Wired.com: How GM Beat Tesla to the First True Mass-Market Electric Car
Alex Davies | Wired.com | February 2016
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...snip
2016 Chevy Bolt
...ELECTRIC VEHICLES have been available to American consumers for the better part of two decades. The 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 electric cars had a maximum range of 50 miles; today’s highest-rated EV—again, the Model S—can go as many as 300 miles before it needs to plug in. And yet, for all that progress, fully electric vehicles still make up less than 1 percent of US auto sales. There’s a straightforward reason for this: The only one that goes far enough costs far too much...snip
...For GM, the Bolt stands to offer a head start in a new kind of market for electric cars. But for the rest of us, there’s a broader significance to this news. It’s not just that Chevy will likely be 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 fun to watch, as companies go. But the Bolt is far more significant than any offering from Tesla ever could be. Why? Think of the old saw 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...
...All of that pissed off Bob Lutz, GM’s vice chair for product development 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 action 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 plenty 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...snip
Full Article: http://www.wired.com/2016/01/gm-electric-car-chevy-bolt-mary-barra/
Driving the Chevy Bolt: An affordable electric car for everyone — CES 2016
Jan 6, 2016: This time last year, no one even knew that GM was working on an affordable, high-range electric car. Now, they're introducing the Chevy Bolt an electric car with a price point for the masses. The Verge's Chris Ziegler got behind the wheel to try the Bolt out.
Related: Wall Street is somewhat less than impressed with Elon's latest tweets
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:TSLA
