1
NEWS
GM is electrifying
But the rate of progress joining the zero-emissions set is just above zeroThe world's largest car company called world media together last week to declare its commitment to electrification – and then explained why that will be very much a long-term project.
Reinventing itself as the world's biggest producer of electric cars is one way to shake off the fallout from the second largest global economic crisis in living memory. But as with any major turning point in the history of General Motors, it's a manoeuvre that calls for the same kind of forward planning as berthing a super tanker.
As a consequence, last week’s Electrification Experience symposium, hosted by General Motors just outside San Francisco, was an event longer on headland speeches and big declarations than fine detail.
If it seems like GM is struggling with this new recovery strategy, that would be because it has been hit by a kind of perfect storm starting with the twin threats of peak oil and climate change. With them came a whole new global legislative regime arising from those threats designed to push the auto industry in new and very expensive directions.
And then came the worst general financial crisis since the Great Depression. The rest is well documented – bankruptcy, bailout. The company that once enjoyed a 50 per cent US market share and counted profits in billions when others counted theirs in tens of millions now languishes to the tune of 26 per cent in government hands.
There’s also, of course, the sense of having looked a gift horse in the mouth with the shelving of the EV1, the electric car that was former CEO Roger Smith's pet project. If only, if only, if only – but in an era of obsession with short-term stock price gains, who could have known back in the 1990s what was to happen just a decade later? Quite a few people, in fact, although none of them in the auto industry. But Smith’s sideline project, pursued with sufficient diligence at the time, could have given GM the mindshare Toyota has since snatched with the Prius – and a massive commercial leg-up with an all-electric car, not just a hybrid.
GM has finally found which way’s up and struggled to the surface for air. The way ashore, it's decided, is through electrification.
For the final night of this jamboree, they served up an appropriately humble plate of surf-and-turf. But that wasn't why we were there. The real source of nutrition was chief technology officer Jon Lauckner – the guy who, legend has it, was shooting the breeze with his boss, Bob Lutz, in 2006 when he scribbled on a piece of paper an idea for an electric car with a low-load petrol engine driving a generator to keep the battery topped up. An electric car with none of what’s since been dubbed “range anxiety”. Lutz picked it up and pushed it through, grafting it on to the Cruze compact sedan platform and out came the Volt – the product to which the company now looks for salvation.
The Volt partly mitigates the expediency that led to the scrapping of the EV1. Volt has met with enthusiastic response, loads of awards and great press, and... rather slow sales. But there’s evidence the public is warming to it – 3000 sales made August its best month ever on home turf.
Talking to GM execs, this is just the beginning, the dawn of a new era. Senior VP of global product development, Mary Barra, kicked off the symposium declaring the company’s intention to have 500,000 "electrified" vehicles on American roads by 2017. The term covers a raft of technologies already appearing on the market. Next to come after the Volt, in northern summer 2013, is the all-electric Chevy (aka Holden Barina) Spark EV, revealed to media at the symposium. Later in 2013 will come the ELR, a Cadillac given the Volt treatment.
The Cadillac is a further pointer to an important part of the company’s strategy: GM is getting very good at spinning new product out of existing componentry. The Spark takes 75 per cent of its drive gear from the Volt and the company’s two-mode hybrid system, for example. And, not having the money for a clean-sheet development like the Prius, GM spun the Volt off the prosaic Cruze platform. Necessity, so often born of poverty, proves once again to be the mother of invention.
But that’s the pointy end. Most of those half million electrified vehicles will be stock petrol engines running E-Assist – the General’s name for microhybrid technology, aka auto stop-start, aka an ECU that puts the engine into a temporary "sleep" mode when it comes to a halt in traffic, with an oversized starter motor to reboot it when the driver’s foot comes off the brake. So the claim is less dramatic than it sounds.
Nevertheless, this symposium did amount to a big statement about where the company’s future lies, and it’s decidedly at odds with its primary competitor, Toyota. Declaring the world not is yet ready for electric direct drive, the Japanese giant is sticking with the power-split hybrid formula (Hybrid Synergy Drive) it uses in its Prius and Lexus-branded vehicles. For GM, as Barra put it in her opening speech, it’s all about the plug.
Lauckner's speech was short on excitement, but it did neatly summarise the company’s aspirations. Most of them anyway – we touched on one aspiration they’re not that keen to talk about.
Escaping government grip?
The General still draws bad business press in spades. In recent months Forbes, for example, has questioned the sustainability of the Volt on production cost grounds and suggested the manufacturer is on the way to a second bankruptcy. Lutz fends off the slings and arrows convincingly and charismatically, but 26 per cent government-owned is not where a company of this ilk wants to be.
When motoring.com.au raised this with Lauckner and asked how deeply integrated the electrification strategy is within GM’s ambitions to escape this plight, he shut it down loud and hard. “Not at all. This is about the technology of the company. In no way, shape or form does that enter into this discussion.”
Back to raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Lauckner said the company’s way of keeping or dictating the pace is via in-house development, investment in promising startups and partnering with appropriate suppliers and engineering firms, via its own venture capital and R&D divisions.
He also sees the industry working more intensively with non-automotive companies – Google is the most obvious example as the auto, computing and communications industries converge.
For GM that means spreading its efforts – and funding – across a wide spectrum of development. First comes automotive clean-tech – propulsion related technologies like batteries, motors, power control systems and emission-control devices. For batteries that means higher specific energy with decent power. Electric motors are already very efficient. “But permanent magnet motors use rare earth materials like neodymium and dysprosium,” Lauckner explained. “With the rise in demand, they’ll get costlier. We’ll need ways to ‘thrift out’ there.”
Second is what Lauckner called “the connected vehicle”. By this he means mobile infotainment, functional interfaces, cloud computing – essentially a reflection of what we see going on in consumer electronics, adapted and expanded for cars.
Then there’s the field of advanced materials – lightweight, eco-friendly manufacturing materials and the technologies used to form them.
Next come sensors, processors and memory. This is huge, he said, because it embodies so much new capability in so many aspects of vehicle function. “But we need capable sensors, especially if we’re heading towards autonomous driving.”
Change here is rapid, he added. “Say 12 years ago, an upper end vehicle might have had 20 processors working on a million lines of code. Today, the equivalent vehicle would likely have 75 processors working on more than 100 million lines of code. And it’s growing so fast I don’t think anyone knows where it’s going to be in another 10 or 12 years.”
On power electronics, the crux lies in emerging high-frequency switching technologies. “Faster, able to run at higher temperatures, which could help save on cooling costs.”
Lastly are the manufacturing technologies – an area in which auto makers are always looking for new efficiencies.
Too early for economies of scale
Asked about the insistence that the key to cost reduction lies in scale, he summarised the problem facing the industry while alt-power is in its embryonic stages: how do you achieve economies of scale when the product doesn’t match consumer expectations created by the technology it’s replacing?
“Right now, it’s about getting higher performance at lower cost. Everyone knows the benefits of electrification, but it costs too much and it doesn’t match what we’re used to from combustion engines.”
The answer lies in time, and “generational improvements” in technology, he said. “If it was as easy as going from gen-one to -three, we’d be doing that. Remember what cell phones were like two decades ago, compared to what they are now?”
He’s optimistic that the next five years or so will see major improvements in energy density, helping solve range problems. “What slows that up is that the relationship between energy density and cost is inverse.”
And auto makers have to get batteries right to persuade consumers. “Look already at the difference between the warranties auto makers have to offer next to consumer electronics.”
So get excited, but be patient. The change we’re seeing is unavoidably incremental.
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Written byJeremy Bass
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