At Witz' End - EV1 - The Real Story, Part II
Note: read part one of this story here.Pause and rebirth
I joined the GM EV effort in April, 1991 and began pulling together a small team of test and development engineers and technicians at GM's Proving Grounds near Milford, MI.
One vivid early memory was driving the Impact concept car down a long, steep Proving Grounds hill early one August morning on the way to demonstrate it to a meeting of GM's Board of Directors. There was a sweeping curve near the bottom of this hill that I routinely drove nearly every day on my way to test tracks.
Suddenly, as I sped downhill toward that curve, I remembered that the Impact rolled on skinny, low-rolling-resistance experimental tires, and had almost no brakes. Visions of an expensive career-ending crash flashed through my head. Then I remembered that I could dial up "coast-down" regenerative braking with a rheostat knob between the seats, and that slowed the slippery little bullet enough to make the turn. Whew!
The pause
Sixteen months of hard work later -- on Pearl Harbor Day, Dec. 7, 1992 -- our fearless leader, Ken Baker, had to tell our Lansing, Mich. Craft Centre plant team, who were preparing to build our breakthrough electric vehicle, that the program had been delayed. Then he had to deliver that same emotional message to his engineers at GM's Warren, MI Technical Center.
The story continues after the jump.
"It was a very, very sad, tough day," he recalls today, "to tell them the program was deferred. I had grown very close to those people, and everybody there was proud of being on that program and what had been accomplished. We had already gone through a couple of budget reductions, but when we got that next cut, we just had to defer the program."
New GM CEO Jack Smith (no relation to former CEO Roger) later hosted our heavy-hearted EV team for lunch, where he apologized and explained why he had reluctantly decided to table the program as he struggled to save the cash-bleeding corporation. He told us that since his appointment to GM's top job the month before, he had canceled or delayed several volume programs, but this had been his last and perhaps most difficult such decision.
"I understood how difficult that decision had been," Baker says. "We had created the USABC [United States Advanced Battery Consortium], which had focused battery development collaboratively, and had the platform in place for clean technologies leadership at the vehicle, battery and power electronics levels. But we had to figure out which living branch to cut off the [GM corporate] tree to it keep alive."
Continued development
When the program was delayed, nearly everyone wrote it off as canceled. But while three-quarters of our group was reassigned, a core team of roughly 100 engineers relocated to an off-site facility in Troy, MI and continued development. Baker was promoted to R&D vice president in April and kept the program alive under that organization.
In the fall of 1993, my Proving Grounds team planned and coordinated a series of briefings and test drives for selected media in "Proof of Concept" (POC) early development cars, and the resulting articles were highly positive. "GM's hard-charging Impact is practical, fun to drive and a master stroke of engineering," said Popular Mechanics. "The world's best electric car," gushed Popular Science. Even enthusiast magazines were pleasantly surprised.
Then a batch of 50 POC-level prototypes was hand-built in the Tech Center shop and prepped and tested by my team for a 1994 "PrEView Drive" program that loaned them to regular folks for three months at a time in a dozen U.S. cities. This very innovative, risky and expensive effort paid off handsomely by accumulating hugely valuable real-world experience, engineering data and feedback on how the cars performed, how people used them and what they disliked and (mostly) liked about them.
RebirthIn March, 1994, with the corporation's shaky finances beginning to recover, Jack Smith and GM's Board appointed Bob Purcell, who was then Executive in Charge of Corporate Strategy, to revive the EV program. Interestingly, we heard later that those rave reviews from our POC-car press drives had positively influenced their decision.
Purcell's mission: make a business of it. "Jack's whole context," he points out today, "was that if we were going to get into electric vehicles, we had to figure out how to make them a sustainable part of General Motors." The plan was to lead the industry in EV technology and sell it to other automakers that chose not to invest billions of dollars to develop their own.
"We needed to be at the forefront of the technical evolution of the automobile," he continues. "Our success as a company was rooted in an era when we led in technology. The industry firsts that have come from GM - electric headlights, enamel paint, electric starter motors, automatic transmissions, catalytic converters, many technologies that are now core to modern automobiles - were invented and pioneered by GM. Based on that fundamental strategy, the decision was made to reactivate the program and take a leadership position on advanced technology."
The EV team became GM's Advanced Technology Vehicles (ATV) Division and began re-staffing with purchasing, manufacturing and other specialists as well as highly motivated and talented engineers. "There were two fundamental challenges," Purcell says: "technical feasibility - can you make it work? And commercial viability - can you make it at a cost that people can afford and shareholders can get a return on their investments? Those two themes ran through everything we did."
One key was to focus not just on the vehicle but on the component set that would make it work. "We developed this concept of generations of technology," he explains. "You cycle design generations relatively quickly to accelerate the rate at which you can get cost out and improve functionality. For example, we were working in parallel on three generations of power electronics - Gen I went into production in '96, Gen II in late '98 - and two generations of batteries, lead-acid [PbA] and nickel-metal hydride [NiMH]."
The business case that Purcell took to the Board that June won approval for both the Gen I car with PbA batteries for 1996 and the more advanced Gen II EV with NiMH for 1998. What happened next is now green car history.
Next time: Technology triumph, market disappointment.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Buzz 1:03PM (8/21/2008)
"The industry firsts that have come from GM - electric headlights, enamel paint, electric starter motors, automatic transmissions, catalytic converters"
...wow and to think I thought GM was full of bunch of brainless dinosaurs.
Come on guys the above stuff is pretty wimpy. And this little gem: ""There were two fundamental challenges," Purcell says: "technical feasibility - can you make it work? And commercial viability - can you make it at a cost that people can afford and shareholders can get a return on their investments?"
Really? Gee I'm glad I wasn't wasting my time sitting in meetings with the GM "brain trust" of the day.
The EV-1 had some great engineering talent. Talent that was clearly wasted at GM.
Hope the Volt works out better, but I'm not encouraged.
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Holden Miecranc 10:14AM (8/22/2008)
"The industry firsts that have come from GM - electric headlights, enamel paint, electric starter motors, automatic transmissions, catalytic converters"
...wow and to think I thought GM was full of bunch of brainless dinosaurs.
Come on guys the above stuff is pretty wimpy.
Pretty wimpy? You are an effing moron if you aren't intelligent enough to acknowledge technical developments that are now industry standards. Please enlighten us with a list of industry firsts Toyta has given us that are now used by every manufacturer and have had as big of an impact on the market as the automatic transmission.
oldraven 1:48PM (8/21/2008)
Sorry Gary. It looks like you've pissed people off enough by having an opinion that they can't even read one word you write about topics 'You'd best stick to' without whining.
Thanks for the update. Can't wait to read more.
Buzz, you really need a hobby or something.
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meme 2:48PM (8/21/2008)
If economics was one of the main guiding forces for the EV1 project, why was the car such a "one-off", sharing so little in common with other GM vehicles? It's this degree of reuse of existing component lines that is such a major factor in reducing the cost of a vehicle, and part of what makes the Volt so believable as a mass-market vehicle. Yes, I understand the need to reduce weight and drag, and how that creates the need for new parts in some circumstances. But, looking back at the program, it looks like GM focused almost solely on "new" and very little on keeping unit costs down through reuse. From the outside looking in, it appears that GM *never wanted* the EV1 to be a financial success -- rather, that they were simply making a technology demonstrator. Which leads to the obvious criticism of GM for using the production cost of the EV1 as an excuse in killing off the program.
I'm curious as to how you'd respond to that criticism. Any specifics would be appreciated.
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Paul Sallmen 3:16PM (8/21/2008)
I, too, tend to agree that GM dropped the ball with the EV1 program. I think the car would've actually sold in moderate numbers especially in urban California. Even if it was expensive (ie $30 000-$40 000) it would've sold mainly as a niche vehicle. Although GM would've lost money initially (so did the Toyota Prius), but the thing GM really missed out on, was the ability to learn from the EV1, improve it and transfer that technology to other models. Something Toyota has already done with their Hybrid Synergy Drive (in Camry, a few Lexuses, licensed to Nissan). But I guess that's why Toyota makes money and GM doesn't. GM doesn't look further than the next quarter. In the 1990s, with $10/barrel oil, an electric car got in the way of their grandiose SUV plans. Too bad they never figured out that oil was a finite resource. Hopefully their plans with the Volt will be different.
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Craig 4:15PM (8/21/2008)
Toyota also dosn't have to pay a good portion of their profits to retired workers and and deal with union labor.
oldraven 12:46PM (8/22/2008)
GM did learn a lot from the EV1, and they did advance the technology. They didn't kill the electric car, they just killed the EV1, since much of the advancements found in the Volt came from what they learned with the EV1. If it makes it any easier to swallow, think of the Volt as the EV2, since GM was planning to build a range extended version of the EV1 the first time around. But CARB insisted on ZERO emissions, not partial emissions.
Thank heavens they don't listen to CARB so much now and went ahead with it anyway. ;)
idave101 3:41PM (8/21/2008)
Looking fwd to part 3. Nice to hear details from an insider on a great project that was economically a decade early and designed two seats short.
Going back to part 1, you mention about the Cali mandate: "...no business wants to be told how many of anything it must sell, since no mandate can force people to buy something they don't want." This is true, but you state that the mission of the Impact program was to "Make a business of it (EV's)". If you can't get 2% of your vehicle sales in Cali to be an EV, that's not much of a business -- or you missed your fundamental goal.
Personally I see the reason we don't have practical and affordable EV's today is because CARB (and EPA) backed down on its mandate. Look at your example of the Cat Converter as a major invention for GM. California mandated strict emmissions controls, changing automotive enviornmental policy forever. Without CARB every US city would look like Bejing when not raining.
GM missed the mark with the EV1 from a consumer point of view, couldn't make money. I don't expect a company to sell a product at a loss, and w/o competition there is no motivation to go back and invest MORE with significant risk. Enter Toyota with the right combo, hybrids, and the rest is history.
Good luck with the Volt. As a very interested consumer (and business person) I'm hoping you can succeed in round 2.
Dave
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Amtoro 6:01PM (8/21/2008)
Consumer were pretty idiotic regarding EV's back then (as some still today) and needed to be shown that an electric car does not have to be slow or ugly; but, be honest, did they ever work on attractive publicity?... nop! all we saw on ads and tv was an alien-looking thing so mysterious that made you feel scared when the robotic voice was reading the meaningless script.
Very little work for wanting to make a business out of it
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kert 6:18PM (8/21/2008)
::a great project that was economically a decade early and designed two seats short.
Except that it wasnt, two seats short, that is. There were four-seat Gen2-s around. A series hybrid one, too. Volt is simply more than a decade late.
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jake 11:28PM (8/21/2008)
Looking forward to the next one, but this story sounds WAY too similar to what is going around with the Volt, down to the part where Bob Purcell talks about "The industry firsts that have come from GM", which Bob Lutz talked about in a recent interview on the Volt. Hope history doesn't repeat itself.
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Earl 11:41PM (8/21/2008)
The Wiz claims to be a test engineer on the EV1 program? so how does he know the entire story like he was in every high level meeting throughout the life of the car? I'm a mechanical design engineer at a fairly large corporation, and our test engineers are just glorified technicians, who really have no clue what goes on with management decisions. To act like he knows the "truth" behind the EV1 sounds like a stretch.
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Cotterpin 12:12AM (8/22/2008)
The part about losing money on the EV-1 per unit makes sense.
When Honda introduced their first hybrid, the Insight, they allegedly lost as much as $10K per car. But Honda stuck with it and were able to develop several other platforms from it.
How much money did GM lose by giving up? All of it.
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RIQ 5:57AM (8/23/2008)
I think this guy got paid by GM, to tell a good side of the EV1, all positive, no Cons. he looks too happy, for someone who worked on this project..
this guy is full of MAJOR BS
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真実は傷つく 9:36AM (8/22/2008)
Not only full of it.
I bet he's on a payroll from "that car manufacturer" w the mission
to restore their (tarnished) image before the 'Volt' world
introduction
catherine 3:02AM (8/22/2008)
Actually Cotterpin, its a lot more than that. GM lost a major competitive advantage called "being ahead of the other guy" with their technology . I can't even image a price tag for that. You look at most Japanese industries,that's one mistake they never make.
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真実は傷つく 9:20AM (8/22/2008)
Well 'catherine',
I'm with you all the way,
but
let's not forget Big Oil and the immense power from UNLIMITED financial resources...
and
the aspect on the EV-1 project, so clearly revieled in the 'Must See' movie "Who Killed The Electric Car?", namely:
What does the EV-1 car say about all the other (polluting) cars we produce?
When you reveal it can be done - to produce a fast, elegant, clean, quiet, attractive, high quality car with a minimum of service need, highly appreciated by customers - you really let the spirit out of the flask!
Solution if you can't get it back IN the flask again?
Nuke it !!!
Wear down the C.A.R.B. !
Lobby that mandate into obliteration !
And so, the saga ended.
At the car-crusher.
Head start or not - that phenomenon was just way too radical and intrusive on the established profiteers territory...
"And you shall know the thruth, and the truth shall set you free"
John 8:32
The Other Bob 8:37AM (8/22/2008)
It is great the hear the rear story of the EV1.
I am betting he will get the the part where people may have been willing to pay $30K fo rthe car, but the car cost $80k to produce. Without a boatload more people willing to buy, the cost would have never dropped. The market wasn't ready for it then. The regret from GM, si that they didn't continue to write off the loss as an advertising expense.
To answer a couple of the above criticisms:
1) This car DID in fact share components from other cars, but how many could it realistically have shared? I remember Saturn switches and components in the interior.
2) The developement of the catalytic converter is not a small change. That invention has done more to clean our air than any hybrid ever will. People ridicule it because its not as sexy as hybrids, but it was a huge change.
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Ralph Finneren 6:07PM (8/23/2008)
Even Wagoner admits dropping the EV1 was a huge mistake, and allowed Toyota to become the "green" manufacturer. Most of the problems with the EV1 were a result of the state of battery development at the time. The reason it was only leased in California and Arizona was that the batteries only functioned well in warm weather. This was never going to be a 50 state vehicle, and the added cost of having the inductive charger installed in the owner's house was ridiculous, nevermind that it totally jetisoned anyone who lived in a condo or apartment without dedicated parking. I've also heard that the EV1 did not meet the crash standards of the day, that it had obtained a waiver as a demostration vehicle. Still, GM should have stuck with it, it was clearly a vehicle ahead of its time, waiting on li-ion batteries.
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Geo 11:14PM (8/23/2008)
Why "waiting on Li-ion batteries." NiMH went 140mi and many of them are still working fine in 10 y/o RAV4-EVs.