BMW’s fresh and funky i3.
Even if sales revenue from the Bolt doesn’t equal what GM has spent developing the car—which is likely, because battery power is still expensive—the Bolt will bring other benefits to GM. The car’s fuel economy rating will be so good that even just decent sales would significantly boost GM’s average fleet-fuel-economy numbers, ironically permitting the automaker to sell more pickups and SUVs, where the real profit margins are.
Perhaps most of all, executives are hoping that the Bolt will switch the narrative about GM—which is significant because a hapless company that churns out bulky trucks and lackluster sedans doesn’t have much place in the future. These days it’s a refrain among GM executives that in the next five to ten years, the auto industry will switch as much as it has in the past 50. As batteries get better and cheaper, the propagation of electrical cars will reinforce the need to build out charging infrastructure and develop clean ways to generate electro-therapy. Cars will embark speaking to each other and to our infrastructure. They will drive themselves, smudging the line inbetween driver and passenger. Google, Apple, Uber, and other tech companies are invading the transportation marketplace with fresh technology and no ingrained attitudes about how things are done.
The Bolt is the most concrete evidence yet that the largest car companies in the world are contemplating a very different kind of future too. GM knows the budge from gasoline to electro-therapy will be a minor one compared to where customers are headed next: away from driving and away from wielding cars. In 2017, GM will give Cadillac sedans the capability to control themselves on the highway. Instead of dismissing Google as a smart-aleck kid grabbing a seat at the adults’ table, GM is talking about partnering with the tech rock-hard on a multitude of efforts. Last year GM launched car-sharing programs in Manhattan and Germany and has promised more to come. In January the company announced that it’s investing $500 million in Lyft, and that it plans to work with the ride-sharing company to develop a national network of self-driving cars. GM is thinking about how to use those fresh business models as it comes in emerging markets like India, where lower incomes and already packed metro areas make its standard move—put two cars in every garage—unworkable.
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This all feels strange coming from GM because, for all the switches of the past decade and despite the use of words like disruption and mobility, it’s no Silicon Valley clothing. The boys and women who built the Bolt are unspoiled Detroit. Mary Barra, Tony Posawatz, and Larry Nitz are all GM lifers. As a kid, Pam Fletcher built engines for race cars with her father. Josh Tavel raced motocross before getting into stock cars as both a driver and an engineer. He practically sweats gasoline. And yet he led the engineering team that could bring electrified driving into the mainstream.
I’ve been driving the Bolt around the Technical Center campus for about fifteen minutes when Tavel brings up something that’s been bothering him. “You haven’t indeed stepped on it yet,” he says. I’ve been taking my time to get a feel for the car, treating it gently on raw roads in the presence of its chief creator. But knowing what I do about the swift pickup of electrified cars—unlike combustion-powered vehicles, they supply instant torque—I’m blessed to oblige. I find a quiet corner of the campus and come to a stop with nothing but clear road ahead. I insert my right foot down and the almost silent Bolt is all of a sudden a noise machine: The tires squeal on the raw pavement. After a half 2nd, they catch and the Bolt zips ahead, if just a bit shakily. Chassis control is not fairly ideal yet, Tavel says. That’ll be immobilized before production starts—in just a few brief months.
Associate editor Alex Davies (@adavies47) writes about the future of transportation for WIRED .
This article emerges in the February two thousand sixteen issue.
STYLING BY JADE LAUREN; MAKEUP BY FLYNN PYYKKONEN; HAIR BY MELISSA KERYN; JACKET BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, COURTESY OF NEIMAN MARCUS.
How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrified Car, WIRED
How GM Hit Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrical Car
Ten years ago, the room where I’m standing would have been packed with a earsplitting roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one quaking atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop glazes used joysticks to adjust its throttle and fountain. ¶ Today, tho’, this former engine testing facility at General Motors’ Warren Technical Center, outside Detroit, is almost dead silent. From one end to the other—across a space toughly the size of two soccer fields—the room is blanketed with the low-frequency hum of cooling fans, interrupted only by the occasional clack of a keyboard and, on this particular morning, the chatter of Larry Nitz’s voice. ¶ “Let’s take a walk,” he says after we’ve lingered in the doorway a moment. A voluble boy with a head of gray curls, Nitz is chief of electrification at General Motors, and this facility—the largest automotive battery lab in North America—is his domain.
GM CEO Mary Barra, February two thousand sixteen Photo by: Joe Pugliese
In place of all the old V-8s, a grid of eighteen massive cobalt blue boxes, each ten feet high and eight feet broad, now predominate the lab. They look a little like walk-in freezers, which isn’t too far off. They’re climate simulators, Nitz says as we file past row after row of them. Battery chemistry is fiendishly sensitive to temperature and humidity, he explains, and electrical cars have to hold up in every kind of weather. So inwards each blue chamber, GM has created a virtual Yukon winter or Florida summer or Arizona spring. The enclosed batteries—not the familiar 40-pound bricks that need a hop begin from time to time, but 1,000-pound behemoths built to power an entire car—are hooked up to testing equipment that charges and discharges them in patterns designed to mimic the ways
people drive in cities, in the suburbs, and on the highway. The tests run twenty four hours a day and in muffle, generating terabytes of data.
But Nitz hasn’t brought me here just to demonstrate me a bunch of blue boxes. Near the end of the room, he eventually stops us in front of a large industrial dolly. Sitting on top is a slick black alien-looking thing, about the size and form of a very thick rectangular kitchen tabletop. It’s three feet broad and six feet long and has dozens of plastic-tipped, copper-colored wires protruding from its surface in a sprawling mess of metallic spaghetti.
This dark monolith is the thing I’ve come to Detroit to see. It’s the technological heart of what promises to be the most significant vehicle General Motors has produced in decades: the very first truly mass-market all-electric car. “This,” Nitz says, “is the battery pack for the Bolt.”
E LECTRIC VEHICLES have been available to American consumers for the better part of two decades. The very first EVs looked like science projects only a Sierra Club member could love, while today an all-electric luxury sedan—the Tesla Model S—is routinely described as the coolest car on the planet. Early electrical cars had a maximum range of fifty miles; today’s highest-rated EV—again, the Model S—can go as many as three hundred miles before it needs to butt-plug in. And yet, for all that progress, fully electrical vehicles still make up less than one percent of US auto sales. There’s a straightforward reason for this: The only one that goes far enough costs far too much.
Most of us simply can’t shell out more than $70,000 for a Tesla. But comparatively affordable electrics like the Nissan Leaf still travel only about eighty miles on a charge—not far enough to dispel the dreaded “range anxiety” that such a low number provokes in most American drivers. A two thousand thirteen investigate by the California Center for Sustainable Energy found that only nine percent of consumers said they would be pleased with an electrified car that can go one hundred miles on a charge. Increase that range to two hundred miles, tho’, and seventy percent of potential drivers said they’d be sated.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called two hundred miles the “minimum threshold” for broad public adoption of electrical cars. Suggest that kind of range at a price that’s affordable to the average consumer and the potential market for electrics all of a sudden looks a entire lot thicker. Get there very first and that fresh market could be all yours.
In its long history, General Motors has managed to kill the electrical car not once but twice.
That’s why, over the past duo of years, a number of major automakers—General Motors, Nissan, Volkswagen—have lined up with plans to suggest an electrified car with (yep) approximately two hundred miles of range, for a price somewhere around the average cost of a fresh American car, about $33,000. They all hope to do so quickly, as fuel efficiency requirements are ratcheting up every year. And they all hope to get there before media darling Tesla does. Musk—billionaire, celebrity, space and solar-energy mogul, would-be colonizer of Mars—has said since two thousand six that Tesla’s “master plan” is to work toward building an affordable, long-range electrical car. And in two thousand fourteen he said that objective was in view: In two thousand sixteen Tesla would unveil a car called the Model three with a sticker price of $35,000 and two hundred miles of range. Production would embark in 2017.
In brief, the electrical car business has taken the form of an old-fashioned race for a prize—a race in very soft sand. There’s no Moore’s law for batteries, which are chemical not digital. Cell development is all slow, arduous trial and error. When your purpose is to drive energy efficiency up while driving costs down on a mass industrial scale, there aren’t many shortcuts or late-night inspirations to be had. But now it looks pretty clear who the winner will be. And it ain’t Tesla.
General Motors very first unveiled the Chevy Bolt as a concept car in January 2015, billing it as a vehicle that would suggest two hundred miles of range for just $30,000 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit). Barring any unforeseen delays, the very first Bolts will roll off the production line at GM’s Orion Assembly facility in Michigan by the end of 2016. As Pam Fletcher, GM’s executive chief engineer for electrical vehicles, recently put it to me with a certain smirk: “Who wants to be 2nd?”
For GM, the Bolt stands to suggest a head commence in a fresh kind of market for electrical cars. But for the rest of us, there’s a broader significance to this news. It’s not just that Chevy will likely be very first. It’s that a car company as lumbering and gigantic as GM, with infrastructure and manufacturing capacity on an epic scale, has gotten there first—and is there now. Tesla is nimble, innovative, and joy to witness, as companies go. But the Bolt is far more significant than any suggesting from Tesla ever could be. Why? Think of the old spotted about how long it takes to turn an aircraft carrier around: It’s slow, and there’s not much to see at any given moment. But the thing about people who actually manage to turn one around is: They’ve got a freaking aircraft carrier.
Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, is a company lifer who has spent years shepherding the Bolt into existence. Joe Pugliese
B EFORE WE GO any further, let’s pause for a moment to savour just how richly ironic it is that General Motors is about to take the lead in the electrified car race. GM is, after all, a company that went bankrupt just seven years ago and survived only with the help of a federal bailout; a company whose board of directors was described by President Obama’s auto czar, Steven Rattner, as “utterly docile” in the face of oncoming disaster; a company that has been the butt of jokes about its lackluster, unreliable, macho cars for years; a company that churned out Hummers while Toyota gave us the Prius. And even more to the point, we’re talking about a company that has a long history with electrical vehicles—the way South Park has a long history with Kenny.
That’s right. General Motors killed the electrified car. More than once.
In the earliest days of the auto industry, electrified cars were about as popular as their combustion-powered counterparts. Just like today, they were cleaner and quieter but more limited in range than the competition. Plus, they didn’t require a palm crank to start—an annoying feature of early combustion vehicles that at times resulted in cracked fingers. But in 1912, Cadillac, GM’s luxury arm, came out with the very first electrified starter for gas-powered vehicles. Electrified cars died out shortly thereafter, and in a cloud of harass GM surged to become the world’s largest carmaker.
Fast-forward eighty four years, and for a brief interlude it looked like GM was about to take the lead in bringing electrics back. In 1996, in response to a California mandate that required automakers to have zero-emissions vehicles ready for market by 1998, GM spinned out the EV1, the very first mass-produced electrified vehicle of the modern era. The funny-looking two-seater had a range of about fifty miles and was suggested for lease to consumers in California and Arizona. It was impractical, dinky, and entirely fated. It earned a petite coterie of devotees but held little appeal for mainstream consumers. It used almost all unique parts, forfeiting the advantages of GM’s scale. And even as GM’s EV1 team was busy building the car, GM’s lawyers were lobbying hard, side by side with the other big automakers, to get California to back off its requirement.
Charging Through History
In the early days of the automobile, electrified cars outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles on America’s rutted, manure-strewn roads. But even as the internal combustion engine became the automobile’s superior power source, the wish of the electrified car never died. —Jordan Crucchiola
Slide: one / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety one | Iowa chemist William Morrison builds the very first successful American EV. It tops out at fourteen mph. The 768-pound, 24-cell battery makes up half the vehicle’s total weight.
Slide: two / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety seven | The Pope Manufacturing Company—builder of the Columbia Electrified Phaeton Mark III—becomes the very first large-scale EV maker in the US. Electrified taxis pop up in Fresh York. Wiki Commons
Slide: three / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred | Ferdinand Porsche is credited with creating the very first gas-electric hybrid, the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus. COURTESY OF PORSCHE
Slide: four / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seven | The most successful EV manufacturer of the early 20th century, the Detroit Electrified Car Company, commences producing vehicles, ultimately making more than 13,000 of them. GETTY Photos
Slide: five / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eight | Henry Ford’s Model T kicks off the modern age of combustion-engine-powered cars. CORBIS
Slide: six / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred twelve | GM’s Charles Kettering invents the electrified starter, eliminating the need to hand-crank gas-powered cars, which were already cheaper than EVs. Now they’re lighter to use too. COURTESY OF GM
Slide: seven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred thirty nine | The Detroit Electrified Car Company shuts down, pretty well marking the end of the very first era of electrical vehicles. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Slide: eight / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy one | EVs arrive in space! The electrified lunar rover ferries astronauts around the moon. It’s raunchy to find an EV anywhere on Earth, however. GETTY Pictures
Slide: nine / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy two | Spurred by federal incentives fastened to the Clean Air Act of 1970, engineer Victor Wouk modifies a one thousand nine hundred seventy two Buick Skylark to make it a gas-electric hybrid. The government awards him $33,000 for the design but doesn’t take the idea further. COURTESY OF EPA.GOV
Slide: ten / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy three | The Arab oil embargo, with its resulting high oil prices and fuel shortages, scares the US into thinking about EVs again. GM develops an urban electrified concept prototype. ALAMY
Slide: eleven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy four | Sebring-Vanguard’s toylike CitiCar debuts at the Electrified Vehicle Symposium in Washington, DC. It has a top speed of thirty mph and can travel forty miles on a single charge—in warm weather. CORBIS
Slide: twelve / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eighty six | Oil prices fall again. Never mind about those EVs, bring on the SUVs! ALAMY
Slide: thirteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety six | Responding to a California mandate requiring zero-emissions vehicles, GM comes out with the EV1. Popular Science calls it “a turning point for the fledgling electrified car industry.” But the cars end up getting recalled. CORBIS
Slide: fourteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety seven | Toyota introduces the Prius and sells Legal,000 units in the very first year of production. It becomes the world’s very first mass-produced gas-electric hybrid vehicle. ATSUSHI TSUKADA/AP PHOTO
Slide: fifteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand six | Tesla Motors debuts its Roadster at the San Francisco International Auto Showcase. It can travel more than two hundred miles before needing to recharge. Celebrities like it. ALAMY
Slide: sixteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand nine | Nissan rolls out the Leaf. The fully electrical car can go about eighty miles on a charge and reach ninety mph. It will eventually become the top-selling electrified vehicle in the US. GETTY Photos
Slide: seventeen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand ten | GM releases the Chevy Volt, the very first commercially available plug-in hybrid, with a gas engine that supplements the electrical drive once the battery is depleted. GETTY Photos
Slide: eighteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand twelve | For around $70,000, drivers can now buy Tesla’s Model S, a luxury electrified sedan with two hundred eight miles of range and a 302-hp motor. The Fresh York Times calls it the most fundamental switch in automotive design since the Model T. And it looks amazing. RUARIDH STEWART/ZUMAPRESS.COM/CORBIS
Slide: nineteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand fifteen | General Motors unveils the Bolt concept vehicle, a four-door hatchback that promises to go two hundred miles on a charge and sell for about $30,000—just below the average cost of an American car. GETTY Pictures
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Right around the time the EV1 was ready to hit dealerships, California weakened its mandate, relieving the legal pressure on automakers to suggest zero-emissions cars. And after a few lackluster years marketing its electrified automobile, GM unceremoniously dumped the money-bleeding EV1. It declined to renew the leases on the harshly 1,100 cars it had put on the road, recalled the vehicles, and—with an inadver&bashful;tently theatrical flourish—crushed almost all of them and piled their carcasses in a junkyard. The experiment cost the company about $1 billion and was a public relations disaster. Years later a documentary that dramatically recounted the EV1 saga, Who Killed the Electrified Car?, helped cement the perception that a feckless GM had committed technological infanticide.
By the mid-2000s, executives realized what a colossal mistake they had made. After railing out the ’90s with a doubled-down commitment to its traditional profit centers—SUVs and light trucks—GM sustained $8.6 billion in losses in 2005. Toyota, which boasted $9 billion in profits that same year, was on the brink of surpassing GM as the world’s largest carmaker. The Japanese hard was railing to victory on a reputation for economical, fuel-efficient cars, especially the Prius, an egg-shaped hybrid that delivered fifty miles per gallon and sold in the hundreds of thousands.
All of that pissed off Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chair for product develop&bashful;ment at the time. A cigar-chomping veteran of the car industry with a penchant for irascible quotes—he once panned GM’s cars for looking like “angry kitchen appliances”—Lutz was especially attuned to the big narratives that drive public perception of the auto industry (while under the surface, most of the real activity is driven by recondite stuff like regulation, industrial and trade policy, labor economics, and logistics). Lutz hated how the Prius had put a saintly halo on Toyota, which sold slew of SUVs and pickups, while hapless GM was mocked for making the Hummer. He also took notice when Silicon Valley upstart Tesla made a major splash with its public debut, announcing it planned to make a lithium-ion-battery-powered luxury sports car.
And so Lutz, a boy who would later announce that global heating is a “total crock of shit,” began lobbying GM’s leadership to make the thickest, greenest play possible. He didn’t want GM to just build a me-too hybrid to contest with Toyota. He dreamed GM to build a fully electrical car that almost anyone could afford to buy and that wasn’t limited by range. He desired, in effect, to build the Bolt. But the technology wasn’t there.
The car that GM actually built at Lutz’s insistence—the Chevy Volt—went on to become one of the most talked-about American vehicles in decades, for a entire host of reasons, many of them symbolic. But in-house, says Tony Posawatz, the engineer who led the team that developed the Volt, it was very clear that this was going to be a transitional car—a warm-up for GM’s electrical long game.
For the Volt, GM lodged on a design that was neither a Prius-style hybrid nor a unspoiled electrical car but something in inbetween called an extended-range electrified vehicle. The setup would combine a plug-in battery strong enough to serve as the car’s main power train, plus a motor with a petite gas engine that would work as a generator, creating electro-therapy to keep the vehicle going when the battery was depleted. But even that hybrid design compelled GM engineers, to a remarkable extent, to become cavemen rediscovering fire.
Being inwards the Bolt feels a bit like flying economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane.
Almost everything switches when you opt for a fundamentally different power train, so GM’s greatest advantage—more than a century of practice building cars—was all but moot. Car structure was different, since they were building around a battery, not an engine. The brakes, steering, and air conditioner were powered differently. Fresh systems, from electromagnetics for the motors to onboard and off-board charging, each came with its own learning curve. The engineers didn’t have established tests to go after. Just turning on the car required finding the flawless sequence of electrical signals from more than a dozen modules. “Oh my God, it took us forever to get the very first Volt to embark,” Fletcher says.
Then there was the battery. Lithium-ion chemistry was a fresh thing ten years ago, and the Volt team quickly discovered how much of a ache in the neck it is. “Batteries wear out just sitting there, and they wear out when you cycle them,” says Bill Wallace, GM’s head battery engineer. “And then they wear out if you over-discharge them, or if you overcharge them.” They’re utterly sensitive to temperature. They switch form as they charge and discharge. They can also catch fire.
In brief, all these problems were fresh to a company whose practice lay in what Lutz calls “the oily bits.” So the team set about developing the expertise it lacked. GM established a curriculum with the University of Michigan to train battery engineers. It packed a vacant building in Brownstown, Michigan, with the equipment to make battery packs. The engineers created test procedures and wrote them down as they went. They modeled different use cases for the Volt, from a woman in northern Minnesota who corks in every night to a dude in Miami who drives one hundred miles a day. They built the battery lab and brought in the blue environmental chambers, then used them to see how the battery would stand up to each situation. “We invented the idea of what the lab should be,” Fletcher says.
The Volt project was still in its infancy when the US economy tanked in 2008, sending GM into shock. The company began losing $1 billion a month and embarked cleaving off limbs in desperation, eliminating or selling its Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Hummer brands. The Volt project could lightly have fallen under the ax as well—but instead it took on an outsize significance. President Obama seized on the car as one reason GM was worth a $40 billion bailout, holding it up as a sign that the bankrupt automaker could adapt. The Volt eventually went on sale in December 2010, to accolades (“A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet.” —The Wall Street Journal) and jeers (“roller skates with a plug” —Fox News).
As for actual drivers, they were pretty into the Volt. The car posted stellar customer satisfaction ratings, and almost seventy percent of its drivers were fresh to Chevy. The trouble was that there simply weren’t many buyers. In 2011, GM’s CEO at the time, Dan Akerson, told reporters he wished to produce 60,000 Volts the next year. To date, Chevy has sold about 80,000—total. The Volt was a powerful symbol, but it wasn’t that significant a vehicle. Buyers soon had more innovative cars to choose from. The all-electric Nissan Leaf hit the market at around the same time as the Volt, for a similar price. In 2012, Tesla introduced its first-generation Model S, with upwards of two hundred miles per charge.
But the real significance of the Volt was that it gave GM a brand-new manufacturing and engineering platform for electrified vehicles, where it had had none before. “Once you make the leap, and you have a big battery, and you have electrical motors,” Posawatz says, “you’ve done all the hard stuff.” And then you might just see an chance to gun for the finish line.
O N THE MORNING of April Two, 2014, US senator Barbara Boxer glared down from behind a microphone in a Senate hearing room in Washington, DC, requesting answers from America’s industrial problem child, General Motors. The company had just instituted its largest recall ever, after reports that faulty ignition switches on millions of cars from the 2000s had been responsible for numerous deaths and injuries. Boxer, as part of a congressional investigative committee, was castigating GM’s fresh CEO, Mary Barra, who had been in the job a mere three weeks. “Woman to woman, I am very disappointed,” Boxer said. “The culture that you are indicating here today is a culture of the status quo.”
Barra sat there, practising the studiously neutral, calmly repentant facial nonexpression of someone getting grilled by Congress. The main theme of Barra’s testimony was that the old GM—with a docile, nodding bureaucratic culture that swept problems under the rug—had died with the company’s two thousand nine bankruptcy, bailout, and restructuring and that the fresh GM was different. But the “culture of the status quo” charge wasn’t so effortless for Barra, of all people, to deflect: She’s not only a GM lifer, she’s a second-generation lifer. Her dad was a die-maker for Pontiac, and she commenced with the company when she was Eighteen. (She’s fifty four now.)
On the other forearm, Barra had a strong forearm in a lot of the most transformative stuff going on at GM. Chief case in point: Not long before she became CEO, Barra had been tapped to run development of fresh products, the position once held by Lutz. So by the time she was hauled before Congress in two thousand fourteen to response for the company’s past sins, she had been overseeing the efforts of GM’s electrification gang for three years.
When I walk into Barra’s office one latest fall day, she’s standing in front of her desk wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, and an Apple Witness. (Offsetting the Steve Jobs vibe just a bit is a calendar on the wall that shows a fluffy white cat in the backseat of an Opel Corsa.) As Barra tells it, the process to develop the Bolt indeed took off when GM’s team was regrouping after a major setback. In 2012, GM invested in a California startup called Envia, which had developed a fresh battery that posted incredible spectacle numbers. Envia promised to supply a 200-mile battery by fall 2013. But its technology turned out to be a flop.
Not only is GM likely to win the race, it may have the winner’s circle to itself for some time.
So in spring 2013, GM’s senior leaders and the most significant figures on its electrification team gathered in the virtual reality room of the company’s Design Center to assess the situation. “We commenced to go, ‘OK, what can we do?’” Barra says. Was there another route to two hundred miles? The EV folks hesitated but commenced pulling together different elements—improvements in battery life, cost savings in motors—that, combined, might represent a way forward. “We can shove our way toward 200,” Fletcher recalls thinking.
The meeting turned into a full-on brainstorming session, one that ended, Barra says, with what looked like a viable path to the Bolt: “And we all went, ‘Let’s do that.’”
And so the design team set to work devising a car that would appeal to consumers well beyond the ecowarrior, early-adopter demographic. Some flashy ideas were thrown out early on: A carbon fiber bod? Lightweight but too expensive at this price point. Suicide doors? Eye-catching, but they added mass without functional benefits. Capped wheels? Good for aerodynamics, but they signaled something science project–y. “It’s got to look like a serious car,” design lead Stuart Norris says. The team delivered as spacious an interior as possible, with upright glass to make the relatively puny car feel more substantial and a raised driving position for a commanding view of the road.
Meantime, the technical folks set about making Norris’ design go two hundred miles on a charge. At their most basic, batteries are made of powders, the morphology of which—grain size, distribution, how they’re corded together—is key to the power and energy of each cell. LG, General Motors’ battery provider, had cooked up a noticeably improved cell that retained energy capacity particularly well when it got hot, as lithium-ion batteries tend to. That meant Chevy could use a smaller cooling system and stick more cells in the battery pack for more range. LG also improved the battery’s conductivity, so the ions flowed quicker, translating to quicker acceleration (the Bolt can go from zero to sixty in seven seconds).
As soon as the battery was ready, engineers at GM’s Michigan proving ground hacked together a bastard car using the front half of a Chevy Sonic and the rear of a Buick Encore. They called it the Soncore and fitted it with the Bolt battery pack and motor, using the Franken-vehicle to make sure the propulsion system worked. That way, once the real Bolt assets was in development, the teams responsible for the car’s chassis controls, vehicle dynamics, and suspension tuning could get right to work.
As two thousand fourteen bled into 2015, Chevy engineers built about one hundred Bolt prototypes, shipping them around the US for real-world testing to verify the findings of the battery lab. The cars went to Arizona and Florida. The team drove them up the California coast and negotiated San Francisco traffic. They ran the prototypes over rough roads, looking for ways to reduce noise and stimulation (extra-tricky in a car with no engine to mask odd sounds). They chose specially developed Michelin tires to minimize rolling resistance and improve range. Working rapid, they made thousands of switches to the car, permanently looking for ways to improve. By the time I arrived for a test-drive, in October, the team still had more than five hundred open work orders to accomplish.
T HE Very first TIME I lay eyes on the Bolt, it’s packaged in swirling black-and-white camouflage—the effect known as dazzle—designed to hide its kinks and lines from cameras. That’s about as flashy as things get. There are no gull-wing doors or retracting treats like on some Teslas. The Bolt sits on modest 17-inch wheels. It shows up to be a nice, of-the-moment-looking hatchback, like a Prius C or a Honda Fit with a shorter fetish mask and taller roof. The main thing that indicates its revolutionary potential is the dashboard, which tells me I have one hundred ninety two miles of range, a number I’ve only seen in Teslas.
Josh Tavel, the Bolt’s chief engineer, invites me to take a seat behind the steering wheel and, from the passenger seat, starts showcasing me around the interior. He embarks with the caveat that the vehicle is only about eighty percent done—thus the big crimson emergency stop button just above the cup holders and the fire extinguisher in the backseat.
As I put the Bolt into drive and embark exploring the GM Technical Center’s eleven miles of roads, Tavel gives me a tour of the interior. It’s decked out with a bunch of digital-age bells and whistles: On the dashboard is a high-definition Ten.2-inch touchscreen. There’s a special space shaped to hold an iPhone 6, with a charge port right there, and a console compartment that fits a tablet. The rearview mirror can pipe in a display from cameras on the back of the car. The car also associates private settings with different keys, so it knows whether you or your spouse is driving and tunes the radio appropriately. The backseat is remarkably roomy for a compact car, especially when it comes to headroom. I’m taller than average, and there are three or four inches inbetween my head and the roof.
Overall, being inwards the Bolt feels a little like flying in economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane. You’ve got a screen, an outlet to cork in your phone, enough legroom, and some sleek appointments. It’s not very first class, but it doesn’t grope your nose in that fact the way some economy cabins (and some GM cars) do.
When I meet with Barra after my test-drive, we commence by talking about the big-picture stuff: how the car could fundamentally switch public attitudes toward electrical vehicles. But she quickly moves on to the little things: the roominess, the connectivity, how the trunk opening is shaped so you can slide in that bookshelf you bought at Ikea. “No one’s gonna buy two hundred miles if it doesn’t come with a good vehicle,” Barra says.
C HEVROLET SAYS it is on track to commence delivering the Bolt by year’s end. If that happens, it’s fairly possible the company will have the winner’s circle to itself for some time. It now emerges that the next Nissan Leaf will have one hundred ten miles of range—a modest improvement over the current model. Volkswagen is at least two years away from its target. (It’s also tied up with a potentially ruinous scandal after cheating on emissions tests for millions of its diesel vehicles.) And Tesla has a track record of running about two years behind its production targets. But all the automakers will need to begin building attractive zero-emissions vehicles somehow, and soon. It’s significant to understand that the market for electrified cars is still driven less by corporate profit-seeking than by government arm-twisting. In the US, federal fuel standards require automakers to achieve a fleet average of harshly thirty four miles per gallon in two thousand sixteen and forty nine mpg by 2025. On top of that, ten states won’t let automakers operate unless they sell at least some zero-emission vehicles. All the automakers have to figure out how to get there.
Photo by: Joe Pugliese
If you’ve noticed certain names missing from the list of contenders for the race to two hundred miles—chiefly Toyota—that’s mainly because Japanese and German automakers have focused on hydrogen fuel cell cars, an embryonic, expensive, and zero-carbon-emission technology that has its own problems, like a lack of national fueling infrastructure. Other automakers have responded to the rising tide of mandates with vehicles developed solely to meet requirements and avoid fines (shades of the EV1). The resulting cars are less than compelling and a ache for automakers. In May 2014, Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne actually asked people not to buy the all-electric version of the Fiat 500, telling, “Every time I sell one, it costs me $14,000.” But the math of electrical vehicles may begin to switch with a mass-market EV like the Bolt, whose sales numbers could be in a different league. Barra wouldn’t disclose a sales goal—Chevy got pretty burned after missing its announced target for the Volt. Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Karl Brauer says that anything more than 50,000 units a year would be a giant coup. A number like that would make the Bolt the best-selling unspoiled electrified ever, ahead of Tesla and leagues ahead of Nissan’s Leaf and BMW’s fresh and funky i3.
Even if sales revenue from the Bolt doesn’t equal what GM has spent developing the car—which is likely, because battery power is still expensive—the Bolt will bring other benefits to GM. The car’s fuel economy rating will be so good that even just decent sales would significantly boost GM’s average fleet-fuel-economy numbers, ironically permitting the automaker to sell more pickups and SUVs, where the real profit margins are.
Perhaps most of all, executives are hoping that the Bolt will switch the narrative about GM—which is significant because a hapless company that churns out bulky trucks and lackluster sedans doesn’t have much place in the future. These days it’s a refrain among GM executives that in the next five to ten years, the auto industry will switch as much as it has in the past 50. As batteries get better and cheaper, the propagation of electrical cars will reinforce the need to build out charging infrastructure and develop clean ways to generate electrical play. Cars will begin speaking to each other and to our infrastructure. They will drive themselves, smudging the line inbetween driver and passenger. Google, Apple, Uber, and other tech companies are invading the transportation marketplace with fresh technology and no ingrained attitudes about how things are done.
The Bolt is the most concrete evidence yet that the largest car companies in the world are contemplating a very different kind of future too. GM knows the stir from gasoline to electrical play will be a minor one compared to where customers are headed next: away from driving and away from possessing cars. In 2017, GM will give Cadillac sedans the capability to control themselves on the highway. Instead of dismissing Google as a smart-aleck kid grabbing a seat at the adults’ table, GM is talking about partnering with the tech stiff on a multiplicity of efforts. Last year GM launched car-sharing programs in Manhattan and Germany and has promised more to come. In January the company announced that it’s investing $500 million in Lyft, and that it plans to work with the ride-sharing company to develop a national network of self-driving cars. GM is thinking about how to use those fresh business models as it comes in emerging markets like India, where lower incomes and already packed metro areas make its standard move—put two cars in every garage—unworkable.
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This all feels strange coming from GM because, for all the switches of the past decade and despite the use of words like disruption and mobility, it’s no Silicon Valley garment. The guys and women who built the Bolt are unspoiled Detroit. Mary Barra, Tony Posawatz, and Larry Nitz are all GM lifers. As a kid, Pam Fletcher built engines for race cars with her father. Josh Tavel raced motocross before getting into stock cars as both a driver and an engineer. He practically sweats gasoline. And yet he led the engineering team that could bring electrical driving into the mainstream.
I’ve been driving the Bolt around the Technical Center campus for about fifteen minutes when Tavel brings up something that’s been bothering him. “You haven’t truly stepped on it yet,” he says. I’ve been taking my time to get a feel for the car, treating it gently on humid roads in the presence of its chief creator. But knowing what I do about the prompt pickup of electrified cars—unlike combustion-powered vehicles, they produce instant torque—I’m blessed to oblige. I find a quiet corner of the campus and come to a stop with nothing but clear road ahead. I ram my right foot down and the almost silent Bolt is all of a sudden a noise machine: The tires squeal on the raw pavement. After a half 2nd, they catch and the Bolt zips ahead, if just a bit shakily. Chassis control is not fairly flawless yet, Tavel says. That’ll be immobile before production starts—in just a few brief months.
Associate editor Alex Davies (@adavies47) writes about the future of transportation for WIRED .
This article emerges in the February two thousand sixteen issue.
STYLING BY JADE LAUREN; MAKEUP BY FLYNN PYYKKONEN; HAIR BY MELISSA KERYN; JACKET BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, COURTESY OF NEIMAN MARCUS.
How GM Hit Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrical Car, WIRED
How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrified Car
Ten years ago, the room where I’m standing would have been packed with a earsplitting roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one shivering atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop glazes used joysticks to adjust its throttle and flow. ¶ Today, however, this former engine testing facility at General Motors’ Warren Technical Center, outside Detroit, is almost dead silent. From one end to the other—across a space harshly the size of two soccer fields—the room is blanketed with the low-frequency hum of cooling fans, interrupted only by the occasional clack of a keyboard and, on this particular morning, the chatter of Larry Nitz’s voice. ¶ “Let’s take a walk,” he says after we’ve lingered in the doorway a moment. A voluble man with a head of gray curls, Nitz is chief of electrification at General Motors, and this facility—the largest automotive battery lab in North America—is his domain.
GM CEO Mary Barra, February two thousand sixteen Photo by: Joe Pugliese
In place of all the old V-8s, a grid of eighteen massive cobalt blue boxes, each ten feet high and eight feet broad, now predominate the lab. They look a little like walk-in freezers, which isn’t too far off. They’re climate simulators, Nitz says as we file past row after row of them. Battery chemistry is fiendishly sensitive to temperature and humidity, he explains, and electrical cars have to hold up in every kind of weather. So inwards each blue chamber, GM has created a virtual Yukon winter or Florida summer or Arizona spring. The enclosed batteries—not the familiar 40-pound bricks that need a hop begin from time to time, but 1,000-pound behemoths built to power an entire car—are hooked up to testing equipment that charges and discharges them in patterns designed to mimic the ways
people drive in cities, in the suburbs, and on the highway. The tests run twenty four hours a day and in muffle, generating terabytes of data.
But Nitz hasn’t brought me here just to showcase me a bunch of blue boxes. Near the end of the room, he ultimately stops us in front of a large industrial dolly. Sitting on top is a slick black alien-looking thing, about the size and form of a very thick rectangular kitchen tabletop. It’s three feet broad and six feet long and has dozens of plastic-tipped, copper-colored wires protruding from its surface in a sprawling mess of metallic spaghetti.
This dark monolith is the thing I’ve come to Detroit to see. It’s the technological heart of what promises to be the most significant vehicle General Motors has produced in decades: the very first truly mass-market all-electric car. “This,” Nitz says, “is the battery pack for the Bolt.”
E LECTRIC VEHICLES have been available to American consumers for the better part of two decades. The very first EVs looked like science projects only a Sierra Club member could love, while today an all-electric luxury sedan—the Tesla Model S—is routinely described as the coolest car on the planet. Early electrical cars had a maximum range of fifty miles; today’s highest-rated EV—again, the Model S—can go as many as three hundred miles before it needs to buttplug in. And yet, for all that progress, fully electrified vehicles still make up less than one percent of US auto sales. There’s a straightforward reason for this: The only one that goes far enough costs far too much.
Most of us simply can’t shell out more than $70,000 for a Tesla. But comparatively affordable electrics like the Nissan Leaf still travel only about eighty miles on a charge—not far enough to dispel the dreaded “range anxiety” that such a low number provokes in most American drivers. A two thousand thirteen examine by the California Center for Sustainable Energy found that only nine percent of consumers said they would be sated with an electrical car that can go one hundred miles on a charge. Increase that range to two hundred miles, however, and seventy percent of potential drivers said they’d be pleased.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called two hundred miles the “minimum threshold” for broad public adoption of electrical cars. Suggest that kind of range at a price that’s affordable to the average consumer and the potential market for electrics abruptly looks a entire lot fatter. Get there very first and that fresh market could be all yours.
In its long history, General Motors has managed to kill the electrical car not once but twice.
That’s why, over the past duo of years, a number of major automakers—General Motors, Nissan, Volkswagen—have lined up with plans to suggest an electrical car with (yep) approximately two hundred miles of range, for a price somewhere around the average cost of a fresh American car, about $33,000. They all hope to do so quickly, as fuel efficiency requirements are ratcheting up every year. And they all hope to get there before media darling Tesla does. Musk—billionaire, celebrity, space and solar-energy mogul, would-be colonizer of Mars—has said since two thousand six that Tesla’s “master plan” is to work toward building an affordable, long-range electrical car. And in two thousand fourteen he said that purpose was in glance: In two thousand sixteen Tesla would unveil a car called the Model three with a sticker price of $35,000 and two hundred miles of range. Production would commence in 2017.
In brief, the electrified car business has taken the form of an old-fashioned race for a prize—a race in very soft sand. There’s no Moore’s law for batteries, which are chemical not digital. Cell development is all slow, arduous trial and error. When your objective is to drive energy efficiency up while driving costs down on a mass industrial scale, there aren’t many shortcuts or late-night inspirations to be had. But now it looks pretty clear who the winner will be. And it ain’t Tesla.
General Motors very first unveiled the Chevy Bolt as a concept car in January 2015, billing it as a vehicle that would suggest two hundred miles of range for just $30,000 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit). Barring any unforeseen delays, the very first Bolts will roll off the production line at GM’s Orion Assembly facility in Michigan by the end of 2016. As Pam Fletcher, GM’s executive chief engineer for electrical vehicles, recently put it to me with a certain sneer: “Who wants to be 2nd?”
For GM, the Bolt stands to suggest a head commence in a fresh kind of market for electrified cars. But for the rest of us, there’s a broader significance to this news. It’s not just that Chevy will likely be very first. It’s that a car company as lumbering and gigantic as GM, with infrastructure and manufacturing capacity on an epic scale, has gotten there first—and is there now. Tesla is nimble, innovative, and joy to see, as companies go. But the Bolt is far more significant than any suggesting from Tesla ever could be. Why? Think of the old eyed about how long it takes to turn an aircraft carrier around: It’s slow, and there’s not much to see at any given moment. But the thing about people who actually manage to turn one around is: They’ve got a freaking aircraft carrier.
Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, is a company lifer who has spent years shepherding the Bolt into existence. Joe Pugliese
B EFORE WE GO any further, let’s pause for a moment to relish just how richly ironic it is that General Motors is about to take the lead in the electrical car race. GM is, after all, a company that went bankrupt just seven years ago and survived only with the help of a federal bailout; a company whose board of directors was described by President Obama’s auto czar, Steven Rattner, as “utterly docile” in the face of emerging disaster; a company that has been the butt of jokes about its lackluster, unreliable, macho cars for years; a company that churned out Hummers while Toyota gave us the Prius. And even more to the point, we’re talking about a company that has a long history with electrified vehicles—the way South Park has a long history with Kenny.
That’s right. General Motors killed the electrified car. More than once.
In the earliest days of the auto industry, electrical cars were about as popular as their combustion-powered counterparts. Just like today, they were cleaner and quieter but more limited in range than the competition. Plus, they didn’t require a palm crank to start—an annoying feature of early combustion vehicles that from time to time resulted in cracked fingers. But in 1912, Cadillac, GM’s luxury arm, came out with the very first electrical starter for gas-powered vehicles. Electrified cars died out shortly thereafter, and in a cloud of harass GM surged to become the world’s largest carmaker.
Fast-forward eighty four years, and for a brief interlude it looked like GM was about to take the lead in bringing electrics back. In 1996, in response to a California mandate that required automakers to have zero-emissions vehicles ready for market by 1998, GM flipped out the EV1, the very first mass-produced electrified vehicle of the modern era. The funny-looking two-seater had a range of about fifty miles and was suggested for lease to consumers in California and Arizona. It was impractical, dinky, and entirely fated. It earned a petite coterie of devotees but held little appeal for mainstream consumers. It used almost all unique parts, forfeiting the advantages of GM’s scale. And even as GM’s EV1 team was busy building the car, GM’s lawyers were lobbying hard, side by side with the other big automakers, to get California to back off its requirement.
Charging Through History
In the early days of the automobile, electrified cars outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles on America’s rutted, manure-strewn roads. But even as the internal combustion engine became the automobile’s superior power source, the fantasy of the electrified car never died. —Jordan Crucchiola
Slide: one / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety one | Iowa chemist William Morrison builds the very first successful American EV. It tops out at fourteen mph. The 768-pound, 24-cell battery makes up half the vehicle’s total weight.
Slide: two / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety seven | The Pope Manufacturing Company—builder of the Columbia Electrical Phaeton Mark III—becomes the very first large-scale EV maker in the US. Electrical taxis pop up in Fresh York. Wiki Commons
Slide: three / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred | Ferdinand Porsche is credited with creating the very first gas-electric hybrid, the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus. COURTESY OF PORSCHE
Slide: four / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seven | The most successful EV manufacturer of the early 20th century, the Detroit Electrified Car Company, commences producing vehicles, ultimately making more than 13,000 of them. GETTY Pics
Slide: five / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eight | Henry Ford’s Model T kicks off the modern age of combustion-engine-powered cars. CORBIS
Slide: six / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred twelve | GM’s Charles Kettering invents the electrified starter, eliminating the need to hand-crank gas-powered cars, which were already cheaper than EVs. Now they’re lighter to use too. COURTESY OF GM
Slide: seven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred thirty nine | The Detroit Electrical Car Company shuts down, pretty well marking the end of the very first era of electrical vehicles. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Slide: eight / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy one | EVs arrive in space! The electrical lunar rover ferries astronauts around the moon. It’s raunchy to find an EV anywhere on Earth, tho’. GETTY Photos
Slide: nine / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy two | Spurred by federal incentives fastened to the Clean Air Act of 1970, engineer Victor Wouk modifies a one thousand nine hundred seventy two Buick Skylark to make it a gas-electric hybrid. The government awards him $33,000 for the design but doesn’t take the idea further. COURTESY OF EPA.GOV
Slide: ten / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy three | The Arab oil embargo, with its resulting high oil prices and fuel shortages, scares the US into thinking about EVs again. GM develops an urban electrical concept prototype. ALAMY
Slide: eleven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy four | Sebring-Vanguard’s toylike CitiCar debuts at the Electrical Vehicle Symposium in Washington, DC. It has a top speed of thirty mph and can travel forty miles on a single charge—in warm weather. CORBIS
Slide: twelve / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eighty six | Oil prices fall again. Never mind about those EVs, bring on the SUVs! ALAMY
Slide: thirteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety six | Responding to a California mandate requiring zero-emissions vehicles, GM comes out with the EV1. Popular Science calls it “a turning point for the fledgling electrified car industry.” But the cars end up getting recalled. CORBIS
Slide: fourteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety seven | Toyota introduces the Prius and sells Legal,000 units in the very first year of production. It becomes the world’s very first mass-produced gas-electric hybrid vehicle. ATSUSHI TSUKADA/AP PHOTO
Slide: fifteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand six | Tesla Motors debuts its Roadster at the San Francisco International Auto Showcase. It can travel more than two hundred miles before needing to recharge. Celebrities like it. ALAMY
Slide: sixteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand nine | Nissan rolls out the Leaf. The fully electrified car can go about eighty miles on a charge and reach ninety mph. It will eventually become the top-selling electrified vehicle in the US. GETTY Pictures
Slide: seventeen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand ten | GM releases the Chevy Volt, the very first commercially available plug-in hybrid, with a gas engine that supplements the electrified drive once the battery is depleted. GETTY Pics
Slide: eighteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand twelve | For around $70,000, drivers can now buy Tesla’s Model S, a luxury electrified sedan with two hundred eight miles of range and a 302-hp motor. The Fresh York Times calls it the most fundamental switch in automotive design since the Model T. And it looks amazing. RUARIDH STEWART/ZUMAPRESS.COM/CORBIS
Slide: nineteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand fifteen | General Motors unveils the Bolt concept vehicle, a four-door hatchback that promises to go two hundred miles on a charge and sell for about $30,000—just below the average cost of an American car. GETTY Pictures
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Right around the time the EV1 was ready to hit dealerships, California weakened its mandate, relieving the legal pressure on automakers to suggest zero-emissions cars. And after a few lackluster years marketing its electrified automobile, GM unceremoniously dumped the money-bleeding EV1. It declined to renew the leases on the toughly 1,100 cars it had put on the road, recalled the vehicles, and—with an inadver&bashful;tently theatrical flourish—crushed almost all of them and piled their carcasses in a junkyard. The experiment cost the company about $1 billion and was a public relations disaster. Years later a documentary that dramatically recounted the EV1 saga, Who Killed the Electrified Car?, helped cement the perception that a feckless GM had committed technological infanticide.
By the mid-2000s, executives realized what a colossal mistake they had made. After railing out the ’90s with a doubled-down commitment to its traditional profit centers—SUVs and light trucks—GM sustained $8.6 billion in losses in 2005. Toyota, which boasted $9 billion in profits that same year, was on the edge of surpassing GM as the world’s largest carmaker. The Japanese stiff was railing to victory on a reputation for economical, fuel-efficient cars, especially the Prius, an egg-shaped hybrid that delivered fifty miles per gallon and sold in the hundreds of thousands.
All of that pissed off Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chair for product develop&timid;ment at the time. A cigar-chomping veteran of the car industry with a penchant for irascible quotes—he once panned GM’s cars for looking like “angry kitchen appliances”—Lutz was especially attuned to the big narratives that drive public perception of the auto industry (while under the surface, most of the real activity is driven by recondite stuff like regulation, industrial and trade policy, labor economics, and logistics). Lutz hated how the Prius had put a saintly halo on Toyota, which sold slew of SUVs and pickups, while hapless GM was mocked for making the Hummer. He also took notice when Silicon Valley upstart Tesla made a major splash with its public debut, announcing it planned to make a lithium-ion-battery-powered luxury sports car.
And so Lutz, a fellow who would later proclaim that global heating is a “total crock of shit,” began lobbying GM’s leadership to make the largest, greenest play possible. He didn’t want GM to just build a me-too hybrid to challenge with Toyota. He wished GM to build a fully electrical car that almost anyone could afford to buy and that wasn’t limited by range. He dreamed, in effect, to build the Bolt. But the technology wasn’t there.
The car that GM actually built at Lutz’s insistence—the Chevy Volt—went on to become one of the most talked-about American vehicles in decades, for a entire host of reasons, many of them symbolic. But in-house, says Tony Posawatz, the engineer who led the team that developed the Volt, it was very clear that this was going to be a transitional car—a warm-up for GM’s electrical long game.
For the Volt, GM lodged on a design that was neither a Prius-style hybrid nor a unspoiled electrical car but something in inbetween called an extended-range electrical vehicle. The setup would combine a plug-in battery strong enough to serve as the car’s main power train, plus a motor with a puny gas engine that would work as a generator, creating violet wand to keep the vehicle going when the battery was depleted. But even that hybrid design coerced GM engineers, to a remarkable extent, to become cavemen rediscovering fire.
Being inwards the Bolt feels a bit like flying economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane.
Almost everything switches when you opt for a fundamentally different power train, so GM’s greatest advantage—more than a century of practice building cars—was all but moot. Car structure was different, since they were building around a battery, not an engine. The brakes, steering, and air conditioner were powered differently. Fresh systems, from electromagnetics for the motors to onboard and off-board charging, each came with its own learning curve. The engineers didn’t have established tests to go after. Just turning on the car required finding the ideal sequence of electrical signals from more than a dozen modules. “Oh my God, it took us forever to get the very first Volt to begin,” Fletcher says.
Then there was the battery. Lithium-ion chemistry was a fresh thing ten years ago, and the Volt team quickly discovered how much of a anguish in the neck it is. “Batteries wear out just sitting there, and they wear out when you cycle them,” says Bill Wallace, GM’s head battery engineer. “And then they wear out if you over-discharge them, or if you overcharge them.” They’re enormously sensitive to temperature. They switch form as they charge and discharge. They can also catch fire.
In brief, all these problems were fresh to a company whose practice lay in what Lutz calls “the oily bits.” So the team set about developing the expertise it lacked. GM established a curriculum with the University of Michigan to train battery engineers. It packed a vacant building in Brownstown, Michigan, with the equipment to make battery packs. The engineers created test procedures and wrote them down as they went. They modeled different use cases for the Volt, from a woman in northern Minnesota who butt-plugs in every night to a dude in Miami who drives one hundred miles a day. They built the battery lab and brought in the blue environmental chambers, then used them to see how the battery would stand up to each situation. “We invented the idea of what the lab should be,” Fletcher says.
The Volt project was still in its infancy when the US economy tanked in 2008, sending GM into shock. The company began losing $1 billion a month and embarked cleaving off limbs in desperation, eliminating or selling its Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Hummer brands. The Volt project could lightly have fallen under the ax as well—but instead it took on an outsize significance. President Obama seized on the car as one reason GM was worth a $40 billion bailout, holding it up as a sign that the bankrupt automaker could adapt. The Volt ultimately went on sale in December 2010, to accolades (“A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet.” —The Wall Street Journal) and jeers (“roller skates with a plug” —Fox News).
As for actual drivers, they were pretty into the Volt. The car posted stellar customer satisfaction ratings, and almost seventy percent of its drivers were fresh to Chevy. The trouble was that there simply weren’t many buyers. In 2011, GM’s CEO at the time, Dan Akerson, told reporters he wished to produce 60,000 Volts the next year. To date, Chevy has sold about 80,000—total. The Volt was a powerful symbol, but it wasn’t that significant a vehicle. Buyers soon had more innovative cars to choose from. The all-electric Nissan Leaf hit the market at around the same time as the Volt, for a similar price. In 2012, Tesla introduced its first-generation Model S, with upwards of two hundred miles per charge.
But the real significance of the Volt was that it gave GM a brand-new manufacturing and engineering platform for electrical vehicles, where it had had none before. “Once you make the leap, and you have a big battery, and you have electrical motors,” Posawatz says, “you’ve done all the hard stuff.” And then you might just see an chance to gun for the finish line.
O N THE MORNING of April Two, 2014, US senator Barbara Boxer glared down from behind a microphone in a Senate hearing room in Washington, DC, requiring answers from America’s industrial problem child, General Motors. The company had just instituted its largest recall ever, after reports that faulty ignition switches on millions of cars from the 2000s had been responsible for numerous deaths and injuries. Boxer, as part of a congressional investigative committee, was castigating GM’s fresh CEO, Mary Barra, who had been in the job a mere three weeks. “Woman to woman, I am very disappointed,” Boxer said. “The culture that you are indicating here today is a culture of the status quo.”
Barra sat there, practising the studiously neutral, calmly repentant facial nonexpression of someone getting grilled by Congress. The main theme of Barra’s testimony was that the old GM—with a docile, nodding bureaucratic culture that swept problems under the rug—had died with the company’s two thousand nine bankruptcy, bailout, and restructuring and that the fresh GM was different. But the “culture of the status quo” charge wasn’t so effortless for Barra, of all people, to deflect: She’s not only a GM lifer, she’s a second-generation lifer. Her dad was a die-maker for Pontiac, and she commenced with the company when she was Legal. (She’s fifty four now.)
On the other mitt, Barra had a strong arm in a lot of the most transformative stuff going on at GM. Chief case in point: Not long before she became CEO, Barra had been tapped to run development of fresh products, the position once held by Lutz. So by the time she was hauled before Congress in two thousand fourteen to response for the company’s past sins, she had been overseeing the efforts of GM’s electrification gang for three years.
When I walk into Barra’s office one latest fall day, she’s standing in front of her desk wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, and an Apple Witness. (Offsetting the Steve Jobs vibe just a bit is a calendar on the wall that shows a fluffy white cat in the backseat of an Opel Corsa.) As Barra tells it, the process to develop the Bolt truly took off when GM’s team was regrouping after a major setback. In 2012, GM invested in a California startup called Envia, which had developed a fresh battery that posted incredible spectacle numbers. Envia promised to supply a 200-mile battery by fall 2013. But its technology turned out to be a flop.
Not only is GM likely to win the race, it may have the winner’s circle to itself for some time.
So in spring 2013, GM’s senior leaders and the most significant figures on its electrification team gathered in the virtual reality room of the company’s Design Center to assess the situation. “We began to go, ‘OK, what can we do?’” Barra says. Was there another route to two hundred miles? The EV folks hesitated but commenced pulling together different elements—improvements in battery life, cost savings in motors—that, combined, might represent a way forward. “We can thrust our way toward 200,” Fletcher recalls thinking.
The meeting turned into a full-on brainstorming session, one that ended, Barra says, with what looked like a viable path to the Bolt: “And we all went, ‘Let’s do that.’”
And so the design team set to work devising a car that would appeal to consumers well beyond the ecowarrior, early-adopter demographic. Some flashy ideas were thrown out early on: A carbon fiber bod? Lightweight but too expensive at this price point. Suicide doors? Eye-catching, but they added mass without functional benefits. Capped wheels? Good for aerodynamics, but they signaled something science project–y. “It’s got to look like a serious car,” design lead Stuart Norris says. The team delivered as spacious an interior as possible, with upright glass to make the relatively puny car feel more substantial and a raised driving position for a commanding view of the road.
Meantime, the technical folks set about making Norris’ design go two hundred miles on a charge. At their most basic, batteries are made of powders, the morphology of which—grain size, distribution, how they’re trussed together—is key to the power and energy of each cell. LG, General Motors’ battery provider, had cooked up a noticeably improved cell that retained energy capacity particularly well when it got hot, as lithium-ion batteries tend to. That meant Chevy could use a smaller cooling system and stick more cells in the battery pack for more range. LG also improved the battery’s conductivity, so the ions flowed quicker, translating to quicker acceleration (the Bolt can go from zero to sixty in seven seconds).
As soon as the battery was ready, engineers at GM’s Michigan proving ground hacked together a bastard car using the front half of a Chevy Sonic and the rear of a Buick Encore. They called it the Soncore and fitted it with the Bolt battery pack and motor, using the Franken-vehicle to make sure the propulsion system worked. That way, once the real Bolt bod was in development, the teams responsible for the car’s chassis controls, vehicle dynamics, and suspension tuning could get right to work.
As two thousand fourteen bled into 2015, Chevy engineers built about one hundred Bolt prototypes, shipping them around the US for real-world testing to verify the findings of the battery lab. The cars went to Arizona and Florida. The team drove them up the California coast and negotiated San Francisco traffic. They ran the prototypes over rough roads, looking for ways to reduce noise and stimulation (extra-tricky in a car with no engine to mask odd sounds). They chose specially developed Michelin tires to minimize rolling resistance and improve range. Working swift, they made thousands of switches to the car, permanently looking for ways to improve. By the time I arrived for a test-drive, in October, the team still had more than five hundred open work orders to finish.
T HE Very first TIME I lay eyes on the Bolt, it’s packaged in swirling black-and-white camouflage—the effect known as dazzle—designed to hide its forms and lines from cameras. That’s about as flashy as things get. There are no gull-wing doors or retracting treats like on some Teslas. The Bolt sits on modest 17-inch wheels. It emerges to be a nice, of-the-moment-looking hatchback, like a Prius C or a Honda Fit with a shorter bondage mask and taller roof. The main thing that indicates its revolutionary potential is the dashboard, which tells me I have one hundred ninety two miles of range, a number I’ve only seen in Teslas.
Josh Tavel, the Bolt’s chief engineer, invites me to take a seat behind the steering wheel and, from the passenger seat, starts displaying me around the interior. He embarks with the caveat that the vehicle is only about eighty percent done—thus the big crimson emergency stop button just above the cup holders and the fire extinguisher in the backseat.
As I put the Bolt into drive and begin exploring the GM Technical Center’s eleven miles of roads, Tavel gives me a tour of the interior. It’s decked out with a bunch of digital-age bells and whistles: On the dashboard is a high-definition Ten.2-inch touchscreen. There’s a special space shaped to hold an iPhone 6, with a charge port right there, and a console compartment that fits a tablet. The rearview mirror can pipe in a display from cameras on the back of the car. The car also associates individual settings with different keys, so it knows whether you or your spouse is driving and tunes the radio appropriately. The backseat is remarkably roomy for a compact car, especially when it comes to headroom. I’m taller than average, and there are three or four inches inbetween my head and the roof.
Overall, being inwards the Bolt feels a little like flying in economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane. You’ve got a screen, an outlet to ass-plug in your phone, enough legroom, and some sleek appointments. It’s not very first class, but it doesn’t caress your nose in that fact the way some economy cabins (and some GM cars) do.
When I meet with Barra after my test-drive, we commence by talking about the big-picture stuff: how the car could fundamentally switch public attitudes toward electrical vehicles. But she quickly moves on to the little things: the roominess, the connectivity, how the trunk opening is shaped so you can slide in that bookshelf you bought at Ikea. “No one’s gonna buy two hundred miles if it doesn’t come with a good vehicle,” Barra says.
C HEVROLET SAYS it is on track to embark delivering the Bolt by year’s end. If that happens, it’s fairly possible the company will have the winner’s circle to itself for some time. It now shows up that the next Nissan Leaf will have one hundred ten miles of range—a modest improvement over the current model. Volkswagen is at least two years away from its target. (It’s also tied up with a potentially ruinous scandal after cheating on emissions tests for millions of its diesel vehicles.) And Tesla has a track record of running about two years behind its production targets. But all the automakers will need to embark building attractive zero-emissions vehicles somehow, and soon. It’s significant to understand that the market for electrified cars is still driven less by corporate profit-seeking than by government arm-twisting. In the US, federal fuel standards require automakers to achieve a fleet average of harshly thirty four miles per gallon in two thousand sixteen and forty nine mpg by 2025. On top of that, ten states won’t let automakers operate unless they sell at least some zero-emission vehicles. All the automakers have to figure out how to get there.
Photo by: Joe Pugliese
If you’ve noticed certain names missing from the list of contenders for the race to two hundred miles—chiefly Toyota—that’s mainly because Japanese and German automakers have focused on hydrogen fuel cell cars, an embryonic, expensive, and zero-carbon-emission technology that has its own problems, like a lack of national fueling infrastructure. Other automakers have responded to the rising tide of mandates with vehicles developed solely to meet requirements and avoid fines (shades of the EV1). The resulting cars are less than compelling and a agony for automakers. In May 2014, Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne actually asked people not to buy the all-electric version of the Fiat 500, telling, “Every time I sell one, it costs me $14,000.” But the math of electrical vehicles may begin to switch with a mass-market EV like the Bolt, whose sales numbers could be in a different league. Barra wouldn’t disclose a sales goal—Chevy got pretty burned after missing its announced target for the Volt. Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Karl Brauer says that anything more than 50,000 units a year would be a gigantic coup. A number like that would make the Bolt the best-selling unspoiled electrical ever, ahead of Tesla and leagues ahead of Nissan’s Leaf and BMW’s fresh and funky i3.
Even if sales revenue from the Bolt doesn’t equal what GM has spent developing the car—which is likely, because battery power is still expensive—the Bolt will bring other benefits to GM. The car’s fuel economy rating will be so good that even just decent sales would significantly boost GM’s average fleet-fuel-economy numbers, ironically permitting the automaker to sell more pickups and SUVs, where the real profit margins are.
Perhaps most of all, executives are hoping that the Bolt will switch the narrative about GM—which is significant because a hapless company that churns out bulky trucks and lackluster sedans doesn’t have much place in the future. These days it’s a refrain among GM executives that in the next five to ten years, the auto industry will switch as much as it has in the past 50. As batteries get better and cheaper, the propagation of electrical cars will reinforce the need to build out charging infrastructure and develop clean ways to generate tens unit. Cars will commence speaking to each other and to our infrastructure. They will drive themselves, smudging the line inbetween driver and passenger. Google, Apple, Uber, and other tech companies are invading the transportation marketplace with fresh technology and no ingrained attitudes about how things are done.
The Bolt is the most concrete evidence yet that the largest car companies in the world are contemplating a very different kind of future too. GM knows the stir from gasoline to electric current will be a minor one compared to where customers are headed next: away from driving and away from possessing cars. In 2017, GM will give Cadillac sedans the capability to control themselves on the highway. Instead of dismissing Google as a smart-aleck kid grabbing a seat at the adults’ table, GM is talking about partnering with the tech stiff on a multiplicity of efforts. Last year GM launched car-sharing programs in Manhattan and Germany and has promised more to come. In January the company announced that it’s investing $500 million in Lyft, and that it plans to work with the ride-sharing company to develop a national network of self-driving cars. GM is thinking about how to use those fresh business models as it comes in emerging markets like India, where lower incomes and already packed metro areas make its standard move—put two cars in every garage—unworkable.
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This all feels strange coming from GM because, for all the switches of the past decade and despite the use of words like disruption and mobility, it’s no Silicon Valley garment. The guys and women who built the Bolt are unspoiled Detroit. Mary Barra, Tony Posawatz, and Larry Nitz are all GM lifers. As a kid, Pam Fletcher built engines for race cars with her father. Josh Tavel raced motocross before getting into stock cars as both a driver and an engineer. He practically sweats gasoline. And yet he led the engineering team that could bring electrified driving into the mainstream.
I’ve been driving the Bolt around the Technical Center campus for about fifteen minutes when Tavel brings up something that’s been bothering him. “You haven’t indeed stepped on it yet,” he says. I’ve been taking my time to get a feel for the car, treating it gently on humid roads in the presence of its chief creator. But knowing what I do about the rapid pickup of electrical cars—unlike combustion-powered vehicles, they produce instant torque—I’m glad to oblige. I find a quiet corner of the campus and come to a stop with nothing but clear road ahead. I jam my right foot down and the almost silent Bolt is abruptly a noise machine: The tires squeal on the moist pavement. After a half 2nd, they catch and the Bolt zips ahead, if just a bit shakily. Chassis control is not fairly ideal yet, Tavel says. That’ll be immobilized before production starts—in just a few brief months.
Associate editor Alex Davies (@adavies47) writes about the future of transportation for WIRED .
This article shows up in the February two thousand sixteen issue.
STYLING BY JADE LAUREN; MAKEUP BY FLYNN PYYKKONEN; HAIR BY MELISSA KERYN; JACKET BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, COURTESY OF NEIMAN MARCUS.
How GM Hammer Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrical Car, WIRED
How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrified Car
Ten years ago, the room where I’m standing would have been packed with a earsplitting roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one quaking atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop covers used joysticks to adjust its throttle and stream. ¶ Today, tho’, this former engine testing facility at General Motors’ Warren Technical Center, outside Detroit, is almost dead silent. From one end to the other—across a space toughly the size of two soccer fields—the room is blanketed with the low-frequency hum of cooling fans, interrupted only by the occasional clack of a keyboard and, on this particular morning, the chatter of Larry Nitz’s voice. ¶ “Let’s take a walk,” he says after we’ve lingered in the doorway a moment. A voluble fellow with a head of gray curls, Nitz is chief of electrification at General Motors, and this facility—the largest automotive battery lab in North America—is his domain.
GM CEO Mary Barra, February two thousand sixteen Photo by: Joe Pugliese
In place of all the old V-8s, a grid of eighteen massive cobalt blue boxes, each ten feet high and eight feet broad, now predominate the lab. They look a little like walk-in freezers, which isn’t too far off. They’re climate simulators, Nitz says as we file past row after row of them. Battery chemistry is fiendishly sensitive to temperature and humidity, he explains, and electrical cars have to hold up in every kind of weather. So inwards each blue chamber, GM has created a virtual Yukon winter or Florida summer or Arizona spring. The enclosed batteries—not the familiar 40-pound bricks that need a hop commence from time to time, but 1,000-pound behemoths built to power an entire car—are hooked up to testing equipment that charges and discharges them in patterns designed to mimic the ways
people drive in cities, in the suburbs, and on the highway. The tests run twenty four hours a day and in muffle, generating terabytes of data.
But Nitz hasn’t brought me here just to demonstrate me a bunch of blue boxes. Near the end of the room, he eventually stops us in front of a large industrial dolly. Sitting on top is a slick black alien-looking thing, about the size and form of a very thick rectangular kitchen tabletop. It’s three feet broad and six feet long and has dozens of plastic-tipped, copper-colored wires protruding from its surface in a sprawling mess of metallic spaghetti.
This dark monolith is the thing I’ve come to Detroit to see. It’s the technological heart of what promises to be the most significant vehicle General Motors has produced in decades: the very first truly mass-market all-electric car. “This,” Nitz says, “is the battery pack for the Bolt.”
E LECTRIC VEHICLES have been available to American consumers for the better part of two decades. The very first EVs looked like science projects only a Sierra Club member could love, while today an all-electric luxury sedan—the Tesla Model S—is routinely described as the coolest car on the planet. Early electrical cars had a maximum range of fifty miles; today’s highest-rated EV—again, the Model S—can go as many as three hundred miles before it needs to buttplug in. And yet, for all that progress, fully electrical vehicles still make up less than one percent of US auto sales. There’s a straightforward reason for this: The only one that goes far enough costs far too much.
Most of us simply can’t shell out more than $70,000 for a Tesla. But comparatively affordable electrics like the Nissan Leaf still travel only about eighty miles on a charge—not far enough to dispel the dreaded “range anxiety” that such a low number provokes in most American drivers. A two thousand thirteen investigate by the California Center for Sustainable Energy found that only nine percent of consumers said they would be pleased with an electrified car that can go one hundred miles on a charge. Increase that range to two hundred miles, tho’, and seventy percent of potential drivers said they’d be pleased.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called two hundred miles the “minimum threshold” for broad public adoption of electrified cars. Suggest that kind of range at a price that’s affordable to the average consumer and the potential market for electrics abruptly looks a entire lot thicker. Get there very first and that fresh market could be all yours.
In its long history, General Motors has managed to kill the electrified car not once but twice.
That’s why, over the past duo of years, a number of major automakers—General Motors, Nissan, Volkswagen—have lined up with plans to suggest an electrical car with (yep) approximately two hundred miles of range, for a price somewhere around the average cost of a fresh American car, about $33,000. They all hope to do so quickly, as fuel efficiency requirements are ratcheting up every year. And they all hope to get there before media darling Tesla does. Musk—billionaire, celebrity, space and solar-energy mogul, would-be colonizer of Mars—has said since two thousand six that Tesla’s “master plan” is to work toward building an affordable, long-range electrified car. And in two thousand fourteen he said that aim was in look: In two thousand sixteen Tesla would unveil a car called the Model three with a sticker price of $35,000 and two hundred miles of range. Production would begin in 2017.
In brief, the electrified car business has taken the form of an old-fashioned race for a prize—a race in very soft sand. There’s no Moore’s law for batteries, which are chemical not digital. Cell development is all slow, arduous trial and error. When your aim is to drive energy efficiency up while driving costs down on a mass industrial scale, there aren’t many shortcuts or late-night inspirations to be had. But now it looks pretty clear who the winner will be. And it ain’t Tesla.
General Motors very first unveiled the Chevy Bolt as a concept car in January 2015, billing it as a vehicle that would suggest two hundred miles of range for just $30,000 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit). Barring any unforeseen delays, the very first Bolts will roll off the production line at GM’s Orion Assembly facility in Michigan by the end of 2016. As Pam Fletcher, GM’s executive chief engineer for electrical vehicles, recently put it to me with a certain sneer: “Who wants to be 2nd?”
For GM, the Bolt stands to suggest a head begin in a fresh kind of market for electrified cars. But for the rest of us, there’s a broader significance to this news. It’s not just that Chevy will likely be very first. It’s that a car company as lumbering and gigantic as GM, with infrastructure and manufacturing capacity on an epic scale, has gotten there first—and is there now. Tesla is nimble, innovative, and joy to witness, as companies go. But the Bolt is far more significant than any suggesting from Tesla ever could be. Why? Think of the old eyed about how long it takes to turn an aircraft carrier around: It’s slow, and there’s not much to see at any given moment. But the thing about people who actually manage to turn one around is: They’ve got a freaking aircraft carrier.
Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, is a company lifer who has spent years shepherding the Bolt into existence. Joe Pugliese
B EFORE WE GO any further, let’s pause for a moment to relish just how richly ironic it is that General Motors is about to take the lead in the electrified car race. GM is, after all, a company that went bankrupt just seven years ago and survived only with the help of a federal bailout; a company whose board of directors was described by President Obama’s auto czar, Steven Rattner, as “utterly docile” in the face of forthcoming disaster; a company that has been the butt of jokes about its lackluster, unreliable, macho cars for years; a company that churned out Hummers while Toyota gave us the Prius. And even more to the point, we’re talking about a company that has a long history with electrical vehicles—the way South Park has a long history with Kenny.
That’s right. General Motors killed the electrical car. More than once.
In the earliest days of the auto industry, electrified cars were about as popular as their combustion-powered counterparts. Just like today, they were cleaner and quieter but more limited in range than the competition. Plus, they didn’t require a forearm crank to start—an annoying feature of early combustion vehicles that periodically resulted in cracked fingers. But in 1912, Cadillac, GM’s luxury arm, came out with the very first electrical starter for gas-powered vehicles. Electrical cars died out shortly thereafter, and in a cloud of harass GM surged to become the world’s largest carmaker.
Fast-forward eighty four years, and for a brief interlude it looked like GM was about to take the lead in bringing electrics back. In 1996, in response to a California mandate that required automakers to have zero-emissions vehicles ready for market by 1998, GM flipped out the EV1, the very first mass-produced electrical vehicle of the modern era. The funny-looking two-seater had a range of about fifty miles and was suggested for lease to consumers in California and Arizona. It was impractical, dinky, and entirely fated. It earned a puny coterie of devotees but held little appeal for mainstream consumers. It used almost all unique parts, forfeiting the advantages of GM’s scale. And even as GM’s EV1 team was busy building the car, GM’s lawyers were lobbying hard, side by side with the other big automakers, to get California to back off its requirement.
Charging Through History
In the early days of the automobile, electrical cars outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles on America’s rutted, manure-strewn roads. But even as the internal combustion engine became the automobile’s superior power source, the desire of the electrified car never died. —Jordan Crucchiola
Slide: one / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety one | Iowa chemist William Morrison builds the very first successful American EV. It tops out at fourteen mph. The 768-pound, 24-cell battery makes up half the vehicle’s total weight.
Slide: two / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety seven | The Pope Manufacturing Company—builder of the Columbia Electrified Phaeton Mark III—becomes the very first large-scale EV maker in the US. Electrified taxis pop up in Fresh York. Wiki Commons
Slide: three / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred | Ferdinand Porsche is credited with creating the very first gas-electric hybrid, the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus. COURTESY OF PORSCHE
Slide: four / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seven | The most successful EV manufacturer of the early 20th century, the Detroit Electrical Car Company, embarks producing vehicles, ultimately making more than 13,000 of them. GETTY Pics
Slide: five / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eight | Henry Ford’s Model T kicks off the modern age of combustion-engine-powered cars. CORBIS
Slide: six / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred twelve | GM’s Charles Kettering invents the electrified starter, eliminating the need to hand-crank gas-powered cars, which were already cheaper than EVs. Now they’re lighter to use too. COURTESY OF GM
Slide: seven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred thirty nine | The Detroit Electrical Car Company shuts down, pretty well marking the end of the very first era of electrical vehicles. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Slide: eight / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy one | EVs arrive in space! The electrified lunar rover ferries astronauts around the moon. It’s harsh to find an EV anywhere on Earth, tho’. GETTY Pictures
Slide: nine / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy two | Spurred by federal incentives fastened to the Clean Air Act of 1970, engineer Victor Wouk modifies a one thousand nine hundred seventy two Buick Skylark to make it a gas-electric hybrid. The government awards him $33,000 for the design but doesn’t take the idea further. COURTESY OF EPA.GOV
Slide: ten / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy three | The Arab oil embargo, with its resulting high oil prices and fuel shortages, scares the US into thinking about EVs again. GM develops an urban electrified concept prototype. ALAMY
Slide: eleven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy four | Sebring-Vanguard’s toylike CitiCar debuts at the Electrified Vehicle Symposium in Washington, DC. It has a top speed of thirty mph and can travel forty miles on a single charge—in warm weather. CORBIS
Slide: twelve / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eighty six | Oil prices fall again. Never mind about those EVs, bring on the SUVs! ALAMY
Slide: thirteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety six | Responding to a California mandate requiring zero-emissions vehicles, GM comes out with the EV1. Popular Science calls it “a turning point for the fledgling electrical car industry.” But the cars end up getting recalled. CORBIS
Slide: fourteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety seven | Toyota introduces the Prius and sells Legitimate,000 units in the very first year of production. It becomes the world’s very first mass-produced gas-electric hybrid vehicle. ATSUSHI TSUKADA/AP PHOTO
Slide: fifteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand six | Tesla Motors debuts its Roadster at the San Francisco International Auto Showcase. It can travel more than two hundred miles before needing to recharge. Celebrities like it. ALAMY
Slide: sixteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand nine | Nissan rolls out the Leaf. The fully electrical car can go about eighty miles on a charge and reach ninety mph. It will eventually become the top-selling electrified vehicle in the US. GETTY Pics
Slide: seventeen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand ten | GM releases the Chevy Volt, the very first commercially available plug-in hybrid, with a gas engine that supplements the electrified drive once the battery is depleted. GETTY Pics
Slide: eighteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand twelve | For around $70,000, drivers can now buy Tesla’s Model S, a luxury electrified sedan with two hundred eight miles of range and a 302-hp motor. The Fresh York Times calls it the most fundamental switch in automotive design since the Model T. And it looks amazing. RUARIDH STEWART/ZUMAPRESS.COM/CORBIS
Slide: nineteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand fifteen | General Motors unveils the Bolt concept vehicle, a four-door hatchback that promises to go two hundred miles on a charge and sell for about $30,000—just below the average cost of an American car. GETTY Pictures
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Right around the time the EV1 was ready to hit dealerships, California weakened its mandate, relieving the legal pressure on automakers to suggest zero-emissions cars. And after a few lackluster years marketing its electrified automobile, GM unceremoniously dumped the money-bleeding EV1. It declined to renew the leases on the toughly 1,100 cars it had put on the road, recalled the vehicles, and—with an inadver&bashful;tently theatrical flourish—crushed almost all of them and piled their carcasses in a junkyard. The experiment cost the company about $1 billion and was a public relations disaster. Years later a documentary that dramatically recounted the EV1 saga, Who Killed the Electrical Car?, helped cement the perception that a feckless GM had committed technological infanticide.
By the mid-2000s, executives realized what a colossal mistake they had made. After railing out the ’90s with a doubled-down commitment to its traditional profit centers—SUVs and light trucks—GM sustained $8.6 billion in losses in 2005. Toyota, which boasted $9 billion in profits that same year, was on the edge of surpassing GM as the world’s largest carmaker. The Japanese rigid was railing to victory on a reputation for economical, fuel-efficient cars, especially the Prius, an egg-shaped hybrid that delivered fifty miles per gallon and sold in the hundreds of thousands.
All of that pissed off Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chair for product develop&bashful;ment at the time. A cigar-chomping veteran of the car industry with a penchant for irascible quotes—he once panned GM’s cars for looking like “angry kitchen appliances”—Lutz was especially attuned to the big narratives that drive public perception of the auto industry (while under the surface, most of the real act is driven by recondite stuff like regulation, industrial and trade policy, labor economics, and logistics). Lutz hated how the Prius had put a saintly halo on Toyota, which sold slew of SUVs and pickups, while hapless GM was mocked for making the Hummer. He also took notice when Silicon Valley upstart Tesla made a major splash with its public debut, announcing it planned to make a lithium-ion-battery-powered luxury sports car.
And so Lutz, a man who would later announce that global heating is a “total crock of shit,” began lobbying GM’s leadership to make the thickest, greenest play possible. He didn’t want GM to just build a me-too hybrid to contest with Toyota. He wished GM to build a fully electrified car that almost anyone could afford to buy and that wasn’t limited by range. He desired, in effect, to build the Bolt. But the technology wasn’t there.
The car that GM actually built at Lutz’s insistence—the Chevy Volt—went on to become one of the most talked-about American vehicles in decades, for a entire host of reasons, many of them symbolic. But in-house, says Tony Posawatz, the engineer who led the team that developed the Volt, it was very clear that this was going to be a transitional car—a warm-up for GM’s electrical long game.
For the Volt, GM lodged on a design that was neither a Prius-style hybrid nor a unspoiled electrified car but something in inbetween called an extended-range electrified vehicle. The setup would combine a plug-in battery strong enough to serve as the car’s main power train, plus a motor with a petite gas engine that would work as a generator, creating electrical play to keep the vehicle going when the battery was depleted. But even that hybrid design coerced GM engineers, to a remarkable extent, to become cavemen rediscovering fire.
Being inwards the Bolt feels a bit like flying economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane.
Almost everything switches when you opt for a fundamentally different power train, so GM’s greatest advantage—more than a century of practice building cars—was all but moot. Car structure was different, since they were building around a battery, not an engine. The brakes, steering, and air conditioner were powered differently. Fresh systems, from electromagnetics for the motors to onboard and off-board charging, each came with its own learning curve. The engineers didn’t have established tests to go after. Just turning on the car required finding the ideal sequence of electrical signals from more than a dozen modules. “Oh my God, it took us forever to get the very first Volt to commence,” Fletcher says.
Then there was the battery. Lithium-ion chemistry was a fresh thing ten years ago, and the Volt team quickly discovered how much of a ache in the neck it is. “Batteries wear out just sitting there, and they wear out when you cycle them,” says Bill Wallace, GM’s head battery engineer. “And then they wear out if you over-discharge them, or if you overcharge them.” They’re utterly sensitive to temperature. They switch form as they charge and discharge. They can also catch fire.
In brief, all these problems were fresh to a company whose practice lay in what Lutz calls “the oily bits.” So the team set about developing the expertise it lacked. GM established a curriculum with the University of Michigan to train battery engineers. It packed a vacant building in Brownstown, Michigan, with the equipment to make battery packs. The engineers created test procedures and wrote them down as they went. They modeled different use cases for the Volt, from a woman in northern Minnesota who butt-plugs in every night to a dude in Miami who drives one hundred miles a day. They built the battery lab and brought in the blue environmental chambers, then used them to see how the battery would stand up to each situation. “We invented the idea of what the lab should be,” Fletcher says.
The Volt project was still in its infancy when the US economy tanked in 2008, sending GM into shock. The company began losing $1 billion a month and began cleaving off limbs in desperation, eliminating or selling its Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Hummer brands. The Volt project could lightly have fallen under the ax as well—but instead it took on an outsize significance. President Obama seized on the car as one reason GM was worth a $40 billion bailout, holding it up as a sign that the bankrupt automaker could adapt. The Volt eventually went on sale in December 2010, to accolades (“A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet.” —The Wall Street Journal) and jeers (“roller skates with a plug” —Fox News).
As for actual drivers, they were pretty into the Volt. The car posted stellar customer satisfaction ratings, and almost seventy percent of its drivers were fresh to Chevy. The trouble was that there simply weren’t many buyers. In 2011, GM’s CEO at the time, Dan Akerson, told reporters he wished to produce 60,000 Volts the next year. To date, Chevy has sold about 80,000—total. The Volt was a powerful symbol, but it wasn’t that significant a vehicle. Buyers soon had more innovative cars to choose from. The all-electric Nissan Leaf hit the market at around the same time as the Volt, for a similar price. In 2012, Tesla introduced its first-generation Model S, with upwards of two hundred miles per charge.
But the real significance of the Volt was that it gave GM a brand-new manufacturing and engineering platform for electrified vehicles, where it had had none before. “Once you make the leap, and you have a big battery, and you have electrified motors,” Posawatz says, “you’ve done all the hard stuff.” And then you might just see an chance to gun for the finish line.
O N THE MORNING of April Two, 2014, US senator Barbara Boxer glared down from behind a microphone in a Senate hearing room in Washington, DC, requiring answers from America’s industrial problem child, General Motors. The company had just instituted its largest recall ever, after reports that faulty ignition switches on millions of cars from the 2000s had been responsible for numerous deaths and injuries. Boxer, as part of a congressional investigative committee, was castigating GM’s fresh CEO, Mary Barra, who had been in the job a mere three weeks. “Woman to woman, I am very disappointed,” Boxer said. “The culture that you are signifying here today is a culture of the status quo.”
Barra sat there, practising the studiously neutral, calmly repentant facial nonexpression of someone getting grilled by Congress. The main theme of Barra’s testimony was that the old GM—with a docile, nodding bureaucratic culture that swept problems under the rug—had died with the company’s two thousand nine bankruptcy, bailout, and restructuring and that the fresh GM was different. But the “culture of the status quo” charge wasn’t so effortless for Barra, of all people, to deflect: She’s not only a GM lifer, she’s a second-generation lifer. Her dad was a die-maker for Pontiac, and she commenced with the company when she was Eighteen. (She’s fifty four now.)
On the other arm, Barra had a strong mitt in a lot of the most transformative stuff going on at GM. Chief case in point: Not long before she became CEO, Barra had been tapped to run development of fresh products, the position once held by Lutz. So by the time she was hauled before Congress in two thousand fourteen to reaction for the company’s past sins, she had been overseeing the efforts of GM’s electrification gang for three years.
When I walk into Barra’s office one latest fall day, she’s standing in front of her desk wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, and an Apple Witness. (Offsetting the Steve Jobs vibe just a bit is a calendar on the wall that shows a fluffy white cat in the backseat of an Opel Corsa.) As Barra tells it, the process to develop the Bolt indeed took off when GM’s team was regrouping after a major setback. In 2012, GM invested in a California startup called Envia, which had developed a fresh battery that posted incredible spectacle numbers. Envia promised to produce a 200-mile battery by fall 2013. But its technology turned out to be a flop.
Not only is GM likely to win the race, it may have the winner’s circle to itself for some time.
So in spring 2013, GM’s senior leaders and the most significant figures on its electrification team gathered in the virtual reality room of the company’s Design Center to assess the situation. “We embarked to go, ‘OK, what can we do?’” Barra says. Was there another route to two hundred miles? The EV folks hesitated but began pulling together different elements—improvements in battery life, cost savings in motors—that, combined, might represent a way forward. “We can thrust our way toward 200,” Fletcher recalls thinking.
The meeting turned into a full-on brainstorming session, one that ended, Barra says, with what looked like a viable path to the Bolt: “And we all went, ‘Let’s do that.’”
And so the design team set to work devising a car that would appeal to consumers well beyond the ecowarrior, early-adopter demographic. Some flashy ideas were thrown out early on: A carbon fiber figure? Lightweight but too expensive at this price point. Suicide doors? Eye-catching, but they added mass without functional benefits. Capped wheels? Good for aerodynamics, but they signaled something science project–y. “It’s got to look like a serious car,” design lead Stuart Norris says. The team delivered as spacious an interior as possible, with upright glass to make the relatively petite car feel more substantial and a raised driving position for a commanding view of the road.
Meantime, the technical folks set about making Norris’ design go two hundred miles on a charge. At their most basic, batteries are made of powders, the morphology of which—grain size, distribution, how they’re corded together—is key to the power and energy of each cell. LG, General Motors’ battery provider, had cooked up a noticeably improved cell that retained energy capacity particularly well when it got hot, as lithium-ion batteries tend to. That meant Chevy could use a smaller cooling system and stick more cells in the battery pack for more range. LG also improved the battery’s conductivity, so the ions flowed swifter, translating to quicker acceleration (the Bolt can go from zero to sixty in seven seconds).
As soon as the battery was ready, engineers at GM’s Michigan proving ground hacked together a bastard car using the front half of a Chevy Sonic and the rear of a Buick Encore. They called it the Soncore and fitted it with the Bolt battery pack and motor, using the Franken-vehicle to make sure the propulsion system worked. That way, once the real Bolt bod was in development, the teams responsible for the car’s chassis controls, vehicle dynamics, and suspension tuning could get right to work.
As two thousand fourteen bled into 2015, Chevy engineers built about one hundred Bolt prototypes, shipping them around the US for real-world testing to verify the findings of the battery lab. The cars went to Arizona and Florida. The team drove them up the California coast and negotiated San Francisco traffic. They ran the prototypes over rough roads, looking for ways to reduce noise and stimulation (extra-tricky in a car with no engine to mask odd sounds). They chose specially developed Michelin tires to minimize rolling resistance and improve range. Working swift, they made thousands of switches to the car, permanently looking for ways to improve. By the time I arrived for a test-drive, in October, the team still had more than five hundred open work orders to finish.
T HE Very first TIME I lay eyes on the Bolt, it’s packaged in swirling black-and-white camouflage—the effect known as dazzle—designed to hide its kinks and lines from cameras. That’s about as flashy as things get. There are no gull-wing doors or retracting treats like on some Teslas. The Bolt sits on modest 17-inch wheels. It shows up to be a nice, of-the-moment-looking hatchback, like a Prius C or a Honda Fit with a shorter spandex hood and taller roof. The main thing that indicates its revolutionary potential is the dashboard, which tells me I have one hundred ninety two miles of range, a number I’ve only seen in Teslas.
Josh Tavel, the Bolt’s chief engineer, invites me to take a seat behind the steering wheel and, from the passenger seat, starts demonstrating me around the interior. He embarks with the caveat that the vehicle is only about eighty percent done—thus the big crimson emergency stop button just above the cup holders and the fire extinguisher in the backseat.
As I put the Bolt into drive and commence exploring the GM Technical Center’s eleven miles of roads, Tavel gives me a tour of the interior. It’s decked out with a bunch of digital-age bells and whistles: On the dashboard is a high-definition Ten.2-inch touchscreen. There’s a special space shaped to hold an iPhone 6, with a charge port right there, and a console compartment that fits a tablet. The rearview mirror can pipe in a display from cameras on the back of the car. The car also associates private settings with different keys, so it knows whether you or your spouse is driving and tunes the radio appropriately. The backseat is remarkably roomy for a compact car, especially when it comes to headroom. I’m taller than average, and there are three or four inches inbetween my head and the roof.
Overall, being inwards the Bolt feels a little like flying in economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane. You’ve got a screen, an outlet to buttplug in your phone, enough legroom, and some sleek appointments. It’s not very first class, but it doesn’t grope your nose in that fact the way some economy cabins (and some GM cars) do.
When I meet with Barra after my test-drive, we begin by talking about the big-picture stuff: how the car could fundamentally switch public attitudes toward electrical vehicles. But she quickly moves on to the little things: the roominess, the connectivity, how the trunk opening is shaped so you can slide in that bookshelf you bought at Ikea. “No one’s gonna buy two hundred miles if it doesn’t come with a excellent vehicle,” Barra says.
C HEVROLET SAYS it is on track to embark delivering the Bolt by year’s end. If that happens, it’s fairly possible the company will have the winner’s circle to itself for some time. It now shows up that the next Nissan Leaf will have one hundred ten miles of range—a modest improvement over the current model. Volkswagen is at least two years away from its target. (It’s also tied up with a potentially ruinous scandal after cheating on emissions tests for millions of its diesel vehicles.) And Tesla has a track record of running about two years behind its production targets. But all the automakers will need to embark building attractive zero-emissions vehicles somehow, and soon. It’s significant to understand that the market for electrical cars is still driven less by corporate profit-seeking than by government arm-twisting. In the US, federal fuel standards require automakers to achieve a fleet average of harshly thirty four miles per gallon in two thousand sixteen and forty nine mpg by 2025. On top of that, ten states won’t let automakers operate unless they sell at least some zero-emission vehicles. All the automakers have to figure out how to get there.
Photo by: Joe Pugliese
If you’ve noticed certain names missing from the list of contenders for the race to two hundred miles—chiefly Toyota—that’s mainly because Japanese and German automakers have focused on hydrogen fuel cell cars, an embryonic, expensive, and zero-carbon-emission technology that has its own problems, like a lack of national fueling infrastructure. Other automakers have responded to the rising tide of mandates with vehicles developed solely to meet requirements and avoid fines (shades of the EV1). The resulting cars are less than compelling and a ache for automakers. In May 2014, Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne actually asked people not to buy the all-electric version of the Fiat 500, telling, “Every time I sell one, it costs me $14,000.” But the math of electrical vehicles may begin to switch with a mass-market EV like the Bolt, whose sales numbers could be in a different league. Barra wouldn’t disclose a sales goal—Chevy got pretty burned after missing its announced target for the Volt. Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Karl Brauer says that anything more than 50,000 units a year would be a ample coup. A number like that would make the Bolt the best-selling unspoiled electrified ever, ahead of Tesla and leagues ahead of Nissan’s Leaf and BMW’s fresh and funky i3.
Even if sales revenue from the Bolt doesn’t equal what GM has spent developing the car—which is likely, because battery power is still expensive—the Bolt will bring other benefits to GM. The car’s fuel economy rating will be so good that even just decent sales would significantly boost GM’s average fleet-fuel-economy numbers, ironically permitting the automaker to sell more pickups and SUVs, where the real profit margins are.
Perhaps most of all, executives are hoping that the Bolt will switch the narrative about GM—which is significant because a hapless company that churns out muscled trucks and lackluster sedans doesn’t have much place in the future. These days it’s a refrain among GM executives that in the next five to ten years, the auto industry will switch as much as it has in the past 50. As batteries get better and cheaper, the propagation of electrified cars will reinforce the need to build out charging infrastructure and develop clean ways to generate electric current. Cars will embark speaking to each other and to our infrastructure. They will drive themselves, smudging the line inbetween driver and passenger. Google, Apple, Uber, and other tech companies are invading the transportation marketplace with fresh technology and no ingrained attitudes about how things are done.
The Bolt is the most concrete evidence yet that the largest car companies in the world are contemplating a very different kind of future too. GM knows the budge from gasoline to electric current will be a minor one compared to where customers are headed next: away from driving and away from possessing cars. In 2017, GM will give Cadillac sedans the capability to control themselves on the highway. Instead of dismissing Google as a smart-aleck kid grabbing a seat at the adults’ table, GM is talking about partnering with the tech rigid on a multitude of efforts. Last year GM launched car-sharing programs in Manhattan and Germany and has promised more to come. In January the company announced that it’s investing $500 million in Lyft, and that it plans to work with the ride-sharing company to develop a national network of self-driving cars. GM is thinking about how to use those fresh business models as it comes in emerging markets like India, where lower incomes and already packed metro areas make its standard move—put two cars in every garage—unworkable.
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This all feels strange coming from GM because, for all the switches of the past decade and despite the use of words like disruption and mobility, it’s no Silicon Valley garment. The boys and women who built the Bolt are unspoiled Detroit. Mary Barra, Tony Posawatz, and Larry Nitz are all GM lifers. As a kid, Pam Fletcher built engines for race cars with her father. Josh Tavel raced motocross before getting into stock cars as both a driver and an engineer. He practically sweats gasoline. And yet he led the engineering team that could bring electrified driving into the mainstream.
I’ve been driving the Bolt around the Technical Center campus for about fifteen minutes when Tavel brings up something that’s been bothering him. “You haven’t indeed stepped on it yet,” he says. I’ve been taking my time to get a feel for the car, treating it gently on raw roads in the presence of its chief creator. But knowing what I do about the quick pickup of electrified cars—unlike combustion-powered vehicles, they produce instant torque—I’m blessed to oblige. I find a quiet corner of the campus and come to a stop with nothing but clear road ahead. I tuck my right foot down and the almost silent Bolt is abruptly a noise machine: The tires squeal on the moist pavement. After a half 2nd, they catch and the Bolt zips ahead, if just a bit shakily. Chassis control is not fairly ideal yet, Tavel says. That’ll be immobilized before production starts—in just a few brief months.
Associate editor Alex Davies (@adavies47) writes about the future of transportation for WIRED .
This article emerges in the February two thousand sixteen issue.
STYLING BY JADE LAUREN; MAKEUP BY FLYNN PYYKKONEN; HAIR BY MELISSA KERYN; JACKET BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, COURTESY OF NEIMAN MARCUS.
How GM Hit Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrical Car, WIRED
How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrified Car
Ten years ago, the room where I’m standing would have been packed with a earsplitting roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one shivering atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop glazes used joysticks to adjust its throttle and geyser. ¶ Today, however, this former engine testing facility at General Motors’ Warren Technical Center, outside Detroit, is almost dead silent. From one end to the other—across a space harshly the size of two soccer fields—the room is blanketed with the low-frequency hum of cooling fans, interrupted only by the occasional clack of a keyboard and, on this particular morning, the chatter of Larry Nitz’s voice. ¶ “Let’s take a walk,” he says after we’ve lingered in the doorway a moment. A voluble man with a head of gray curls, Nitz is chief of electrification at General Motors, and this facility—the largest automotive battery lab in North America—is his domain.
GM CEO Mary Barra, February two thousand sixteen Photo by: Joe Pugliese
In place of all the old V-8s, a grid of eighteen massive cobalt blue boxes, each ten feet high and eight feet broad, now predominate the lab. They look a little like walk-in freezers, which isn’t too far off. They’re climate simulators, Nitz says as we file past row after row of them. Battery chemistry is fiendishly sensitive to temperature and humidity, he explains, and electrical cars have to hold up in every kind of weather. So inwards each blue chamber, GM has created a virtual Yukon winter or Florida summer or Arizona spring. The enclosed batteries—not the familiar 40-pound bricks that need a hop embark from time to time, but 1,000-pound behemoths built to power an entire car—are hooked up to testing equipment that charges and discharges them in patterns designed to mimic the ways
people drive in cities, in the suburbs, and on the highway. The tests run twenty four hours a day and in muffle, generating terabytes of data.
But Nitz hasn’t brought me here just to showcase me a bunch of blue boxes. Near the end of the room, he ultimately stops us in front of a large industrial dolly. Sitting on top is a sleek black alien-looking thing, about the size and form of a very thick rectangular kitchen tabletop. It’s three feet broad and six feet long and has dozens of plastic-tipped, copper-colored wires protruding from its surface in a sprawling mess of metallic spaghetti.
This dark monolith is the thing I’ve come to Detroit to see. It’s the technological heart of what promises to be the most significant vehicle General Motors has produced in decades: the very first truly mass-market all-electric car. “This,” Nitz says, “is the battery pack for the Bolt.”
E LECTRIC VEHICLES have been available to American consumers for the better part of two decades. The very first EVs looked like science projects only a Sierra Club member could love, while today an all-electric luxury sedan—the Tesla Model S—is routinely described as the coolest car on the planet. Early electrical cars had a maximum range of fifty miles; today’s highest-rated EV—again, the Model S—can go as many as three hundred miles before it needs to buttplug in. And yet, for all that progress, fully electrified vehicles still make up less than one percent of US auto sales. There’s a straightforward reason for this: The only one that goes far enough costs far too much.
Most of us simply can’t shell out more than $70,000 for a Tesla. But comparatively affordable electrics like the Nissan Leaf still travel only about eighty miles on a charge—not far enough to dispel the dreaded “range anxiety” that such a low number provokes in most American drivers. A two thousand thirteen explore by the California Center for Sustainable Energy found that only nine percent of consumers said they would be sated with an electrical car that can go one hundred miles on a charge. Increase that range to two hundred miles, however, and seventy percent of potential drivers said they’d be pleased.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called two hundred miles the “minimum threshold” for broad public adoption of electrified cars. Suggest that kind of range at a price that’s affordable to the average consumer and the potential market for electrics all of a sudden looks a entire lot thicker. Get there very first and that fresh market could be all yours.
In its long history, General Motors has managed to kill the electrical car not once but twice.
That’s why, over the past duo of years, a number of major automakers—General Motors, Nissan, Volkswagen—have lined up with plans to suggest an electrified car with (yep) approximately two hundred miles of range, for a price somewhere around the average cost of a fresh American car, about $33,000. They all hope to do so quickly, as fuel efficiency requirements are ratcheting up every year. And they all hope to get there before media darling Tesla does. Musk—billionaire, celebrity, space and solar-energy mogul, would-be colonizer of Mars—has said since two thousand six that Tesla’s “master plan” is to work toward building an affordable, long-range electrified car. And in two thousand fourteen he said that purpose was in view: In two thousand sixteen Tesla would unveil a car called the Model three with a sticker price of $35,000 and two hundred miles of range. Production would commence in 2017.
In brief, the electrified car business has taken the form of an old-fashioned race for a prize—a race in very soft sand. There’s no Moore’s law for batteries, which are chemical not digital. Cell development is all slow, arduous trial and error. When your purpose is to drive energy efficiency up while driving costs down on a mass industrial scale, there aren’t many shortcuts or late-night inspirations to be had. But now it looks pretty clear who the winner will be. And it ain’t Tesla.
General Motors very first unveiled the Chevy Bolt as a concept car in January 2015, billing it as a vehicle that would suggest two hundred miles of range for just $30,000 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit). Barring any unforeseen delays, the very first Bolts will roll off the production line at GM’s Orion Assembly facility in Michigan by the end of 2016. As Pam Fletcher, GM’s executive chief engineer for electrical vehicles, recently put it to me with a certain sneer: “Who wants to be 2nd?”
For GM, the Bolt stands to suggest a head begin in a fresh kind of market for electrical cars. But for the rest of us, there’s a broader significance to this news. It’s not just that Chevy will likely be very first. It’s that a car company as lumbering and gigantic as GM, with infrastructure and manufacturing capacity on an epic scale, has gotten there first—and is there now. Tesla is nimble, innovative, and joy to witness, as companies go. But the Bolt is far more significant than any suggesting from Tesla ever could be. Why? Think of the old witnessed about how long it takes to turn an aircraft carrier around: It’s slow, and there’s not much to see at any given moment. But the thing about people who actually manage to turn one around is: They’ve got a freaking aircraft carrier.
Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, is a company lifer who has spent years shepherding the Bolt into existence. Joe Pugliese
B EFORE WE GO any further, let’s pause for a moment to relish just how richly ironic it is that General Motors is about to take the lead in the electrified car race. GM is, after all, a company that went bankrupt just seven years ago and survived only with the help of a federal bailout; a company whose board of directors was described by President Obama’s auto czar, Steven Rattner, as “utterly docile” in the face of forthcoming disaster; a company that has been the butt of jokes about its lackluster, unreliable, macho cars for years; a company that churned out Hummers while Toyota gave us the Prius. And even more to the point, we’re talking about a company that has a long history with electrical vehicles—the way South Park has a long history with Kenny.
That’s right. General Motors killed the electrical car. More than once.
In the earliest days of the auto industry, electrified cars were about as popular as their combustion-powered counterparts. Just like today, they were cleaner and quieter but more limited in range than the competition. Plus, they didn’t require a arm crank to start—an annoying feature of early combustion vehicles that sometimes resulted in violated fingers. But in 1912, Cadillac, GM’s luxury arm, came out with the very first electrical starter for gas-powered vehicles. Electrified cars died out shortly thereafter, and in a cloud of harass GM surged to become the world’s largest carmaker.
Fast-forward eighty four years, and for a brief interlude it looked like GM was about to take the lead in bringing electrics back. In 1996, in response to a California mandate that required automakers to have zero-emissions vehicles ready for market by 1998, GM flipped out the EV1, the very first mass-produced electrical vehicle of the modern era. The funny-looking two-seater had a range of about fifty miles and was suggested for lease to consumers in California and Arizona. It was impractical, dinky, and entirely fated. It earned a puny coterie of devotees but held little appeal for mainstream consumers. It used almost all unique parts, forfeiting the advantages of GM’s scale. And even as GM’s EV1 team was busy building the car, GM’s lawyers were lobbying hard, side by side with the other big automakers, to get California to back off its requirement.
Charging Through History
In the early days of the automobile, electrical cars outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles on America’s rutted, manure-strewn roads. But even as the internal combustion engine became the automobile’s superior power source, the fantasy of the electrical car never died. —Jordan Crucchiola
Slide: one / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety one | Iowa chemist William Morrison builds the very first successful American EV. It tops out at fourteen mph. The 768-pound, 24-cell battery makes up half the vehicle’s total weight.
Slide: two / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety seven | The Pope Manufacturing Company—builder of the Columbia Electrified Phaeton Mark III—becomes the very first large-scale EV maker in the US. Electrified taxis pop up in Fresh York. Wiki Commons
Slide: three / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred | Ferdinand Porsche is credited with creating the very first gas-electric hybrid, the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus. COURTESY OF PORSCHE
Slide: four / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seven | The most successful EV manufacturer of the early 20th century, the Detroit Electrical Car Company, embarks producing vehicles, ultimately making more than 13,000 of them. GETTY Pictures
Slide: five / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eight | Henry Ford’s Model T kicks off the modern age of combustion-engine-powered cars. CORBIS
Slide: six / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred twelve | GM’s Charles Kettering invents the electrified starter, eliminating the need to hand-crank gas-powered cars, which were already cheaper than EVs. Now they’re lighter to use too. COURTESY OF GM
Slide: seven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred thirty nine | The Detroit Electrified Car Company shuts down, pretty well marking the end of the very first era of electrified vehicles. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Slide: eight / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy one | EVs arrive in space! The electrified lunar rover ferries astronauts around the moon. It’s raunchy to find an EV anywhere on Earth, however. GETTY Photos
Slide: nine / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy two | Spurred by federal incentives affixed to the Clean Air Act of 1970, engineer Victor Wouk modifies a one thousand nine hundred seventy two Buick Skylark to make it a gas-electric hybrid. The government awards him $33,000 for the design but doesn’t take the idea further. COURTESY OF EPA.GOV
Slide: ten / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy three | The Arab oil embargo, with its resulting high oil prices and fuel shortages, scares the US into thinking about EVs again. GM develops an urban electrified concept prototype. ALAMY
Slide: eleven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy four | Sebring-Vanguard’s toylike CitiCar debuts at the Electrical Vehicle Symposium in Washington, DC. It has a top speed of thirty mph and can travel forty miles on a single charge—in warm weather. CORBIS
Slide: twelve / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eighty six | Oil prices fall again. Never mind about those EVs, bring on the SUVs! ALAMY
Slide: thirteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety six | Responding to a California mandate requiring zero-emissions vehicles, GM comes out with the EV1. Popular Science calls it “a turning point for the fledgling electrical car industry.” But the cars end up getting recalled. CORBIS
Slide: fourteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety seven | Toyota introduces the Prius and sells Eighteen,000 units in the very first year of production. It becomes the world’s very first mass-produced gas-electric hybrid vehicle. ATSUSHI TSUKADA/AP PHOTO
Slide: fifteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand six | Tesla Motors debuts its Roadster at the San Francisco International Auto Demonstrate. It can travel more than two hundred miles before needing to recharge. Celebrities like it. ALAMY
Slide: sixteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand nine | Nissan rolls out the Leaf. The fully electrified car can go about eighty miles on a charge and reach ninety mph. It will eventually become the top-selling electrical vehicle in the US. GETTY Pictures
Slide: seventeen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand ten | GM releases the Chevy Volt, the very first commercially available plug-in hybrid, with a gas engine that supplements the electrified drive once the battery is depleted. GETTY Photos
Slide: eighteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand twelve | For around $70,000, drivers can now buy Tesla’s Model S, a luxury electrical sedan with two hundred eight miles of range and a 302-hp motor. The Fresh York Times calls it the most fundamental switch in automotive design since the Model T. And it looks amazing. RUARIDH STEWART/ZUMAPRESS.COM/CORBIS
Slide: nineteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand fifteen | General Motors unveils the Bolt concept vehicle, a four-door hatchback that promises to go two hundred miles on a charge and sell for about $30,000—just below the average cost of an American car. GETTY Pictures
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Right around the time the EV1 was ready to hit dealerships, California weakened its mandate, relieving the legal pressure on automakers to suggest zero-emissions cars. And after a few lackluster years marketing its electrical automobile, GM unceremoniously dumped the money-bleeding EV1. It declined to renew the leases on the toughly 1,100 cars it had put on the road, recalled the vehicles, and—with an inadver&bashful;tently theatrical flourish—crushed almost all of them and piled their carcasses in a junkyard. The experiment cost the company about $1 billion and was a public relations disaster. Years later a documentary that dramatically recounted the EV1 saga, Who Killed the Electrical Car?, helped cement the perception that a feckless GM had committed technological infanticide.
By the mid-2000s, executives realized what a colossal mistake they had made. After railing out the ’90s with a doubled-down commitment to its traditional profit centers—SUVs and light trucks—GM sustained $8.6 billion in losses in 2005. Toyota, which boasted $9 billion in profits that same year, was on the brink of surpassing GM as the world’s largest carmaker. The Japanese stiff was railing to victory on a reputation for economical, fuel-efficient cars, especially the Prius, an egg-shaped hybrid that delivered fifty miles per gallon and sold in the hundreds of thousands.
All of that pissed off Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chair for product develop&bashful;ment at the time. A cigar-chomping veteran of the car industry with a penchant for irascible quotes—he once panned GM’s cars for looking like “angry kitchen appliances”—Lutz was especially attuned to the big narratives that drive public perception of the auto industry (while under the surface, most of the real act is driven by recondite stuff like regulation, industrial and trade policy, labor economics, and logistics). Lutz hated how the Prius had put a saintly halo on Toyota, which sold slew of SUVs and pickups, while hapless GM was mocked for making the Hummer. He also took notice when Silicon Valley upstart Tesla made a major splash with its public debut, announcing it planned to make a lithium-ion-battery-powered luxury sports car.
And so Lutz, a dude who would later proclaim that global heating is a “total crock of shit,” began lobbying GM’s leadership to make the fattest, greenest play possible. He didn’t want GM to just build a me-too hybrid to challenge with Toyota. He dreamed GM to build a fully electrical car that almost anyone could afford to buy and that wasn’t limited by range. He dreamed, in effect, to build the Bolt. But the technology wasn’t there.
The car that GM actually built at Lutz’s insistence—the Chevy Volt—went on to become one of the most talked-about American vehicles in decades, for a entire host of reasons, many of them symbolic. But in-house, says Tony Posawatz, the engineer who led the team that developed the Volt, it was very clear that this was going to be a transitional car—a warm-up for GM’s electrical long game.
For the Volt, GM lodged on a design that was neither a Prius-style hybrid nor a unspoiled electrical car but something in inbetween called an extended-range electrified vehicle. The setup would combine a plug-in battery strong enough to serve as the car’s main power train, plus a motor with a petite gas engine that would work as a generator, creating electro-therapy to keep the vehicle going when the battery was depleted. But even that hybrid design compelled GM engineers, to a remarkable extent, to become cavemen rediscovering fire.
Being inwards the Bolt feels a bit like flying economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane.
Almost everything switches when you opt for a fundamentally different power train, so GM’s greatest advantage—more than a century of practice building cars—was all but moot. Car structure was different, since they were building around a battery, not an engine. The brakes, steering, and air conditioner were powered differently. Fresh systems, from electromagnetics for the motors to onboard and off-board charging, each came with its own learning curve. The engineers didn’t have established tests to go after. Just turning on the car required finding the flawless sequence of electrical signals from more than a dozen modules. “Oh my God, it took us forever to get the very first Volt to embark,” Fletcher says.
Then there was the battery. Lithium-ion chemistry was a fresh thing ten years ago, and the Volt team quickly discovered how much of a anguish in the neck it is. “Batteries wear out just sitting there, and they wear out when you cycle them,” says Bill Wallace, GM’s head battery engineer. “And then they wear out if you over-discharge them, or if you overcharge them.” They’re enormously sensitive to temperature. They switch form as they charge and discharge. They can also catch fire.
In brief, all these problems were fresh to a company whose practice lay in what Lutz calls “the oily bits.” So the team set about developing the expertise it lacked. GM established a curriculum with the University of Michigan to train battery engineers. It packed a vacant building in Brownstown, Michigan, with the equipment to make battery packs. The engineers created test procedures and wrote them down as they went. They modeled different use cases for the Volt, from a woman in northern Minnesota who buttplugs in every night to a boy in Miami who drives one hundred miles a day. They built the battery lab and brought in the blue environmental chambers, then used them to see how the battery would stand up to each situation. “We invented the idea of what the lab should be,” Fletcher says.
The Volt project was still in its infancy when the US economy tanked in 2008, sending GM into shock. The company began losing $1 billion a month and began cleaving off limbs in desperation, eliminating or selling its Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Hummer brands. The Volt project could lightly have fallen under the ax as well—but instead it took on an outsize significance. President Obama seized on the car as one reason GM was worth a $40 billion bailout, holding it up as a sign that the bankrupt automaker could adapt. The Volt eventually went on sale in December 2010, to accolades (“A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet.” —The Wall Street Journal) and jeers (“roller skates with a plug” —Fox News).
As for actual drivers, they were pretty into the Volt. The car posted stellar customer satisfaction ratings, and almost seventy percent of its drivers were fresh to Chevy. The trouble was that there simply weren’t many buyers. In 2011, GM’s CEO at the time, Dan Akerson, told reporters he dreamed to produce 60,000 Volts the next year. To date, Chevy has sold about 80,000—total. The Volt was a powerful symbol, but it wasn’t that significant a vehicle. Buyers soon had more innovative cars to choose from. The all-electric Nissan Leaf hit the market at around the same time as the Volt, for a similar price. In 2012, Tesla introduced its first-generation Model S, with upwards of two hundred miles per charge.
But the real significance of the Volt was that it gave GM a brand-new manufacturing and engineering platform for electrical vehicles, where it had had none before. “Once you make the leap, and you have a big battery, and you have electrical motors,” Posawatz says, “you’ve done all the hard stuff.” And then you might just see an chance to gun for the finish line.
O N THE MORNING of April Two, 2014, US senator Barbara Boxer glared down from behind a microphone in a Senate hearing room in Washington, DC, requesting answers from America’s industrial problem child, General Motors. The company had just instituted its largest recall ever, after reports that faulty ignition switches on millions of cars from the 2000s had been responsible for numerous deaths and injuries. Boxer, as part of a congressional investigative committee, was castigating GM’s fresh CEO, Mary Barra, who had been in the job a mere three weeks. “Woman to woman, I am very disappointed,” Boxer said. “The culture that you are indicating here today is a culture of the status quo.”
Barra sat there, practising the studiously neutral, calmly repentant facial nonexpression of someone getting grilled by Congress. The main theme of Barra’s testimony was that the old GM—with a docile, nodding bureaucratic culture that swept problems under the rug—had died with the company’s two thousand nine bankruptcy, bailout, and restructuring and that the fresh GM was different. But the “culture of the status quo” charge wasn’t so effortless for Barra, of all people, to deflect: She’s not only a GM lifer, she’s a second-generation lifer. Her dad was a die-maker for Pontiac, and she embarked with the company when she was Legal. (She’s fifty four now.)
On the other arm, Barra had a strong arm in a lot of the most transformative stuff going on at GM. Chief case in point: Not long before she became CEO, Barra had been tapped to run development of fresh products, the position once held by Lutz. So by the time she was hauled before Congress in two thousand fourteen to response for the company’s past sins, she had been overseeing the efforts of GM’s electrification gang for three years.
When I walk into Barra’s office one latest fall day, she’s standing in front of her desk wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, and an Apple See. (Offsetting the Steve Jobs vibe just a bit is a calendar on the wall that shows a fluffy white cat in the backseat of an Opel Corsa.) As Barra tells it, the process to develop the Bolt indeed took off when GM’s team was regrouping after a major setback. In 2012, GM invested in a California startup called Envia, which had developed a fresh battery that posted incredible spectacle numbers. Envia promised to produce a 200-mile battery by fall 2013. But its technology turned out to be a flop.
Not only is GM likely to win the race, it may have the winner’s circle to itself for some time.
So in spring 2013, GM’s senior leaders and the most significant figures on its electrification team gathered in the virtual reality room of the company’s Design Center to assess the situation. “We embarked to go, ‘OK, what can we do?’” Barra says. Was there another route to two hundred miles? The EV folks hesitated but embarked pulling together different elements—improvements in battery life, cost savings in motors—that, combined, might represent a way forward. “We can thrust our way toward 200,” Fletcher recalls thinking.
The meeting turned into a full-on brainstorming session, one that ended, Barra says, with what looked like a viable path to the Bolt: “And we all went, ‘Let’s do that.’”
And so the design team set to work devising a car that would appeal to consumers well beyond the ecowarrior, early-adopter demographic. Some flashy ideas were thrown out early on: A carbon fiber assets? Lightweight but too expensive at this price point. Suicide doors? Eye-catching, but they added mass without functional benefits. Capped wheels? Good for aerodynamics, but they signaled something science project–y. “It’s got to look like a serious car,” design lead Stuart Norris says. The team delivered as spacious an interior as possible, with upright glass to make the relatively puny car feel more substantial and a raised driving position for a commanding view of the road.
Meantime, the technical folks set about making Norris’ design go two hundred miles on a charge. At their most basic, batteries are made of powders, the morphology of which—grain size, distribution, how they’re tied together—is key to the power and energy of each cell. LG, General Motors’ battery provider, had cooked up a noticeably improved cell that retained energy capacity particularly well when it got hot, as lithium-ion batteries tend to. That meant Chevy could use a smaller cooling system and stick more cells in the battery pack for more range. LG also improved the battery’s conductivity, so the ions flowed swifter, translating to quicker acceleration (the Bolt can go from zero to sixty in seven seconds).
As soon as the battery was ready, engineers at GM’s Michigan proving ground hacked together a bastard car using the front half of a Chevy Sonic and the rear of a Buick Encore. They called it the Soncore and fitted it with the Bolt battery pack and motor, using the Franken-vehicle to make sure the propulsion system worked. That way, once the real Bolt figure was in development, the teams responsible for the car’s chassis controls, vehicle dynamics, and suspension tuning could get right to work.
As two thousand fourteen bled into 2015, Chevy engineers built about one hundred Bolt prototypes, shipping them around the US for real-world testing to verify the findings of the battery lab. The cars went to Arizona and Florida. The team drove them up the California coast and negotiated San Francisco traffic. They ran the prototypes over rough roads, looking for ways to reduce noise and stimulation (extra-tricky in a car with no engine to mask odd sounds). They chose specially developed Michelin tires to minimize rolling resistance and improve range. Working rapid, they made thousands of switches to the car, permanently looking for ways to improve. By the time I arrived for a test-drive, in October, the team still had more than five hundred open work orders to finish.
T HE Very first TIME I lay eyes on the Bolt, it’s packaged in swirling black-and-white camouflage—the effect known as dazzle—designed to hide its forms and lines from cameras. That’s about as flashy as things get. There are no gull-wing doors or retracting treats like on some Teslas. The Bolt sits on modest 17-inch wheels. It emerges to be a nice, of-the-moment-looking hatchback, like a Prius C or a Honda Fit with a shorter bondage mask and taller roof. The main thing that indicates its revolutionary potential is the dashboard, which tells me I have one hundred ninety two miles of range, a number I’ve only seen in Teslas.
Josh Tavel, the Bolt’s chief engineer, invites me to take a seat behind the steering wheel and, from the passenger seat, starts demonstrating me around the interior. He starts with the caveat that the vehicle is only about eighty percent done—thus the big crimson emergency stop button just above the cup holders and the fire extinguisher in the backseat.
As I put the Bolt into drive and begin exploring the GM Technical Center’s eleven miles of roads, Tavel gives me a tour of the interior. It’s decked out with a bunch of digital-age bells and whistles: On the dashboard is a high-definition Ten.2-inch touchscreen. There’s a special space shaped to hold an iPhone 6, with a charge port right there, and a console compartment that fits a tablet. The rearview mirror can pipe in a display from cameras on the back of the car. The car also associates private settings with different keys, so it knows whether you or your spouse is driving and tunes the radio appropriately. The backseat is remarkably roomy for a compact car, especially when it comes to headroom. I’m taller than average, and there are three or four inches inbetween my head and the roof.
Overall, being inwards the Bolt feels a little like flying in economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane. You’ve got a screen, an outlet to cork in your phone, enough legroom, and some sleek appointments. It’s not very first class, but it doesn’t caress your nose in that fact the way some economy cabins (and some GM cars) do.
When I meet with Barra after my test-drive, we embark by talking about the big-picture stuff: how the car could fundamentally switch public attitudes toward electrical vehicles. But she quickly moves on to the little things: the roominess, the connectivity, how the trunk opening is shaped so you can slide in that bookshelf you bought at Ikea. “No one’s gonna buy two hundred miles if it doesn’t come with a superb vehicle,” Barra says.
C HEVROLET SAYS it is on track to commence delivering the Bolt by year’s end. If that happens, it’s fairly possible the company will have the winner’s circle to itself for some time. It now emerges that the next Nissan Leaf will have one hundred ten miles of range—a modest improvement over the current model. Volkswagen is at least two years away from its target. (It’s also tied up with a potentially ruinous scandal after cheating on emissions tests for millions of its diesel vehicles.) And Tesla has a track record of running about two years behind its production targets. But all the automakers will need to commence building attractive zero-emissions vehicles somehow, and soon. It’s significant to understand that the market for electrical cars is still driven less by corporate profit-seeking than by government arm-twisting. In the US, federal fuel standards require automakers to achieve a fleet average of toughly thirty four miles per gallon in two thousand sixteen and forty nine mpg by 2025. On top of that, ten states won’t let automakers operate unless they sell at least some zero-emission vehicles. All the automakers have to figure out how to get there.
Photo by: Joe Pugliese
If you’ve noticed certain names missing from the list of contenders for the race to two hundred miles—chiefly Toyota—that’s mainly because Japanese and German automakers have focused on hydrogen fuel cell cars, an embryonic, expensive, and zero-carbon-emission technology that has its own problems, like a lack of national fueling infrastructure. Other automakers have responded to the rising tide of mandates with vehicles developed solely to meet requirements and avoid fines (shades of the EV1). The resulting cars are less than compelling and a anguish for automakers. In May 2014, Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne actually asked people not to buy the all-electric version of the Fiat 500, telling, “Every time I sell one, it costs me $14,000.” But the math of electrical vehicles may begin to switch with a mass-market EV like the Bolt, whose sales numbers could be in a different league. Barra wouldn’t disclose a sales goal—Chevy got pretty burned after missing its announced target for the Volt. Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Karl Brauer says that anything more than 50,000 units a year would be a large coup. A number like that would make the Bolt the best-selling unspoiled electrified ever, ahead of Tesla and leagues ahead of Nissan’s Leaf and BMW’s fresh and funky i3.
Even if sales revenue from the Bolt doesn’t equal what GM has spent developing the car—which is likely, because battery power is still expensive—the Bolt will bring other benefits to GM. The car’s fuel economy rating will be so good that even just decent sales would significantly boost GM’s average fleet-fuel-economy numbers, ironically permitting the automaker to sell more pickups and SUVs, where the real profit margins are.
Perhaps most of all, executives are hoping that the Bolt will switch the narrative about GM—which is significant because a hapless company that churns out muscular trucks and lackluster sedans doesn’t have much place in the future. These days it’s a refrain among GM executives that in the next five to ten years, the auto industry will switch as much as it has in the past 50. As batteries get better and cheaper, the propagation of electrified cars will reinforce the need to build out charging infrastructure and develop clean ways to generate electric current. Cars will embark speaking to each other and to our infrastructure. They will drive themselves, smudging the line inbetween driver and passenger. Google, Apple, Uber, and other tech companies are invading the transportation marketplace with fresh technology and no ingrained attitudes about how things are done.
The Bolt is the most concrete evidence yet that the largest car companies in the world are contemplating a very different kind of future too. GM knows the stir from gasoline to electro-stimulation will be a minor one compared to where customers are headed next: away from driving and away from wielding cars. In 2017, GM will give Cadillac sedans the capability to control themselves on the highway. Instead of dismissing Google as a smart-aleck kid grabbing a seat at the adults’ table, GM is talking about partnering with the tech hard on a multiplicity of efforts. Last year GM launched car-sharing programs in Manhattan and Germany and has promised more to come. In January the company announced that it’s investing $500 million in Lyft, and that it plans to work with the ride-sharing company to develop a national network of self-driving cars. GM is thinking about how to use those fresh business models as it comes in emerging markets like India, where lower incomes and already packed metro areas make its standard move—put two cars in every garage—unworkable.
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This all feels strange coming from GM because, for all the switches of the past decade and despite the use of words like disruption and mobility, it’s no Silicon Valley clothing. The boys and women who built the Bolt are unspoiled Detroit. Mary Barra, Tony Posawatz, and Larry Nitz are all GM lifers. As a kid, Pam Fletcher built engines for race cars with her father. Josh Tavel raced motocross before getting into stock cars as both a driver and an engineer. He practically sweats gasoline. And yet he led the engineering team that could bring electrified driving into the mainstream.
I’ve been driving the Bolt around the Technical Center campus for about fifteen minutes when Tavel brings up something that’s been bothering him. “You haven’t truly stepped on it yet,” he says. I’ve been taking my time to get a feel for the car, treating it gently on raw roads in the presence of its chief creator. But knowing what I do about the swift pickup of electrified cars—unlike combustion-powered vehicles, they supply instant torque—I’m blessed to oblige. I find a quiet corner of the campus and come to a stop with nothing but clear road ahead. I ram my right foot down and the almost silent Bolt is all of a sudden a noise machine: The tires squeal on the moist pavement. After a half 2nd, they catch and the Bolt zips ahead, if just a bit shakily. Chassis control is not fairly flawless yet, Tavel says. That’ll be motionless before production starts—in just a few brief months.
Associate editor Alex Davies (@adavies47) writes about the future of transportation for WIRED .
This article shows up in the February two thousand sixteen issue.
STYLING BY JADE LAUREN; MAKEUP BY FLYNN PYYKKONEN; HAIR BY MELISSA KERYN; JACKET BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, COURTESY OF NEIMAN MARCUS.
How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrical Car, WIRED
How GM Strike Tesla to the Very first True Mass-Market Electrified Car
Ten years ago, the room where I’m standing would have been packed with a earsplitting roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one shuddering atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop decorates used joysticks to adjust its throttle and flow. ¶ Today, however, this former engine testing facility at General Motors’ Warren Technical Center, outside Detroit, is almost dead silent. From one end to the other—across a space toughly the size of two soccer fields—the room is blanketed with the low-frequency hum of cooling fans, interrupted only by the occasional clack of a keyboard and, on this particular morning, the chatter of Larry Nitz’s voice. ¶ “Let’s take a walk,” he says after we’ve lingered in the doorway a moment. A voluble boy with a head of gray curls, Nitz is chief of electrification at General Motors, and this facility—the largest automotive battery lab in North America—is his domain.
GM CEO Mary Barra, February two thousand sixteen Photo by: Joe Pugliese
In place of all the old V-8s, a grid of eighteen massive cobalt blue boxes, each ten feet high and eight feet broad, now predominate the lab. They look a little like walk-in freezers, which isn’t too far off. They’re climate simulators, Nitz says as we file past row after row of them. Battery chemistry is fiendishly sensitive to temperature and humidity, he explains, and electrical cars have to hold up in every kind of weather. So inwards each blue chamber, GM has created a virtual Yukon winter or Florida summer or Arizona spring. The enclosed batteries—not the familiar 40-pound bricks that need a hop embark from time to time, but 1,000-pound behemoths built to power an entire car—are hooked up to testing equipment that charges and discharges them in patterns designed to mimic the ways
people drive in cities, in the suburbs, and on the highway. The tests run twenty four hours a day and in muffle, generating terabytes of data.
But Nitz hasn’t brought me here just to display me a bunch of blue boxes. Near the end of the room, he eventually stops us in front of a large industrial dolly. Sitting on top is a sleek black alien-looking thing, about the size and form of a very thick rectangular kitchen tabletop. It’s three feet broad and six feet long and has dozens of plastic-tipped, copper-colored wires protruding from its surface in a sprawling mess of metallic spaghetti.
This dark monolith is the thing I’ve come to Detroit to see. It’s the technological heart of what promises to be the most significant vehicle General Motors has produced in decades: the very first truly mass-market all-electric car. “This,” Nitz says, “is the battery pack for the Bolt.”
E LECTRIC VEHICLES have been available to American consumers for the better part of two decades. The very first EVs looked like science projects only a Sierra Club member could love, while today an all-electric luxury sedan—the Tesla Model S—is routinely described as the coolest car on the planet. Early electrified cars had a maximum range of fifty miles; today’s highest-rated EV—again, the Model S—can go as many as three hundred miles before it needs to ass-plug in. And yet, for all that progress, fully electrified vehicles still make up less than one percent of US auto sales. There’s a straightforward reason for this: The only one that goes far enough costs far too much.
Most of us simply can’t shell out more than $70,000 for a Tesla. But comparatively affordable electrics like the Nissan Leaf still travel only about eighty miles on a charge—not far enough to dispel the dreaded “range anxiety” that such a low number provokes in most American drivers. A two thousand thirteen explore by the California Center for Sustainable Energy found that only nine percent of consumers said they would be pleased with an electrified car that can go one hundred miles on a charge. Increase that range to two hundred miles, however, and seventy percent of potential drivers said they’d be pleased.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has called two hundred miles the “minimum threshold” for broad public adoption of electrical cars. Suggest that kind of range at a price that’s affordable to the average consumer and the potential market for electrics abruptly looks a entire lot fatter. Get there very first and that fresh market could be all yours.
In its long history, General Motors has managed to kill the electrical car not once but twice.
That’s why, over the past duo of years, a number of major automakers—General Motors, Nissan, Volkswagen—have lined up with plans to suggest an electrical car with (yep) approximately two hundred miles of range, for a price somewhere around the average cost of a fresh American car, about $33,000. They all hope to do so quickly, as fuel efficiency requirements are ratcheting up every year. And they all hope to get there before media darling Tesla does. Musk—billionaire, celebrity, space and solar-energy mogul, would-be colonizer of Mars—has said since two thousand six that Tesla’s “master plan” is to work toward building an affordable, long-range electrified car. And in two thousand fourteen he said that aim was in view: In two thousand sixteen Tesla would unveil a car called the Model three with a sticker price of $35,000 and two hundred miles of range. Production would begin in 2017.
In brief, the electrified car business has taken the form of an old-fashioned race for a prize—a race in very soft sand. There’s no Moore’s law for batteries, which are chemical not digital. Cell development is all slow, arduous trial and error. When your purpose is to drive energy efficiency up while driving costs down on a mass industrial scale, there aren’t many shortcuts or late-night inspirations to be had. But now it looks pretty clear who the winner will be. And it ain’t Tesla.
General Motors very first unveiled the Chevy Bolt as a concept car in January 2015, billing it as a vehicle that would suggest two hundred miles of range for just $30,000 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit). Barring any unforeseen delays, the very first Bolts will roll off the production line at GM’s Orion Assembly facility in Michigan by the end of 2016. As Pam Fletcher, GM’s executive chief engineer for electrical vehicles, recently put it to me with a certain sneer: “Who wants to be 2nd?”
For GM, the Bolt stands to suggest a head commence in a fresh kind of market for electrical cars. But for the rest of us, there’s a broader significance to this news. It’s not just that Chevy will likely be very first. It’s that a car company as lumbering and gigantic as GM, with infrastructure and manufacturing capacity on an epic scale, has gotten there first—and is there now. Tesla is nimble, innovative, and joy to see, as companies go. But the Bolt is far more significant than any suggesting from Tesla ever could be. Why? Think of the old spotted about how long it takes to turn an aircraft carrier around: It’s slow, and there’s not much to see at any given moment. But the thing about people who actually manage to turn one around is: They’ve got a freaking aircraft carrier.
Mary Barra, the CEO of GM, is a company lifer who has spent years shepherding the Bolt into existence. Joe Pugliese
B EFORE WE GO any further, let’s pause for a moment to savour just how richly ironic it is that General Motors is about to take the lead in the electrical car race. GM is, after all, a company that went bankrupt just seven years ago and survived only with the help of a federal bailout; a company whose board of directors was described by President Obama’s auto czar, Steven Rattner, as “utterly docile” in the face of oncoming disaster; a company that has been the butt of jokes about its lackluster, unreliable, macho cars for years; a company that churned out Hummers while Toyota gave us the Prius. And even more to the point, we’re talking about a company that has a long history with electrified vehicles—the way South Park has a long history with Kenny.
That’s right. General Motors killed the electrified car. More than once.
In the earliest days of the auto industry, electrical cars were about as popular as their combustion-powered counterparts. Just like today, they were cleaner and quieter but more limited in range than the competition. Plus, they didn’t require a arm crank to start—an annoying feature of early combustion vehicles that at times resulted in violated fingers. But in 1912, Cadillac, GM’s luxury arm, came out with the very first electrified starter for gas-powered vehicles. Electrified cars died out shortly thereafter, and in a cloud of harass GM surged to become the world’s largest carmaker.
Fast-forward eighty four years, and for a brief interlude it looked like GM was about to take the lead in bringing electrics back. In 1996, in response to a California mandate that required automakers to have zero-emissions vehicles ready for market by 1998, GM flipped out the EV1, the very first mass-produced electrified vehicle of the modern era. The funny-looking two-seater had a range of about fifty miles and was suggested for lease to consumers in California and Arizona. It was impractical, dinky, and entirely fated. It earned a puny coterie of devotees but held little appeal for mainstream consumers. It used almost all unique parts, forfeiting the advantages of GM’s scale. And even as GM’s EV1 team was busy building the car, GM’s lawyers were lobbying hard, side by side with the other big automakers, to get California to back off its requirement.
Charging Through History
In the early days of the automobile, electrified cars outnumbered gasoline-powered vehicles on America’s rutted, manure-strewn roads. But even as the internal combustion engine became the automobile’s superior power source, the wish of the electrical car never died. —Jordan Crucchiola
Slide: one / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety one | Iowa chemist William Morrison builds the very first successful American EV. It tops out at fourteen mph. The 768-pound, 24-cell battery makes up half the vehicle’s total weight.
Slide: two / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand eight hundred ninety seven | The Pope Manufacturing Company—builder of the Columbia Electrified Phaeton Mark III—becomes the very first large-scale EV maker in the US. Electrical taxis pop up in Fresh York. Wiki Commons
Slide: three / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred | Ferdinand Porsche is credited with creating the very first gas-electric hybrid, the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus. COURTESY OF PORSCHE
Slide: four / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seven | The most successful EV manufacturer of the early 20th century, the Detroit Electrical Car Company, commences producing vehicles, ultimately making more than 13,000 of them. GETTY Pictures
Slide: five / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eight | Henry Ford’s Model T kicks off the modern age of combustion-engine-powered cars. CORBIS
Slide: six / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred twelve | GM’s Charles Kettering invents the electrified starter, eliminating the need to hand-crank gas-powered cars, which were already cheaper than EVs. Now they’re lighter to use too. COURTESY OF GM
Slide: seven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred thirty nine | The Detroit Electrical Car Company shuts down, pretty well marking the end of the very first era of electrified vehicles. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Slide: eight / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy one | EVs arrive in space! The electrical lunar rover ferries astronauts around the moon. It’s raunchy to find an EV anywhere on Earth, however. GETTY Pics
Slide: nine / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy two | Spurred by federal incentives fastened to the Clean Air Act of 1970, engineer Victor Wouk modifies a one thousand nine hundred seventy two Buick Skylark to make it a gas-electric hybrid. The government awards him $33,000 for the design but doesn’t take the idea further. COURTESY OF EPA.GOV
Slide: ten / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy three | The Arab oil embargo, with its resulting high oil prices and fuel shortages, scares the US into thinking about EVs again. GM develops an urban electrified concept prototype. ALAMY
Slide: eleven / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred seventy four | Sebring-Vanguard’s toylike CitiCar debuts at the Electrical Vehicle Symposium in Washington, DC. It has a top speed of thirty mph and can travel forty miles on a single charge—in warm weather. CORBIS
Slide: twelve / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred eighty six | Oil prices fall again. Never mind about those EVs, bring on the SUVs! ALAMY
Slide: thirteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety six | Responding to a California mandate requiring zero-emissions vehicles, GM comes out with the EV1. Popular Science calls it “a turning point for the fledgling electrified car industry.” But the cars end up getting recalled. CORBIS
Slide: fourteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: one thousand nine hundred ninety seven | Toyota introduces the Prius and sells Legitimate,000 units in the very first year of production. It becomes the world’s very first mass-produced gas-electric hybrid vehicle. ATSUSHI TSUKADA/AP PHOTO
Slide: fifteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand six | Tesla Motors debuts its Roadster at the San Francisco International Auto Showcase. It can travel more than two hundred miles before needing to recharge. Celebrities like it. ALAMY
Slide: sixteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand nine | Nissan rolls out the Leaf. The fully electrified car can go about eighty miles on a charge and reach ninety mph. It will eventually become the top-selling electrified vehicle in the US. GETTY Photos
Slide: seventeen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand ten | GM releases the Chevy Volt, the very first commercially available plug-in hybrid, with a gas engine that supplements the electrified drive once the battery is depleted. GETTY Pics
Slide: eighteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand twelve | For around $70,000, drivers can now buy Tesla’s Model S, a luxury electrical sedan with two hundred eight miles of range and a 302-hp motor. The Fresh York Times calls it the most fundamental switch in automotive design since the Model T. And it looks amazing. RUARIDH STEWART/ZUMAPRESS.COM/CORBIS
Slide: nineteen / of nineteen . Caption: Caption: two thousand fifteen | General Motors unveils the Bolt concept vehicle, a four-door hatchback that promises to go two hundred miles on a charge and sell for about $30,000—just below the average cost of an American car. GETTY Pictures
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Right around the time the EV1 was ready to hit dealerships, California weakened its mandate, relieving the legal pressure on automakers to suggest zero-emissions cars. And after a few lackluster years marketing its electrified automobile, GM unceremoniously dumped the money-bleeding EV1. It declined to renew the leases on the toughly 1,100 cars it had put on the road, recalled the vehicles, and—with an inadver&bashful;tently theatrical flourish—crushed almost all of them and piled their carcasses in a junkyard. The experiment cost the company about $1 billion and was a public relations disaster. Years later a documentary that dramatically recounted the EV1 saga, Who Killed the Electrified Car?, helped cement the perception that a feckless GM had committed technological infanticide.
By the mid-2000s, executives realized what a colossal mistake they had made. After railing out the ’90s with a doubled-down commitment to its traditional profit centers—SUVs and light trucks—GM sustained $8.6 billion in losses in 2005. Toyota, which boasted $9 billion in profits that same year, was on the edge of surpassing GM as the world’s largest carmaker. The Japanese hard was railing to victory on a reputation for economical, fuel-efficient cars, especially the Prius, an egg-shaped hybrid that delivered fifty miles per gallon and sold in the hundreds of thousands.
All of that pissed off Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chair for product develop&timid;ment at the time. A cigar-chomping veteran of the car industry with a penchant for irascible quotes—he once panned GM’s cars for looking like “angry kitchen appliances”—Lutz was especially attuned to the big narratives that drive public perception of the auto industry (while under the surface, most of the real activity is driven by recondite stuff like regulation, industrial and trade policy, labor economics, and logistics). Lutz hated how the Prius had put a saintly halo on Toyota, which sold slew of SUVs and pickups, while hapless GM was mocked for making the Hummer. He also took notice when Silicon Valley upstart Tesla made a major splash with its public debut, announcing it planned to make a lithium-ion-battery-powered luxury sports car.
And so Lutz, a dude who would later announce that global heating is a “total crock of shit,” began lobbying GM’s leadership to make the fattest, greenest play possible. He didn’t want GM to just build a me-too hybrid to challenge with Toyota. He desired GM to build a fully electrified car that almost anyone could afford to buy and that wasn’t limited by range. He desired, in effect, to build the Bolt. But the technology wasn’t there.
The car that GM actually built at Lutz’s insistence—the Chevy Volt—went on to become one of the most talked-about American vehicles in decades, for a entire host of reasons, many of them symbolic. But in-house, says Tony Posawatz, the engineer who led the team that developed the Volt, it was very clear that this was going to be a transitional car—a warm-up for GM’s electrical long game.
For the Volt, GM lodged on a design that was neither a Prius-style hybrid nor a unspoiled electrified car but something in inbetween called an extended-range electrified vehicle. The setup would combine a plug-in battery strong enough to serve as the car’s main power train, plus a motor with a puny gas engine that would work as a generator, creating electro-therapy to keep the vehicle going when the battery was depleted. But even that hybrid design coerced GM engineers, to a remarkable extent, to become cavemen rediscovering fire.
Being inwards the Bolt feels a bit like flying economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane.
Almost everything switches when you opt for a fundamentally different power train, so GM’s greatest advantage—more than a century of practice building cars—was all but moot. Car structure was different, since they were building around a battery, not an engine. The brakes, steering, and air conditioner were powered differently. Fresh systems, from electromagnetics for the motors to onboard and off-board charging, each came with its own learning curve. The engineers didn’t have established tests to go after. Just turning on the car required finding the flawless sequence of electrical signals from more than a dozen modules. “Oh my God, it took us forever to get the very first Volt to commence,” Fletcher says.
Then there was the battery. Lithium-ion chemistry was a fresh thing ten years ago, and the Volt team quickly discovered how much of a anguish in the neck it is. “Batteries wear out just sitting there, and they wear out when you cycle them,” says Bill Wallace, GM’s head battery engineer. “And then they wear out if you over-discharge them, or if you overcharge them.” They’re utterly sensitive to temperature. They switch form as they charge and discharge. They can also catch fire.
In brief, all these problems were fresh to a company whose practice lay in what Lutz calls “the oily bits.” So the team set about developing the expertise it lacked. GM established a curriculum with the University of Michigan to train battery engineers. It packed a vacant building in Brownstown, Michigan, with the equipment to make battery packs. The engineers created test procedures and wrote them down as they went. They modeled different use cases for the Volt, from a woman in northern Minnesota who buttplugs in every night to a boy in Miami who drives one hundred miles a day. They built the battery lab and brought in the blue environmental chambers, then used them to see how the battery would stand up to each situation. “We invented the idea of what the lab should be,” Fletcher says.
The Volt project was still in its infancy when the US economy tanked in 2008, sending GM into shock. The company began losing $1 billion a month and commenced cleaving off limbs in desperation, eliminating or selling its Pontiac, Saturn, Saab, and Hummer brands. The Volt project could lightly have fallen under the ax as well—but instead it took on an outsize significance. President Obama seized on the car as one reason GM was worth a $40 billion bailout, holding it up as a sign that the bankrupt automaker could adapt. The Volt ultimately went on sale in December 2010, to accolades (“A bunch of Midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet.” —The Wall Street Journal) and jeers (“roller skates with a plug” —Fox News).
As for actual drivers, they were pretty into the Volt. The car posted stellar customer satisfaction ratings, and almost seventy percent of its drivers were fresh to Chevy. The trouble was that there simply weren’t many buyers. In 2011, GM’s CEO at the time, Dan Akerson, told reporters he dreamed to produce 60,000 Volts the next year. To date, Chevy has sold about 80,000—total. The Volt was a powerful symbol, but it wasn’t that significant a vehicle. Buyers soon had more innovative cars to choose from. The all-electric Nissan Leaf hit the market at around the same time as the Volt, for a similar price. In 2012, Tesla introduced its first-generation Model S, with upwards of two hundred miles per charge.
But the real significance of the Volt was that it gave GM a brand-new manufacturing and engineering platform for electrified vehicles, where it had had none before. “Once you make the leap, and you have a big battery, and you have electrical motors,” Posawatz says, “you’ve done all the hard stuff.” And then you might just see an chance to gun for the finish line.
O N THE MORNING of April Two, 2014, US senator Barbara Boxer glared down from behind a microphone in a Senate hearing room in Washington, DC, requesting answers from America’s industrial problem child, General Motors. The company had just instituted its largest recall ever, after reports that faulty ignition switches on millions of cars from the 2000s had been responsible for numerous deaths and injuries. Boxer, as part of a congressional investigative committee, was castigating GM’s fresh CEO, Mary Barra, who had been in the job a mere three weeks. “Woman to woman, I am very disappointed,” Boxer said. “The culture that you are signifying here today is a culture of the status quo.”
Barra sat there, practising the studiously neutral, calmly repentant facial nonexpression of someone getting grilled by Congress. The main theme of Barra’s testimony was that the old GM—with a docile, nodding bureaucratic culture that swept problems under the rug—had died with the company’s two thousand nine bankruptcy, bailout, and restructuring and that the fresh GM was different. But the “culture of the status quo” charge wasn’t so effortless for Barra, of all people, to deflect: She’s not only a GM lifer, she’s a second-generation lifer. Her dad was a die-maker for Pontiac, and she began with the company when she was Legitimate. (She’s fifty four now.)
On the other palm, Barra had a strong mitt in a lot of the most transformative stuff going on at GM. Chief case in point: Not long before she became CEO, Barra had been tapped to run development of fresh products, the position once held by Lutz. So by the time she was hauled before Congress in two thousand fourteen to response for the company’s past sins, she had been overseeing the efforts of GM’s electrification gang for three years.
When I walk into Barra’s office one latest fall day, she’s standing in front of her desk wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, and an Apple Witness. (Offsetting the Steve Jobs vibe just a bit is a calendar on the wall that shows a fluffy white cat in the backseat of an Opel Corsa.) As Barra tells it, the process to develop the Bolt truly took off when GM’s team was regrouping after a major setback. In 2012, GM invested in a California startup called Envia, which had developed a fresh battery that posted incredible spectacle numbers. Envia promised to supply a 200-mile battery by fall 2013. But its technology turned out to be a flop.
Not only is GM likely to win the race, it may have the winner’s circle to itself for some time.
So in spring 2013, GM’s senior leaders and the most significant figures on its electrification team gathered in the virtual reality room of the company’s Design Center to assess the situation. “We began to go, ‘OK, what can we do?’” Barra says. Was there another route to two hundred miles? The EV folks hesitated but embarked pulling together different elements—improvements in battery life, cost savings in motors—that, combined, might represent a way forward. “We can shove our way toward 200,” Fletcher recalls thinking.
The meeting turned into a full-on brainstorming session, one that ended, Barra says, with what looked like a viable path to the Bolt: “And we all went, ‘Let’s do that.’”
And so the design team set to work devising a car that would appeal to consumers well beyond the ecowarrior, early-adopter demographic. Some flashy ideas were thrown out early on: A carbon fiber figure? Lightweight but too expensive at this price point. Suicide doors? Eye-catching, but they added mass without functional benefits. Capped wheels? Good for aerodynamics, but they signaled something science project–y. “It’s got to look like a serious car,” design lead Stuart Norris says. The team delivered as spacious an interior as possible, with upright glass to make the relatively petite car feel more substantial and a raised driving position for a commanding view of the road.
Meantime, the technical folks set about making Norris’ design go two hundred miles on a charge. At their most basic, batteries are made of powders, the morphology of which—grain size, distribution, how they’re trussed together—is key to the power and energy of each cell. LG, General Motors’ battery provider, had cooked up a noticeably improved cell that retained energy capacity particularly well when it got hot, as lithium-ion batteries tend to. That meant Chevy could use a smaller cooling system and stick more cells in the battery pack for more range. LG also improved the battery’s conductivity, so the ions flowed quicker, translating to quicker acceleration (the Bolt can go from zero to sixty in seven seconds).
As soon as the battery was ready, engineers at GM’s Michigan proving ground hacked together a bastard car using the front half of a Chevy Sonic and the rear of a Buick Encore. They called it the Soncore and fitted it with the Bolt battery pack and motor, using the Franken-vehicle to make sure the propulsion system worked. That way, once the real Bolt figure was in development, the teams responsible for the car’s chassis controls, vehicle dynamics, and suspension tuning could get right to work.
As two thousand fourteen bled into 2015, Chevy engineers built about one hundred Bolt prototypes, shipping them around the US for real-world testing to verify the findings of the battery lab. The cars went to Arizona and Florida. The team drove them up the California coast and negotiated San Francisco traffic. They ran the prototypes over rough roads, looking for ways to reduce noise and stimulation (extra-tricky in a car with no engine to mask odd sounds). They chose specially developed Michelin tires to minimize rolling resistance and improve range. Working quick, they made thousands of switches to the car, permanently looking for ways to improve. By the time I arrived for a test-drive, in October, the team still had more than five hundred open work orders to accomplish.
T HE Very first TIME I lay eyes on the Bolt, it’s packaged in swirling black-and-white camouflage—the effect known as dazzle—designed to hide its forms and lines from cameras. That’s about as flashy as things get. There are no gull-wing doors or retracting treats like on some Teslas. The Bolt sits on modest 17-inch wheels. It shows up to be a nice, of-the-moment-looking hatchback, like a Prius C or a Honda Fit with a shorter fetish mask and taller roof. The main thing that indicates its revolutionary potential is the dashboard, which tells me I have one hundred ninety two miles of range, a number I’ve only seen in Teslas.
Josh Tavel, the Bolt’s chief engineer, invites me to take a seat behind the steering wheel and, from the passenger seat, starts demonstrating me around the interior. He embarks with the caveat that the vehicle is only about eighty percent done—thus the big crimson emergency stop button just above the cup holders and the fire extinguisher in the backseat.
As I put the Bolt into drive and commence exploring the GM Technical Center’s eleven miles of roads, Tavel gives me a tour of the interior. It’s decked out with a bunch of digital-age bells and whistles: On the dashboard is a high-definition Ten.2-inch touchscreen. There’s a special space shaped to hold an iPhone 6, with a charge port right there, and a console compartment that fits a tablet. The rearview mirror can pipe in a display from cameras on the back of the car. The car also associates private settings with different keys, so it knows whether you or your spouse is driving and tunes the radio appropriately. The backseat is remarkably roomy for a compact car, especially when it comes to headroom. I’m taller than average, and there are three or four inches inbetween my head and the roof.
Overall, being inwards the Bolt feels a little like flying in economy class on a brand-new, state-of-the-art plane. You’ve got a screen, an outlet to ass-plug in your phone, enough legroom, and some sleek appointments. It’s not very first class, but it doesn’t touch your nose in that fact the way some economy cabins (and some GM cars) do.
When I meet with Barra after my test-drive, we embark by talking about the big-picture stuff: how the car could fundamentally switch public attitudes toward electrical vehicles. But she quickly moves on to the little things: the roominess, the connectivity, how the trunk opening is shaped so you can slide in that bookshelf you bought at Ikea. “No one’s gonna buy two hundred miles if it doesn’t come with a good vehicle,” Barra says.
C HEVROLET SAYS it is on track to commence delivering the Bolt by year’s end. If that happens, it’s fairly possible the company will have the winner’s circle to itself for some time. It now shows up that the next Nissan Leaf will have one hundred ten miles of range—a modest improvement over the current model. Volkswagen is at least two years away from its target. (It’s also tied up with a potentially ruinous scandal after cheating on emissions tests for millions of its diesel vehicles.) And Tesla has a track record of running about two years behind its production targets. But all the automakers will need to embark building attractive zero-emissions vehicles somehow, and soon. It’s significant to understand that the market for electrical cars is still driven less by corporate profit-seeking than by government arm-twisting. In the US, federal fuel standards require automakers to achieve a fleet average of harshly thirty four miles per gallon in two thousand sixteen and forty nine mpg by 2025. On top of that, ten states won’t let automakers operate unless they sell at least some zero-emission vehicles. All the automakers have to figure out how to get there.
Photo by: Joe Pugliese
If you’ve noticed certain names missing from the list of contenders for the race to two hundred miles—chiefly Toyota—that’s mainly because Japanese and German automakers have focused on hydrogen fuel cell cars, an embryonic, expensive, and zero-carbon-emission technology that has its own problems, like a lack of national fueling infrastructure. Other automakers have responded to the rising tide of mandates with vehicles developed solely to meet requirements and avoid fines (shades of the EV1). The resulting cars are less than compelling and a agony for automakers. In May 2014, Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne actually asked people not to buy the all-electric version of the Fiat 500, telling, “Every time I sell one, it costs me $14,000.” But the math of electrical vehicles may begin to switch with a mass-market EV like the Bolt, whose sales numbers could be in a different league. Barra wouldn’t disclose a sales goal—Chevy got pretty burned after missing its announced target for the Volt. Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Karl Brauer says that anything more than 50,000 units a year would be a phat coup. A number like that would make the Bolt the best-selling unspoiled electrical ever, ahead of Tesla and leagues ahead of Nissan’s Leaf and BMW’s fresh and funky i3.
Even if sales revenue from the Bolt doesn’t equal what GM has spent developing the car—which is likely, because battery power is still expensive—the Bolt will bring other benefits to GM. The car’s fuel economy rating will be so good that even just decent sales would significantly boost GM’s average fleet-fuel-economy numbers, ironically permitting the automaker to sell more pickups and SUVs, where the real profit margins are.
Perhaps most of all, executives are hoping that the Bolt will switch the narrative about GM—which is significant because a hapless company that churns out muscled trucks and lackluster sedans doesn’t have much place in the future. These days it’s a refrain among GM executives that in the next five to ten years, the auto industry will switch as much as it has in the past 50. As batteries get better and cheaper, the propagation of electrified cars will reinforce the need to build out charging infrastructure and develop clean ways to generate violet wand. Cars will commence speaking to each other and to our infrastructure. They will drive themselves, smudging the line inbetween driver and passenger. Google, Apple, Uber, and other tech companies are invading the transportation marketplace with fresh technology and no ingrained attitudes about how things are done.
The Bolt is the most concrete evidence yet that the largest car companies in the world are contemplating a very different kind of future too. GM knows the stir from gasoline to electro-therapy will be a minor one compared to where customers are headed next: away from driving and away from possessing cars. In 2017, GM will give Cadillac sedans the capability to control themselves on the highway. Instead of dismissing Google as a smart-aleck kid grabbing a seat at the adults’ table, GM is talking about partnering with the tech rock hard on a multitude of efforts. Last year GM launched car-sharing programs in Manhattan and Germany and has promised more to come. In January the company announced that it’s investing $500 million in Lyft, and that it plans to work with the ride-sharing company to develop a national network of self-driving cars. GM is thinking about how to use those fresh business models as it comes in emerging markets like India, where lower incomes and already packed metro areas make its standard move—put two cars in every garage—unworkable.
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This all feels strange coming from GM because, for all the switches of the past decade and despite the use of words like disruption and mobility, it’s no Silicon Valley garment. The fellows and women who built the Bolt are unspoiled Detroit. Mary Barra, Tony Posawatz, and Larry Nitz are all GM lifers. As a kid, Pam Fletcher built engines for race cars with her father. Josh Tavel raced motocross before getting into stock cars as both a driver and an engineer. He practically sweats gasoline. And yet he led the engineering team that could bring electrical driving into the mainstream.
I’ve been driving the Bolt around the Technical Center campus for about fifteen minutes when Tavel brings up something that’s been bothering him. “You haven’t truly stepped on it yet,” he says. I’ve been taking my time to get a feel for the car, treating it gently on raw roads in the presence of its chief creator. But knowing what I do about the prompt pickup of electrified cars—unlike combustion-powered vehicles, they supply instant torque—I’m blessed to oblige. I find a quiet corner of the campus and come to a stop with nothing but clear road ahead. I plunge my right foot down and the almost silent Bolt is all of a sudden a noise machine: The tires squeal on the humid pavement. After a half 2nd, they catch and the Bolt zips ahead, if just a bit shakily. Chassis control is not fairly flawless yet, Tavel says. That’ll be stationary before production starts—in just a few brief months.
Associate editor Alex Davies (@adavies47) writes about the future of transportation for WIRED .
This article shows up in the February two thousand sixteen issue.
STYLING BY JADE LAUREN; MAKEUP BY FLYNN PYYKKONEN; HAIR BY MELISSA KERYN; JACKET BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN, COURTESY OF NEIMAN MARCUS.
