One of the myths perpetuated by those slavering drones Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh is the Chevy Volt is a product of Government Motors, foisted upon the American public on the orders of President Barack Obama as part of his plan to turn the country into a socialist paradise. Or something like that. In his new book Car Guys vs Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, which is due to be released June 9, former GM vice chairman Bob Lutz firmly puts the Volt birthers and their tinfoil-hat-wearing fellow travelers in their place. He says the Volt’s ingenious powertrain concept was the idea of GM vice president Jon Lauckner, who sketched it out on a notepad in his office in late 2005, and that serious development work on a production version was well underway in 2007.
Car Guys vs Bean Counters is mostly a blistering attack on the numbers-driven management culture that blights many American corporations, and for which pre-bankruptcy GM was perhaps the ultimate poster child. It’s littered with examples where common sense has been trumped by statistics. Here’s just one: GM deliberately reduced the sheen in its paint so small defects and imperfections would be less obvious. The result? Fewer paint defects per car than Toyota, according to J.D.Power surveys. And cars that looked drab and unappealing in the showroom.
Lutz, who opens the book with an account of how Ford of Europe’s finance department pointed out fixing a problem with camshafts failing shortly after the 12,000-mile warranty expired would result in a $50 million hole in the company’s profit forecast because Parts and Service would no longer be able to sell replacement camshafts to customers, savages America’s business schools: “The big business schools should be asking how and why it all went wrong. They have produced generations of number-crunching, alternate-scenario-loving, spreadsheet-addicted idiot-savants. They should be ashamed.”
But Lutz also reserves a good helping of scorn for Beck and Limbaugh and their vitriolic attacks on the Volt: “Animosity towards the Obama administration is so intense among the right-wing talk-show hosts that any vulnerability, however tenuous, must be attacked and blamed on ‘socialist influence’, with no regard to truth or to the damage these reckless claims can make to GM, an American corporation, to the dedicated and hard-driving members of the Volt team, and to a now-misinformed public that may be steered away from a transportation solution that would fill their needs perfectly.”
Often wrong, but seldom in doubt. It’s a favorite saying of Lutz’s, and it reveals a surprisingly wry self-awareness. His book is full of digs at socialists and the left-wing media that at times sound like they’re straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook, but foaming ideologues like Beck, Limbaugh and their ilk clearly irritate the hell out of the former Marine, whose own political leanings are, ironically, very firmly to the right: “Those people are damaging the credibility of the Republican Party,” Lutz told me at the LA Show last year, still seething over their loopy attacks on the Volt.
Lutz confidently predicts more of the world’s automakers will develop vehicles with Volt-type powertrains. “The skeptics, the pundits, the GM haters, and those who detest lithium-ion as a chemistry will all be dragged, however unwillingly, to the same conclusion,” Lutz writes. “Volt paved the way; Volt was the first with the extended-range EV concept; Volt demonstrated the will and the technological capability of General Motors. And to all the doubters, opponents, critics and skeptics… [including] Glenn Beck, I say: ‘Eat your hearts out. Volt is the future’.”
No doubts there, then. And this time he’s probably not wrong, either. GM sources at last week’s New York Show were still buzzing with the news that BMW engineering in Munich had not only bought a Volt, but had also just hired the former lead engineer of the Volt team, Frank Weber, who will report directly to R&D chief Klaus Draeger. It’s been a very long time since one of Germany’s blue-chip automakers took American automotive engineering that seriously.
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