Long Island Books: Electric Vehicle One

"The Car That Could"

By Michael Schnayerson

Random House, $25

Now available at dealerships - though not anywhere near you - is a revolutionary new car. After years of fitful experiments, a major American manufacturer has brought a modern electric car to market. Even more remarkably, the manufacturer is General Motors, known for grandiose concepts, stagnant bureaucracy, and often flatfooted management.

Last week, amid a star-studded, hype-laden rollout, a teardrop-shaped two-seater called the EV1 (electric vehicle one) became available for lease at certain Saturn dealerships around Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix.

There are high hopes that electrics like the EV1 - which emit no tailpipe pollution - can bring an end to tailpipe pollution and heavy dependence on foreign oil. But there are high hurdles as well, and most analysts are betting that GM, which already spent hundreds of millions developing this car - somewhat against its will - is not going to make any money on it.

An Uphill Drive

The bugbear of electrics is range. Despite all its cutting-edge technology, the EV1 can go between 70 and 90 miles on a single charge. Put it this way: If you lived in Montauk, you wouldn't be able to drive this car to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Riverhead to get tags for it and make it back home. And this already limited range plummets in the cold - hence GM's decision to keep its ground-breaker in warmer climes.

So don't consider Michael Shnayerson's "The Car That Could" a Consumer Reports guide to buying a GM EV1. Rather, Mr. Shnayerson, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair who lives on North Haven, provides a front-seat account of the men (and a few, very few, women) who struggled with doubting executives, stupendous technical challenges, and the tense relationship between carmakers and a government-imposed mandate to bring their first-of-its-kind product to market.

Despite the title's focus on the car, this is largely the story of the people who built a car that, well, might. At the same time, Mr. Shnayerson provides enough technical detail, in clear fashion, that the reader can see just how tough it was for GM to pull it off.

Fly On The Wall

To create this account, with its fly-on-the-wall accounts of critical moments in the EV1's development, Mr. Shnayerson enjoyed behind-the-scenes access to the program from early on, continuing to interview and visit even when, for a while, the program "went black" - engineer talk for making a project secret.

In his introduction, he says that GM's only condition for his unlimited access to the program was that it be allowed to review the final manuscript to "correct factual inaccuracies and to delete any confidential details pertaining to future car programs." At one point in the text, Mr. Shnayerson notes that GM disagreed with his observation that its staff was overwhelmingly white, male, and Protestant.

Mr. Shnayerson goes beyond portraying the cadre that built the car to explore the tortuous political battle that swirls around electric cars. The main players are the greenies, environmentalists who wanted electric cars to cut air pollution, and automakers, who don't want to take the huge financial risk of building an electric car for an uncertain market, but also don't want to be left behind if by some chance or miracle electric cars actually take off.

Self-Imposed Crisis

But there are others who have interests in the electric car concept. Mr. Shnayerson introduces the so-called "oilies," refiners who don't want electrics to kill the gasoline market, and power utilities, who want to make sure they don't get stuck eating the cost of building out the power grid to recharge electric cars.

In the role of mediator is the California Air Resources Board, a panel whose policy decisions on car pollution set the pace not only for that state, but, indirectly and by example, for the whole country.

Curiously, GM's crisis of having to develop an electric car under the gun was one of its own making. GM's chairman, Roger Smith (of "Roger and Me" infamy), had become smitten with solar and electric cars as a way to promote GM engineering, and sank a few million into a hand-built concept car with the unfortunate name "Impact."

Big Promise

The Impact, built mostly by an outside team of Californians who truly believed electrics could reverse that state's ongoing air problems, worked pretty well for an electric, with triple-digit range.

The critics at car shows were impressed, as was Mr. Smith, who went so far as to declare on Earth Day 1990 that GM would build the car as a production model. Environmentalists hailed the announcement. But Mr. Smith's underlings - who would actually have to build the darned thing - were aghast, Mr. Shnayerson recounts.

The California Air Resources Board took Mr. Smith at his word, and imposed a mandate that major car makers sell a certain percentage of electric cars in that state, starting in 1998.

Enter Kenneth Baker

Thus caught in its own boast, GM began in earnest to see how it could actually build such a car, while at the same time looking to buy time from the mandate with public relations. Also, it joined a Federally sponsored consortium with Ford and Chrysler to develop a better battery, a quest for the magic bullet that could solve the problem of electrics' limited range at a swoop. As for Roger Smith, he retired.

To head its own program, GM chose an executive named Kenneth Baker, who had experience with an earlier GM electric vehicle program that went kaput after the gas crises of the '70s faded. An ambitious man at a make-or-break point in his career, Mr. Baker is the most extensively profiled of the EV1's many progenitors.

As a chronicler of celebrities such as Keanu Reeves and Jodie Foster, Mr. Shnayerson has a deft touch for the character sketch. Problem here is that limns too many people - there are a dizzying number of characters introduced by name, and they pop up again after long intervals, leaving even the careful reader thinking, "Who?"

Schizoid Character

Judging from the slew of names Mr. Shnayerson thanks for their time and interviews in his foreword, he didn't want to leave anyone out of the tale's actual telling.

Still, many of the characters are quite memorable, and what's interesting as well is the different motivations they bring to the crucible of building the world's first modern electric car.

There are young engineers who want to kiss goodbye the polluting ways of the internal-combustion engine, there is the eccentric inventor who thinks he has the battery that could save GM's program if they'd only let him try, and there are the car execs, of whom only some truly believe electric cars can work.

General Motors constitutes a character as well in this story, a rather schizoid one. On one hand, it was proud of the progress it made on its electric; on the other, it so hated and feared the CARB mandate that it didn't want to give the slightest hint that it was getting anywhere, a duality rather amusingly described by Mr. Shnayerson as "a sort of Dr. Strangelove reaction . . . one hand shooting up, the other hand reaching over to pull it back down."

Three-Way Poker

Plus, there were GM's wrenching financial woes of the early 1990s to contend with - truly staggering losses. In 1992, the electric vehicle program got sidetracked as GM sought to stanch the flow of red ink. For a while, in fact, GM explored collaborating with Ford and Chrysler to build an electric car collectively, high heresy for Detroit.

This period is one of the book's best moments, as Mr. Shnayerson - who also interviewed the electric chiefs of the other two companies - describes the poker game the Big Three play. All face the same looming mandate, but each remains so secretive about its progress - or lack thereof - that their cards never hit the table.

GM, in fact, felt it was so far ahead in the race that it sought to make Ford pay it cash for the research it had done before it would begin collaborating.

Pressed On Anyway

No deal was ever made. In the end, GM decided to go it alone and build the EV1, an effort led by a new program head, the somewhat Napoleonic Bob Purcell.

But the stunner was that GM stuck to its plan to build the car even though in 1995 CARB agreed to forestall the mandate, instead demanding that manufacturers build cleaner gasoline cars while continuing to work toward an electric.

Three weeks after CARB backed off, GM unveiled the EV1, whose production plans had been a closely held secret for almost two years.

A new, green GM? Perhaps. Maybe not. Mr. Shnayerson, who in his introduction states outright that he felt the mandate was "a triumph of social policy," suggests that inertia may have had more to do with the decision to build the car anyway. "By the time CARB blinked," he writes, "EV1 was hurtling toward production after an investment of nearly half a billion dollars, with the first of the pre-production cars rolling off the line at Lansing."

Not Here, Not Yet

Saturn is offering the car through lease only, so that owners won't have to join GM in its big gamble quite as completely. Battery technology, for example, is evolving quickly, so the EV1's massive pack of traditional lead-acid batteries may become obsolete in a few years.

Bottom line? About $35,000. A cluster of government rebates and subsidies will bring the payments down to about those of a $25,000 smog-producing car, depending on the state.

Oh, and by the way, the charger will cost you another $50 per month.

Want to see more? Fire up your Web browser and head over to http://www.gmev.com/home.cgi, the EV1's home page.

The East End would seem home to more than a few with the combination of green mind and green pockets who might take this car home to their electric socket. But you'll have to wait, as our cold winters pose big challenges for electrics. Cold saps battery energy - that's one of the reasons your car turns over so slowly when it's below freezing, so an EV1 might only have 30 or 40 miles of range during a deep freeze. Plus, the high efficiency of electric motors means there's no waste heat to keep passengers toasty.

Still, the Northeast states, including New York, have followed along with California's mandate deal. Car makers can build low-emission gas cars for now, but, by 2003, at least 10 percent of sales will have to be "zero-emissions." Stay tuned.

David Muhlbaum, a former East Hampton Star reporter, now lives in Washington, D.C.