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==Introduction== |
==Introduction== |
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In 1990, a major auto show was held in Los Angeles, USA. One of the cars that attracted the most attention at the show was an experimental car called the Impact. The exterior appearance of the Impact was unconventional: a sort of hybrid between the restrained design of a family car, and the aerodynamic contours of a sports car. But this was not the reason for the great interest shown by journalists and car enthusiasts in the experimental car. The reason for the interest was the fact that the Impact was an electric car - and more importantly, whoever was behind the Impact was none other than General Motors - then the largest automaker in the world. This fact has raised many hopes among visitors to the show that perhaps, for the first time in seventy years, quiet, green electric cars will return to travel on the roads. |
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GM CEO Roger Smith was so pleased with the enthusiastic responses and positive reviews that he decided to take up the gauntlet: he announced that the company intends to make the Impact the first ever electric car to be mass-produced - namely, A "real" car, one that can be bought and taken home. |
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This ambitious statement, it turns out, was the beginning of one of the strangest stories in the history of the automotive industry: a story through which we will get to know some of the challenges and difficulties that stand in the way of the electric vehicle revolution. |
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To restore the crown to its former glory |
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The person who took on the task of turning the experimental impact into a car suitable for serial production was Ken Baker - head of the Advanced Vehicle Engineering group in GM's Chevrolet-Pontiac division. Baker, who had the electric vehicle issue close to his heart, set up a new development group and recruited several hundred employees from other divisions of the company. |
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You may be asking yourself - why recruit so many employees to the development group, if the impact presented at the show was already in fact a ready-made car? So it is, that she was not. |
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On paper, the Impact presented impressive data: a top speed of about one hundred and eighty km / h, and a driving distance of no less than two hundred kilometers between charges - an incredible number, well above almost all electric cars produced so far. But to reach those numbers, Baker and people discovered , The company that developed the Impact - a subcontractor that worked in GM's service - rounded all sorts of corners that can only be rounded in an experimental car, one that should not get into the hands of real customers.For example, to reduce air resistance, Impact engineers removed the side mirrors and covered the car All the door and window slots in the masking tape. Electronic components in the car failed after a total of twenty hours on the road, and worst of all: to achieve the Impact's impressive driving range, the electric car drove until its batteries were completely depleted, right down to zero. Such a full charge is devastating to batteries - hence a range of two hundred kilometers is not something that can be reproduced in the real world. This dress is a total of 110 kilometers, and even that on a sunny day, without wind - and without running an air conditioner. In other words, Baker and his staff had * lots * of work to do on the impact… |
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But they were motivated, and they had a vision: to restore the crown to its former glory, and to restore to the electric car the crown of 'Queen of the Road.' |
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The electric car in the early twentieth century |
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Yeah, I know that sounds weird. 'To return a crown to its old self? ...' When did the electric car have a crown that can be returned to פה Where no crowns are returned? ... Well, not many people know this, but for a short time, in the early twentieth century - the electric car was the undisputed leader of the world. The young vehicle. |
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The story of the electric car begins in 1859, when the French physicist Gaston Plante developed a new type of battery called the 'Lead Acid Battery'. It was the first rechargeable battery - that is, a battery that can be recharged by connecting to a power source, without recharging or replacing the chemicals inside. The new battery enabled another French inventor, Gustav Trouve, to develop the first electric car in 1881 - and within a few years more electric cars emerged in England and Germany as well. |
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The two main alternatives to electric propulsion were the gasoline-based internal combustion engines, which also made their first steps at the time - and steam engines, which were older and more familiar. The electric car, however, was superior to these two alternatives by a considerable margin. First, the petrol and steam engines were very noisy and emitted stinking smoke - compared to the quiet and clean electric motor. Second, gasoline and steam engines required constant cooling, and since a closed-circuit cooling system - the radiator - had not yet been invented, this meant that car owners had to stop every twenty to thirty miles to fill water - while an average electric car could go about seventy miles between charges. And finally, electric cars were also faster than gasoline-based cars - though steam cars were still faster than both. |
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The relative advantages of electric propulsion led to the fact that in the early twentieth century, electric cars were the most common on the roads: over forty percent of all vehicles in the US, for example, were electric vehicles - compared to twenty percent that caught gasoline vehicles. Electric, quickly disappeared - mainly because the enormous pressure of steam inside the boilers posed a significant safety hazard, and driving a steam-based car was more or less like riding on a barrel of explosives. At that time they were designed in a very luxurious way, including luxurious fabric upholstery, gold and copper finishes and the like. |
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But the electric cars also had one significant drawback - the drawback that led, in the end In fact, for their downfall: the electricity infrastructure - or rather, the absence of such infrastructure. As I told you in the chapter on the 'war of the currents' between Edison, Tesla and Westinghaus, at the beginning of the twentieth century there were still no standards that defined how electricity should be conducted from the power plant to consumers' homes. Because of this, installing a charging system in the customer's home was very expensive - and it was not easy to find a place to charge your vehicle on the road. |
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Gasoline, on the other hand, is a much simpler matter: easy to transport and easy to store. With the rise in popularity of vehicles, many businesses began offering gas cans to drivers - and in the 1920s 'real' gas stations as we know them today began to emerge. Demand for gasoline has also led to a drastic drop in its price - up to five cents per gallon (four liters) of gasoline, compared to twenty to forty cents for a corresponding amount of electrical energy. |
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In 1908, the Ford Model T was born - the car that launched the modern car era. The Model T was equipped with a petrol engine, and its immense popularity marked a clear change of trend to the detriment of electric cars. The death blow of electric propulsion came only four years later, in 1912, with the invention of the electric starter. Until then, gasoline engine start-ups were done using Manuela - which not only required physical effort, it also had a tendency to break fingers for careless people. The electric starter made starting up simple and easy, and along with the growing distribution of gas stations - electric cars were being pushed out of the market. More and more manufacturers left the electric vehicle market, until in the 1920s the production of electric cars ceased almost completely. |
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Development challenges |
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Kenneth Baker and his men knew they had a rare opportunity: an opportunity to harness the industrial power and vast resources of the world's largest automotive company to revolutionize the automotive world - and perhaps also make a crucial contribution to the climate change struggle, whose awareness began to grow in the early 1990s. With this motivation and a windfall from senior management began the development of the new electric car, which was named General Motors EV1, short for Electric Vehicle. |
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The team faced two fundamental challenges: technological, and marketing. |
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The technological challenge focused mostly on the car's energy consumption. The impact had no less than twenty-seven lead-acid batteries - but the total energy content of all twenty-seven of those batteries together was equivalent to two liters of gasoline. To allow the new car a reasonable driving range, the engineers had to redesign almost every system and system in the vehicle: from the steering and braking system to the air conditioning system. The exterior design of the EV1 was so aerodynamic that some compared it to the F16 - and the body itself was made of lightweight aluminum, combined with plastic parts. All of these gave the car a driving range of about one hundred and ten miles when driving within the city, and a little more than that when driving on a highway. In the second generation of the EV1, which came out in 1999, the lead-acid batteries were replaced with nickel-metal-hydride batteries that had a slightly better energy content, and made it possible to double the travel range to about two hundred kilometers. |
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But even this improved range was far from sufficient. Opinion polls have shown that for ninety percent of the public, a driving range of two hundred kilometers is perceived as too low and creates in them what is called 'range anxiety': the fear of getting stuck with the vehicle without the possibility of recharging it. |
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The second significant challenge, then, was the marketing challenge. It was clear that it would not be easy to convince the public to accept the EV1, and this forced forced task fell on the shoulders of a marketer named John Dabels. This is how Doubles described his first meeting with Kenneth Baker, the program director. |
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"The interview was short. Ken asked me if I was interested in joining the program. And doing what? I asked him. He replied - 'create a demand among the public for electric cars all over the world.' I asked him if he had any instructions for me. Ken Baker pushed a blank sheet of white paper at me and said, 'You're the one who needs to solve this problem.' That was the end of the interview. " |
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Compared to regular, gasoline-powered cars, the EV1 was not a good car. To reduce weight, it had only two seats - so it was not suitable for families - the trunk was relatively small, and even the spare tire was removed to reduce a few more pounds. In fact, the EV1 was voted by Time magazine in 2008 as one of the fifty worst cars of all time. All of these shortcomings were supposed to make the marketing task assigned to Doubles impossible… But in 1993, when GM announced it was interested in a few dozen volunteers to try out the prototype of the new car, its switchboard almost collapsed under a flood of tens of thousands of phones from people begging to actually try The EV1. |
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What is the meaning of this huge demand? |
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Well, the first reason is that to make up for the shortcomings of the EV1, the engineers equipped it with a wide range of advanced technologies compared to the other cars in those days. For example, starting at the push of a button with a key, an advanced steering control system, special glass that keeps the vehicle cool even on sunny days, tire pressure sensors and more. |
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Another reason is the natural advantages of an electric vehicle over a fuel-powered vehicle - the same advantages that even those who are driving an electric car for the first time today can not help but be impressed by. Here are things written by a person who did a test drive on the EV1: |
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"The first thing you notice in this car, is what it lacks. Almost no noise: only the hum is light and quiet clicks when you press the brake pedal. Second, no exhaust: no steam emitted from behind like a wave chasing a motorboat. Then, when you sit in front The steering wheel, there is no delay between pressing the pedal and accelerating - and oh, boy, what acceleration does this car have [...] you feel like you are being launched [rocket], and then you experience this childish enthusiasm, [there are some who call it] 'the smile Of the electric car. '" |
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The commercials GM created for the EV1 highlighted these benefits, as well as the fact that an electric car has no motor to handle, no hill Wicks that can break down and there is no oil to fill. The media interest around the EV1 has been tremendous, and reviews like the one I just read to you have created serious hype around the new car. |
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And finally, another significant factor in the demand was the identity of the potential customers. GM has decided that as a first step, the EV1 will only be marketed in a few major cities, most of them in California. The reason for this was very practical: Lead-acid batteries are very sensitive to extreme temperatures, and in California the weather is quite comfortable most days of the year. But what else there is in California - then, as today - is a relatively large amount of high-income people who can afford to own such an electric vehicle as a second vehicle - that is, a backup vehicle suitable for short trips within the city. People who are also not afraid to try new technology, and who are very, very important to them to save the planet. These people were very fond of the vision inherent in electric cars, and were willing to sacrifice their personal comfort to contribute to its fulfillment. |
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Customers are starting to get apprehensive |
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But in 1996, when GM began handing over the EV1 to private customers who ordered it, a grave concern began to creep into the hearts of some fans of the new car that the big car company might not really want the EV1 to succeed. That maybe GM wants the EV1 to fail. |
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The first sign that something was wrong with GM's EV1 was the fact that GM did not sell the new car to customers - but leased it to them, or in Hebrew - leasing. The monthly cost of the leasing plan was not very high - something between $ 350 and $ 650 - but since it is a leasing, it means that the car does not belong to customers: that is, the ownership of the vehicle remains with GM, which can require them to return the vehicle at the end of the leasing period. And why would a carmaker want to do such a thing? |
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The second and even more threatening sign, was the fight waged by GM - along with other automakers - over new regulations enacted by the state of California. |
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These regulations were born out of massive public pressure on elected officials to solve what was considered one of the country's most serious problems: air pollution. Crowded and crowded cities such as Los Angeles suffered from very heavy smog, which impaired the quality of life of the residents and caused diseases. In 1990, a special committee called the CARB (California Air Resources Committee) determined that seven of the state's major automakers should allocate two percent of their annual sales to non-polluting gases, such as electric vehicles. If manufacturers do not meet this requirement, they will be banned from selling vehicles in California. |
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GM and other automakers have estimated that they will not be able to meet this requirement. Despite initial enthusiasm for the EV1, carmakers did not believe there would be enough demand for electric vehicles among the general public: ordinary people, those who could not afford to own a second car solely for short journeys. Therefore, the car manufacturers began to put massive pressure on the CARB committee to overturn its decision. The pressure from the car manufacturers did cause the committee to flex its requirements a bit and extend the deadline it gave to companies - but not to cancel its requirements. In response, GM filed a lawsuit against the commission, claiming that the requirements it set were illogical and imposing a disproportionate burden on automakers. |
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An absurd situation has thus arisen where one arm of GM builds an electric car and markets it as a legitimate transport solution - while another arm of the company strongly argues that electric cars are not yet mature enough to be a legitimate transport solution… Deliberately sabotaging the chances of success of the EV1, to prove that the requirements of the CARB Commission are illogical and unrealistic in reality. |
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The owners of the EV1 - about eight hundred people - decided to band together, and try to convince GM not to kill the new car. In the words of one of the drivers: |
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"The feeling among our group was that 'we can force them.' "... we're going to force the largest company in the free world to do something it does not want to do, if only we can build a large enough case [for the electric car] and create enough visibility for the project." |
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And EV1 drivers were not content with mere statements. For example, fifty-eight of them sent GM - on their own initiative - checks totaling more than twenty thousand dollars, as a down payment and GM will decide to allow drivers to purchase their cars at the end of the leasing period. GM, however, returned the checks to them without redeeming them. Another customer, a filmmaker by profession, invested another twenty thousand dollars out of his own pocket to produce four independent radio commercials for the EV1, because he thought GM was not marketing the electric car properly. |
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Death of the EV1 |
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And the suspicious customers were not wrong. In January 2000, GM announced that it would stop producing the EV1, and three years later, in 2003, when leasing contracts with customers began to expire, it began collecting electric cars from customers' homes. |
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EV1 drivers flooded GM with letters and phone calls, begging the company to allow them to purchase their electric cars and leave them with them. "The EV1 is more than just a car," one of them wrote to the company president, "it is the road to national redemption." |
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But without Since. One by one the trucks reached the customers' houses and collected their cars. At least two customers were arrested by police as they tried to forcibly prevent GM employees from loading the cars. More famous clients have received a bit more ‘stroking’ treatment: for example, director Francis Ford Coppola, remembered from films such as ‘The Godfather’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. GM knew that Coppola was an avid car enthusiast, and to ease the blow he sent one of the program's executives to collect his EV1 from him in person. Coppola invited the manager to dinner at his estate. |
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"Before dinner, he told me - 'Let's take a ride with the car.' We both went for a drive around Napa Valley. He was so passionate about the car, and kept pointing out all sorts of things in it. He told me - "Next time you make a car A [tram] like that, do this thing differently, make that thing bigger, change here and there… "He was very friendly and very optimistic." |
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When they returned to Coppola's estate, sat down at the table - and while eating dinner and drinking wine, GM employees quietly loaded Coppola's EV1 onto a truck - and took it… Operation Coppola was crowned a success. |
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Or, to be more precise, this is what GM thought. Years later, in 2017, comedian and car enthusiast Jay Leno visited Coppola's estate - and the veteran director presented his EV1 with obvious pride! It turns out that somehow Coppola still managed to get his car back - or maybe he had another car that he managed to hide from the investigating eyes of the manager who came to pick it up… |
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The other drivers, who were a little less famous than Coppola, decided to take on a marketing ploy of their own and in 2003 organized a "funeral" for their EV1. Many journalists and TV channels were invited to cover the funeral procession in which twenty-four EV1 cars wrapped in black cloths took part: Hamat Khalilim led the quiet journey to the Hollywood cemetery, and when the convoy reached its destination the drivers carried humorous eulogies to the car they loved so much. One of them, a rabbi named Brian Meyer, said in his speech - |
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"Today we are experiencing a sense of severe loss as we disconnect the EV1 plug… it is hard to know what to say in moments like this. In all honesty, I searched the rabbinical instruction booklet and found nothing about how to bury a car." |
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"Who killed the electric car?" |
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And so, despite all the protests and pleas, the EV1's extraordinary experiment came to an end. Several copies of it can now be found in museums across the United States, and in a handful of insidious customers - such as Francis Ford Coppola - who managed to outwit GM and keep their car with them. |
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In 2006, a documentary called 'Who Killed the Electric Car' was released, which told the story of the EV1 and the circumstances that led to its downfall. The film, which stars several Hollywood stars who have driven the EV1 such as Tom Hanks and Mel Gibson, promotes the idea that GM killed the EV1 to preserve its existing revenue model from the sale of spare parts - since electric cars do not need much care and repair - And also to appease the big oil companies, whose new electric car has threatened their revenues from the sale of fuel. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, GM sacrificed the EV1 to prove to the CARB committee that its requirements from automakers - devoting a few percent of all vehicles they make to electric propulsion - are unreasonable. |
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This claim sounds like a classic conspiracy theory - and like any self-respecting conspiracy theory, there is a degree of truth in these claims. John Doubles, EV1's marketing director, described GM's conduct regarding the electric car as a case of 'corporate schizophrenia.' |
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"I remember sitting next to one of our lobbyists, and he said to me - 'Doubles, you are my biggest enemy. My job is to convince Congress and the government that the [CARB Commission regulations] should not be implemented, and you prove to everyone that I am wrong. You have to stop it. . " I asked him - are you the one who signs the check for my salary? Not true? "Our group reports directly to the chairman of the board, and until they tell me otherwise - that's what we will continue to do." |
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The way GM decided to get rid of the cars it collected from customers was also suspicious and unconventional: GM did not just store these cars in some remote warehouse - they sent them to a junkyard, where the electric cars were shredded into thousands of tiny pieces of metal. For the suspicious customers, this was proof that GM not only wanted to cancel the program - but also sought to make sure the electric cars would never hit the road again. |
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But like almost every conspiracy theory - the truth behind the EV1 story is much simpler and more banal: money. |
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The EV1 development plan was a very expensive plan for GM, mainly because the electric car was so different from all the other vehicles in the company. GM had a hundred years of experience designing and manufacturing cars, but the EV1 was a very different car from anything the company had done in the past, so all that rich experience was useless, and it was impossible to even use parts or technologies already developed for other models. To the high development costs should be added the fear - very justified, it must be said - that the public will simply not want to buy a car that is on the one hand relatively expensive, and on the other hand has only two seats, a driving range that is less than half the range of a gasoline engine based car. Charge it except for special luggage in the customer's home only. Although the enthusiasm on the part of leasing customers was impressive - but GM feared that this enthusiasm does not represent the general public, but only a small group of idealists, environmentalists, who also happen to have deep enough pockets to play with an electric car toy. One of GM's executives said, in testimony before the CARB commission, that the company had invested close to a billion dollars in the design and production of the EV1, but the actual demand for the car was twenty times lower than it had hoped. |
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"The market for electric cars has not materialized. Not because of reluctance on our part, but because customers were unwilling to sacrifice the convenience of gasoline-powered cars." |
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John Doubles, EV1's marketer, also denies allegations of conspiracy. |
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"When people ask me about a conspiracy, I tell them there was no conspiracy to kill the car because we were not smart enough to think about such a conspiracy. I thought about it a lot, and I think the EV1 died mostly because of a lack of understanding within the company about the value it brings - More than because of outside forces. [...] We did not do a good job of educating people within the company about the benefits of EV1, as we did to people outside the company. We took it for granted that people within GM understand the value of this program. In retrospect, this There was a serious mistake - our biggest mistake, I think. " |
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Aliba Deables, the people who had the hardest time The people who had the hardest time understanding the importance of EV1 to GM were the company's financiers. |
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"What a lot of financiers do not understand is where the profits come from. I know this is a strange statement, but financiers spend most of their time understanding it is impossible to cut costs, and less how to bring in more revenue. Show me one company that managed to cut its way to success… |
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[My colleagues and I] emphasized how important it is for GM to have a positive image among the younger generation, who tend not to purchase the company's products. Jack Smith, president of the company, asked - 'Are many of these young people old enough to buy cars, and if not - what do we care what they think?' This question is a perfect example of how difficult it was to educate financiers about the importance of the program. Take someone who's 14 today: Do you know how many cars he's going to buy in his lifetime? Something like twenty cars, maybe more. You want this person to think about our product. Do not upset him! " |
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In the early 1990s, GM was in a serious economic crisis. The company's CEO was replaced and the weight of financiers in the decision-making process increased significantly. In 1992, the sword of cuts was raised, and most of the engineers in Kenneth Baker's team were fired. The EV1 has never been as lucrative to a company as other model cars, like the monstrous Hummer and the fuel-eater that was very popular in the 1990s, when the price of oil was particularly low. |
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And what about GM's refusal to allow customers to purchase the EV1 at the end of the leasing period? The blame, in this case, is the government regulation that stipulates that a car manufacturer must provide service and spare parts for all its vehicles for at least fifteen years. Given that GM feared the EV1 would be a commercial failure, one can understand why they did not want to take on this long-standing commitment. |
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But despite the economic rationale behind the decision to kill EV1, it was not enough to save GM. A combination of fierce competition with automakers from the Far East, coupled with heavy economic commitments for workers' pensions and health insurance, led to a huge loss of about $ 8 billion in 2005, and in 2008 - at the height of the global subprime crisis - GM did not lose Less than a billion dollars each month, and has had to sell or close the production lines of several of its famous brands, such as Pontiac, Saab and Hammer. In 2009 GM declared bankruptcy, and a shirt in the skin of its teeth by the United States Federal Government. |
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If we zoom out for a moment on the sequence of events I have described to you so far, it is easy to see that all of EV1's troubles stemmed from one and only one source: its batteries. The low energy content of lead-acid batteries - and later nickel-metal-hydride batteries - are the reason for the car's low driving range, which forced the engineers to make the car as light and aerodynamic as possible, making its design so complex and challenging and the car itself expensive. Very much in relation to the transportation value it provided to its potential buyers - and what ultimately thwarted the entire project. If only the energy content of the batteries were higher, many of the problems of the EV1 would have disappeared. |
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The biggest irony of this whole story is that at the time of this whole saga - the quarrels with the customers, the internal arguments within the company, the layoffs and the accusations - the technology that could have prevented these troubles was right under GM's nose. |
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Lead-acid batteries |
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Stanley Whittingham is an English chemist who in the 1960s worked at the American Stanford University on research in the electrochemicals of solid materials, and in the early 1970s moved to work at Exxon, the international energy giant. |
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The days were the days of the global oil crisis: Following the Yom Kippur War and the support of Western countries in Israel, Middle Eastern oil producers announced that they would stop exporting oil to the West. Fuel prices have skyrocketed, and many companies have begun to take an interest in alternative energy solutions. Exxon, in particular, began to seriously consider the idea of electric cars as a replacement for gasoline engines, and Wittingham and colleagues were tasked with designing the next generation of batteries to be used in such cars. |
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The most common batteries in the automotive world at the time were the same batteries that GM engineers chose for the EV1: lead-acid batteries, which are the same batteries used as batteries in gasoline-powered cars. But it was clear to everyone that this type of battery could not fit the task. Although lead-acid batteries were rechargeable batteries - a basic requirement for electric vehicle batteries - but as mentioned, they could only store a relatively low amount of energy. And that was only part of the problem, because even if you charged the lead-acid battery to the end, until the battery was completely full - you could only use about half, about, of the energy stored in it. why? |
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Well, the basic structure of a lead-acid battery is quite simple. Imagine an aquarium, only instead of water there is a liquid in the aquarium called 'electrolyte'. The electrolyte of the lead-acid battery is - look surprised - sulfuric acid, which means that there are no fish in this aquarium - and if there were fish in it, they have long since become confiscated. Inside the electrolyte are immersed two long sticks: "electrodes". One electrode is made of lead and we call it an anode, and the other is made of a compound of lead and oxygen - 'lead oxide' - and we call it a cathode. |
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When the lead electrodes meet the acid, a chemical reaction is formed, one of the products of which is free electrons - electrons that are actually the electricity that the battery provides to the engine and other vehicle systems. |
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But the reaction between the lead and the electrodes has another by-product, in the form of a new compound called 'sulfur lead'. This crystalline compound accumulates on the electrodes like corals on underwater rock. |
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As long as there is only a relatively thin layer of sulfur lead on the electrodes, there is no problem: the acid can pass through the openings and nozzles in the crystal, so the chemical reaction between it and the electrodes continues uninterrupted and the battery continues to generate electricity. When we charge the battery - that is, we will connect it to an external power source - the sulfur lead will disintegrate, the crystalline layer will disappear and the battery will return to its original state. |
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But if we continue to discharge the battery for a long time, the crystalline layer that accumulates on the electrodes will thicken - until it can prevent the acid from touching the electrodes, and in some cases even cause such a strong internal pressure inside the battery that it may rupture. This is why we do not want to let the lead-acid battery run out completely. |
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Stanley Whitingham sought to find a way to allow the battery to store much more energy on the one hand - and also to discharge that energy from the battery without destroying it. |
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Lithium-ion batteries |
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Whitingham's first decision was to replace the lead in the anode with lithium. Like lead, lithium is a metal - but it is a much lighter metal: in fact, lithium is the lightest metal of all metals - which means you can push a lot of lithium into a battery and it will still be much lighter than a lead-acid battery. More importantly, lithium tends to release its electrons very easily - hence it is able to provide more electrical energy: that is, the energy capacity of the battery increases significantly. |
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Whitingham's second decision was to find a solution that would allow him to avoid, somehow, a chemical reaction that creates a layer of insulating material on the electrodes, such as that which occurs inside a lead-acid battery. Fortunately, as part of his work at Stanford, Whitingham was exposed to a new and different type of chemical reaction called intercalation. What is an intercalation? |
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Imagine you are standing in front of a refrigerator, and you have magnets in your hand. You want to get rid of these magnets: What's the easiest way to do this? Simple - attach the magnets to the refrigerator door, and they "stick" to it. This is an analogy to a chemical reaction like the one that causes the formation of the sulfur lead layer. The problem is that it is not easy to later separate the magnets from the refrigerator door - or in our analogy, disassemble the compound back into its two original ions. |
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What to do? Well, another option is to open the refrigerator door and put the magnets on the shelves inside. Because the magnets do not stick to the plastic shelves - they can be removed from the refrigerator without any problem. |
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This is the principled idea behind intercalation. Whitingham replaced the lead cathode with lead oxide - a substance called titanium disulfide. Titanium disulfide has a layered structure - these layers can be imagined as shelves in the refrigerator - and between these layers it is possible to "store" atoms, even without forming a new compound. That is, the atoms just sit there and do not move, without sticking to anything and without creating an insulating layer that will prevent the electrode from coming into contact with the liquid in the battery. |
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The result was a brand new type of battery, called the Lithium Ion Battery. Let's review how this battery works, and understand why it is better than lead-acid batteries. |
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We return to the aquarium filled with electrolyte, and two electrodes sunk into it: an anode made of lithium, and a cathode of titanium disulfide. |
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We will connect the new battery to some device: for example, a lamp. The lithium in the anode easily gives up its electrons, which are now galloping towards the lamp. They leave behind the atoms of lithium - which because they lack electrons, they have become 'ions' - atoms with an electric charge, positive in this case. The positive lithium ions float inside the liquid electrolyte, while the electrons pass through the lamp, causing it to glow - and from there, since electricity always flows in a closed circuit, return to the battery - but this time to the second, cathode. Electrons have a negative electric charge, and when they accumulate on the cathode they attract the positive ions of the lithium. |
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But when lithium ions reach the cathode, they do not adhere to it like a magnet to the door of a refrigerator - but penetrate into the cathode and settle in the spaces between the layers of titanium atoms. This process continues as long as there is enough lithium in the anode of the battery, and enough free space in the cathode to receive the ions. |
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And what happens when the lithium-ion battery is charged? |
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Connect the battery to an external power source: the cathode to the positive terminal of the voltage, and the anode to the negative terminal. The cathode, which has suddenly become positive, will 'expel' the lithium ions stored inside it - because positive charges repel each other. On the other side of the battery, the external voltage source will inject a lot of negative electrons into the anode, and these negative electrons will attract the positive lithium ions floating in the liquid - until all the positive ions return to the anode, and the battery returns to its original, charged state. |
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In other words, the charging and discharging of the batteries is based on the movement of lithium ions back and forth between the electrodes. When the battery provides power the ions move to the cathode, and when it is charged with electricity - the ions return to the anode. This periodic movement from side to side, back and forth, is why lithium-ion batteries are sometimes referred to as 'rocking chair batteries'. |
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Stanley Whitingham's new battery was clearly a breakthrough: its energy content was up to three times higher than that of lead-acid batteries, and thanks to the interaction it was also possible to make good use of this energy without fear of overcharging which would destroy the battery. In 1977, Whitingham introduced his new battery at a technology show, demonstrating how it can power a motorcycle headlight for an entire week, non-stop. |
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But to her and a thorn in her side: Wittingham's new battery was also very dangerous. Titanium disulfide, whose layered structure allows the intercalation phenomenon - is an expensive material, difficult to manufacture, and if it is exposed to the open air it can emit bad gases. The lithium in the second electrode was even more problematic: the ease with which lithium tends to lose electrons means that it also reacts wildly - to the point of actually exploding - when it comes in contact with certain substances, such as water. In addition, the fact that lithium-ion batteries contain more energy in more or less the same volume, means that when the battery is charged it can overheat: such warming can cause a kind of 'avalanche' where more and more lithium ions are ejected into the liquid and cause the battery to heat up even more. More, until finally the battery ignites - and even explodes. |
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Whitingham failed to overcome these safety issues, so Axon decided not to produce rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, but only disposable batteries, which were slightly safer. But even that did not really help: in the early 1980s, Exxon's management decided to re-examine the economic viability of investing in the development of new battery technology. Because at this point the oil crisis is long gone and prices |
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The oil is back to normal - they have come to the conclusion that there is no point in continuing to invest money in developing the new battery. |
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This could have been the death knell for the new lithium-ion batteries, had it not been for Prof. John Goodenough. |
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Godinf was born in 1922, and began his scientific career as a physicist. He worked at Westinghouse and then at MIT, where he was also exposed to chemistry - and over the years he gained a great deal of knowledge in this field as well. In the 1970s, he was approached by Goodinf University of Oxford, England, and offered to join the ranks of her professor of chemistry. Godinf says he was surprised by the offer because he did not see himself as a chemist at all but as a physicist - but eventually accepted it and moved to England. |
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It was Godinff's unique expertise as a physicist who was also a chemist - or a chemist who was also a physicist - that allowed him to take Stanley Wittingham's lithium-ion battery one step further: he replaced the cathode titanium disulfide with a lithium and cobalt compound that was cheaper and easier to manufacture. This replacement doubled the energy content of the battery, because now the lithium in the cathode also contributed the ions essential for its operation - in addition to the ions that the lithium contributed in the anode. |
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John Goodinaf's work has greatly contributed to the development of the lithium-ion battery, but has not yet completely solved its safety issues - mainly because of the anode, which was still made entirely of dangerous metallic lithium and tends to explode. The third and crucial contribution to the development of the new battery was made by the Japanese Dr. Akira Yoshino, who in 1983 came across a scientific paper in which Godinf described his work on the new battery. |
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Yoshino picked up the glove, and continued the work from where Godinaf had stopped. It replaced the electrolyte inside the battery with a different type of liquid, further improving the battery's ability to store energy. In addition, it was able to replace the dangerous lithium in the anode with a carbon-based material: a material that is also endowed with a multi-layered structure, and is therefore able to "store" the lithium ions by intercalation. This replacement has helped significantly reduce the risk of battery explosion. |
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Finally, the third and final modification Yoshino added to the lithium-ion battery also contributed to the safety of the battery. As mentioned, uncontrolled warming of the battery during charging can cause an avalanche in which more and more lithium ions are emitted from the cathode and pass to the anode. Akira placed a thin membrane inside the battery that separated the two electrodes. Under normal conditions, lithium ions pass through the holes in the membrane without any problem - but if the battery heats up too much, the membrane melts, its holes become clogged - then the ions are unable to pass through, which immediately stops the avalanche, stops warming and prevents the battery from igniting. To prove how safe the new batteries were, Yoshino took several such batteries to the parking lot under his office - and dropped heavy iron balls on them. The batteries did not explode. |
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The first company to agree to gamble on the new batteries was Sony, which launched rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for commercial use. The changes Akira Yoshino introduced in the battery proved themselves, and Sony's batteries were reliable and safe. Other companies began to take them seriously, and one of those companies was Motorola, which in the early 1990s was a global pioneer in the field of cell phones. The DynaTAC, Motorola's first mobile phone - and in fact, the first mobile phone in the world - weighed almost a whole kilogram, and its battery lasted barely thirty minutes. In 1996, Motorola released the StarTAC, the first laptop with a lithium-ion battery: the Startack weighed only eighty-eight grams - but its battery held more than twice as much as the Daintak. |
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Lithium-ion batteries are taking over the world |
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Performance like this has led to lithium-ion batteries gaining momentum throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and everywhere they went - they revolutionized dramatically: the powerful batteries paved the way for a long line of products and developments that we take for granted today. : Thin and lightweight smartphones, through laptops and tiny wireless headphones that can last for hours without a power connection, and ending with scooters and electric bikes that are changing the way we move around in big cities. It would not be an exaggeration to say that much of the advanced technology we use today would not have been possible without the work of Whitingham, Godinf and Yoshino - and the three were recognized for their contribution in 2019, in the form of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry they shared. John Godinaf was then 97: the oldest Nobel Prize winner ever. |
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But the auto industry is known for its conservatism, and it's easy to see why companies that are reluctant to add even a USB socket to their cars are reluctant to incorporate batteries with such a problematic reputation. When GM decided to replace the first-generation EV1 lead-acid batteries with new ones, it preferred nickel-metal-hydride batteries - even though their performance was significantly inferior to lithium-ion batteries. |
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Then, in 2008, a new actress appeared on stage: a small, anonymous company called Tesla, which developed the first electric car - the Tesla Roadster - which was based on lithium-ion batteries: 6831 such batteries, to be exact, gave the Roadster an unprecedented range Of over 390 miles on a single charge. Tesla's success made GM executives realize what a mistake they've made with the EV1. The EV1 gave GM more than a decade of advantage over all its electric car competitors, and could have propelled the company to new heights… But GM chose conservatism over innovation, the EV1 ended its life as a pile of shredded metal flakes - and little Tesla overtook it and became a manufacturer The vehicle has the largest market value in the world. In 2009, Rick Wagoner, GM's outgoing CEO, admitted that the cancellation of EV1 was his biggest mistake as CEO. Another senior GM executive, deputy chairman, said in a 2009 interview with New Magazine. -Yurker ': |
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"All our geniuses at GM kept saying that lithium-ion technology is ten years in the future [...] and suddenly, boom, Tesla shows up. So I said [to our engineers] - 'how can it be that a small startup from California, whoever runs it Do not understand anything in the car business, succeed in it - and we do not? ... " |
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Tesla's success brought to life the sleepy electric car market: Mitsubishi and Nissan rushed to develop their own electric cars, in Israel Shai Agassi gambled on the whole box office with Butterfly - and even GM itself came out with its own electric car in 2013: the Chevrolet Spark EV. Today we can see more electric cars on the roads than ever before, and every year their number is growing. |
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Where is the electric car headed? It is difficult to know, but there is no doubt that the future of the electric car depends, to a large extent, on technological developments in the field of batteries. And here it seems that we have a lot more room to move forward: it is estimated that modern lithium-ion batteries use only a third of their theoretical capacity, and each year their energy capacity improves by another five percent. |
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And yet, it is not easy to develop new battery technology. Chemistry is a complex and challenging field, and it is not for nothing that it has taken over twenty years and the joint work of several scientists all over the world to overcome all the shortcomings of lithium-ion batteries. Safety, capacity, shelf life, number of charge cycles… Each battery is necessarily a compromise between several complex and sometimes contradictory requirements: for example, the ability to store a large amount of energy in a battery sometimes comes at the expense of how fast the battery can supply this energy to the consumer. And fast charging may come at the expense of battery life. |
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You might think Tesla Roadster was the first electric car mass produced in the world. |
You might think Tesla Roadster was the first electric car mass produced in the world. |
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Revision as of 13:27, 21 June 2022
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Introduction
You might think Tesla Roadster was the first electric car mass produced in the world.
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However, this is not the case. The automobile industry had experimented with many power sources, including steam, electric and Internal combustion engines.
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