How GM Beat Tesla to the First True Mass-Market Electric Car
TEN YEARS AGO, the room where I’m standing would have been filled with a deafening roar. The air would have pealed with the sound of a dozen V-8 engines, each one trembling atop its own laboratory pedestal as engineers in white shop coats used joysticks to adjust its throttle and load. ¶ Today, though, 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 roughly 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 guy 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.
In place of all the old V-8s, a grid of 18 massive cobalt blue boxes, each 10 feet high and 8 feet wide, now dominate 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 electric cars have to hold up in every kind of weather. So inside 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 jump start 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 24 hours a day and in silence, generating terabytes of data.
But Nitz hasn’t brought me here just to show me a bunch of blue boxes. Near the end of the room, he finally stops us in front of a large industrial dolly. Sitting on top is a smooth black alien-looking thing, about the size and shape of a very thick rectangular kitchen tabletop. It’s 3 feet wide and 6 feet long and has dozens of plastic-tipped, copper-colored wires protruding from its surface in a sprawling mess of metallic spaghetti.
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