SPECIAL EARTH DAY DOUBLE ISSUE - AutoWeek

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NEXT MONTH, IT WILL BE a decade since General Motors’ Richard Wagoner made Larry Burns the company’s vice president for research and development and gave him one standing order: Reinvent the car. Burns rolled out his answer in 2002: the Autonomy fuel-cell concept car, describing a new DNA for automobility involving not just a new power source—hydrogen—but total electrification of all systems needed for steering, braking, climate control and more. We interviewed Burns in March in his office in Warren, Michigan, which he has decorated with photos of the Autonomy and its successors, the Hy-Wire and the Sequel, and of the Chevy Equinox-based fuel-cell demonstrator cars, now being tested by consumers on the road. The photos are there not as trophies of past achievements but as daily reminders of a continuing vision. “I really believe technology can solve problems,” says Burns. “We can remove the car from the environmental equation, and it will be good business.” Faith in technology is expected of an engineer, perhaps especially of one who can hear only thanks to the technology of the cochlear implants he got after an infection left him deaf. Few observers, though, note the equally competitive fervor that Burns brings to the car business, the degree to which he believes in GM as much as in hydrogen. “Do you know that only 12 percent of the world’s population owns a car? Incredible, isn’t it? That means there’s a great market opportunity, but it’s not one we can take advantage of doing it the old way. The issue is that our industry worldwide is 96 percent dependent on petroleum, and that’s not a sustainable model for our future. When I say sustainable, it’s not just about global climate change, it’s not just about oil availability or price, it’s about equality of access. Oil will play a continuing role, but to grow our business sustainably, we need alternatives, multiple sources to meet expanding needs.” When he began championing hydrogen and talking sustainability, many industry insiders dismissed Burns as a quixotic visionary, doomed to fail in the shark pool that is GM management. Skeptical environmentalists still claim it’s all a cynical corporate bluff. Burns doesn’t come across as any kind of poker player, least of all a bluffer, but neither does he seem naive. The GM shark pool? He’s been swimming in it since 1969. 46 AUTOWEEK APRIL 21, 2008 thegreenissue The Believer Burns grew up in Waterford, Michigan, near Pontiac, where his father owned a diner. The youngest in a large family, he found there wasn’t much money left when it was time for college, but he loved cars, so he got a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at General Motors Institute (now Kettering University), where students alternated classroom time with working for pay for GM and suppliers. He got a master’s in engineering and public policy at the University of Michigan and a doctorate in civil engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He studied urban planning and transportation, and while many of his peers focused on mass transit, Burns kept his eye on the car. “My thesis was on the virtues of automobility, why people prefer it, the flexibility to meet personal schedules and destinations. For personal mobility, nothing beats a car.” His GM career began in the same department he leads today, R&D, but he’s held executive positions in various divisions in the fields of product-program management, quality, production control, industrial engineering and product and business planning. “I wasn’t involved in EV1, I was doing production work in that period, but when people judge EV1 as a failure, it breaks my heart,” Burns says. “We learned so much about electric drive, about controls and batteries, and it’s expertise we’re still using today. Probably a third of the people out of 200 or so on the Volt project have EV1 experience.” GM had a clear edge on the competition in electric cars, and Burns says, almost wistfully, “If we had that hand to play over today . . . ” before moving on to say that the EV1 put a largely experimental product in the hands of regular consumers. “That’s where Toyota got ahead with Prius; nothing With no shortage of idealists who’d like to reinvent the car, Larry Burns is in a position to do it BY KEVIN A. WILSON is as important as getting real products on the road with real people. “We built hybrid prototypes back in the early ’90s, and that evolved into the PNGV Precept of 1999. But that wasn’t a zeroemissions vehicle by the California standards—there’s an example of where regulation can lead you astray. I personally brought four hybrid proposals before the board in the 1999-2002 period, and all were rejected. It was because of the business case. We just didn’t get the courage to lose money on Gen 1.” He knows he’s playing catch-up today and seems energized by scoffing from Toyota execs about GM’s Volt plug-in hybrid, like a ballplayer who’s read disparaging words about his team from an opposing coach. “If we just copied Prius, we’d stay behind,” he says. “We could license the technology, as some have done, and build, say, a hybrid Vibe at NUMMI, but no one would give us credit for that. Prius changed the game. Now, how do we change the game on them?” That’s what the two-mode hybrid is about. It’s what the plug-in hybrid is about. It’s why GM is rolling out a new hybrid every quarter for the next four years, and it’s in part what the flex-fuel effort is about. By 2012, GM says, half of the cars it builds will be flex-fuel vehicles that can burn E85 or another blended fuel. Burns acknowledges that the current model—ethanol from corn distributed over a limited infrastructure—is neither environmentally nor economically sound, but he says that GM opted to put the vehicles out there first as part of a longrange strategy to influence development of cellulosic ethanol and a distribution system. Burns is vice president not only for R&D but also for product strategy. So the Volt plug-in (see page 29) isn’t just another hybrid
PHOTOGAL ENTERPRISES with a plug—it’s a first-generation electrified car in which batteries might just as readily be recharged by a fuel cell as by a small engine. It uses a lot of traditional hardware shared with the global compact-car chassis it’s being co-developed with, so it bears little resemblance to the Autonomy, but there are strands of that new DNA throughout. All of this activity—the hybrids, the battery research, the investment in ethanol start-up company Coskata (see page 42)— moves GM and the industry closer to a fully electric, fuel-cell-powered car, as Burns sees it. He even sees the distillation of ethanol as a step away from a means of generating ample hydrogen for tomorrow’s vehicles. Coskata, he notes, already has a lead on microbes that could produce hydrogen using the same process it’s developing for ethanol. He reminds us that the oil industry already makes a lot of hydrogen, which it uses to cleanse traditional fuels of sulfur. “That’s 175 million vehicles’ worth of hydrogen devoted to keeping gasoline vehicles viable!” Meanwhile, he says “nothing beats biofuels” when it comes to ensuring a steady supply of energy in the face of global political instability. Part of the appeal of Coskata is that it envisions localized production using regionally available corn, cellulosic crops, wood, municipal waste, tires and so on. Burns has experience and understanding of something many of his critics don’t fully grasp: the sheer magnitude and scope of the car business. Inventors and start-ups can produce a handful of cars—hundreds, thousands—without making a blip on the charts. Putting 100 hydrogen-powered Equinoxes on the road this year makes good on an earlier pledge, but the real goal is to make GM the first company to sell a million such vehicles into private hands. If you’re GM, Toyota or another major manufacturer, you also must meet varying regulatory standards, and you can’t count on many incentives big enough to change your business case. “When we were mapping out the new DNA for the car, Rick [Wagoner] defined the challenge properly: It can’t be transformational if it can’t compete on cost, last 150,000 miles or 10 years (6000 operational hours) and satisfy the customer with style, safety, utility and driving experience.” Now in his late 50s, Burns may no longer be in charge when that millionth GM fuelcell car hits the road, but he expects to see it happen. We don’t think he’s bluffing. c APRIL 21, 2008 AUTOWEEK 47
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