Here's a great 10.5-minute CBS News Sunday
Morning Current Affairs story on PHEVs and EVs,
plus a transcript of the show. We encourage you
to watch it online rather than just read it,
because it will have a bigger impact. Plus, below
the transcript is a bonus: a full transcript of
the complete interview with GM's Vice Chairman
Bob Lutz, who appears in the broadcast show for only two or three minutes.

We've tracked Lutz's comments as he evolved from
a macho gasoline-powered muscle car guy to PHEV
advocate at
http://www.calcars.org/carmakers.html -- Lutz
continues to back away as much as possible from
fuel cells, and he's getting steadily more
enthusiastic and definitive about the Volt,
though his 2010 "goal" has now slipped a bit to
"late '10 or early '11." He also says the
company will receive its first complete battery
packs next month and will start giving test drives in 2008.

In the broadcast interview, Economist
correspondent Vijay Vaitheeswaran, talking about
PHEVs, says "I think it's a real grassroots
revolution. Could be the next big grassroots
revolution in American politics. What I call the
great awakening of America to climate change and
oil addiction." Vaitheeswaran is coauthor of a
book coming out in about two weeks, "Zoom: The
Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future." which
you can pre-order from links at http://www.calccars.org/books.html

(The interviewer for the CBS News story is
NYTimes Circuits columnist David Pogue, creator
of the "Missing Manual" computer book series. We
and others have been responding frequently to
Pogue's blog, encouraging this Prius owner to look at PHEVs.)

VIDEO STORY TRANSCRIPT & URL
Could The Electric Car Save Us?
One Expert Says It's The Only Good Alternative To Gasoline-Powered Autos
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/06/sunday/main3239838.shtml

(CBS) Let's face it: Gasoline-powered cars are a
gigantic problem. They pollute, they keep us
dependent on foreign oil, and when gas prices go
up, they cost a fortune to drive. But what's the alternative?

The problem is, oil is found only where on earth
God put it, and He happened to put a lot of it in the Middle East.

Vijay Vaitheeswaran is a correspondent for The
Economist and coauthor of "Zoom: The Global Race
to Fuel the Car of the Future." He’s heard the
sales pitches for every solution under the sun -
like ethanol derived from corn.

"I like the idea that farmers are growing energy
that powers our cars," President George W. Bush said in a speech last March.

But Vaitheeswaran says that it actually requires
more fossil fuels to create enough ethanol to
take the place of a gallon of gasoline than the gasoline itself would need.

He has also heard about hydrogen, but says it is
expensive to make and difficult to distribute.

"You can't just pull up at the Exxon station and
say, 'Fill her up with hydrogen,'" he told CBS News correspondent David Pogue.

But a better solution might be ready to roll sooner than you think:

"Electric cars could be a game changer," Vaitheeswaran said.

Toyota's Prius is a half-electric car and cracked
the top ten cars sold in America this summer.
It's a hybrid, so it has both an electric motor
and a gas engine. At low speeds, the electric
motor provides all the power, you're not using
any gas. When you need more power, the gas engine
kicks in as well, and then when you're slowing
down and braking, the power from the wheels is
reclaimed and stored in the battery. All told,
the Prius gets 45 to 50 miles per gallon of gas, but it is still using gas.

But the public's perception of the electric car
is about to get a big makeover, and it's going to
start with the Tesla electric roadster. It goes
from 0 to 60 in 4 seconds. You plug it at night,
and the next day it can go 200 miles on a charge.
There's no gas tank, no tailpipe, no oil changes and certainly no boredom.

Not bad for a car company that's based in Silicon Valley.

Martin Eberhard co-founded Tesla Motors with a
bunch of software and engineering experts who had
no car-design experience. As a result, Eberhard
says they weren't held back by conventional wisdom.

"I thought we should build a car that's actually
better than those gasoline cars, a car that
people want to drive," he said. "So that it
doesn't require some great leap of altruism on
the part of everybody suddenly to break our addiction to oil."

Electric cars don't produce any pollution or
greenhouse gases, but some worry that they will
shift the pollution to the power plants that burn coal when making electricity.

"If you do the math, you'll find that an electric
car, even if you use coal to make the
electricity, produces less pollution per mile
than burning gasoline in the best gasoline-powered car," Eberhard said.

But if you do a little more math, you might get a
little electric-car sticker shock. This radical
innovation doesn't come cheap. The Tesla starts
at $98,000. At this price it compares comparably
favorably with sports cars that have this kind of performance.

Actually, the Tesla handles like a sports car and can go quite fast.

It's selling fast, too. The first 570 Tesla
roadsters have already sold out, and there's a
one-year waiting list. Fortunately, not all Tesla
Motors cars will cost so much; the roadster is just an opening move.

"With that progress, then we consider the next
car," Eberhard said. "Then we look for a car
that's in the $50,000 range that can seat, you
know, five adults, as our next model."

So why does it take a Silicon Valley startup to
reinvent the electric car? Why can't Detroit do
it? Actually, it can. Bob Lutz is vice chairman
for Product Development at General Motors. The
Chevy Volt electric is his baby and it won't cost $100,000.

"My personal target still is to bring this car
into the market at, you know, nicely below $30,000," Lutz said.

The Volt can run for 40 miles on a battery
charge, which GM says is enough daily range for
82 percent of the population. But for longer
trips, the Volt also has a tiny engine (either
gas or ethanol, or hydrogen) that recharges the battery as you drive.

"That engine never drives the car," Lutz said.
"It's not hooked up to the wheels. Think of it as
a portable generator that gets your battery back up."

The car is almost an inside-out traditional
hybrid. Instead of a battery helping out the gas
engine, the gas engine helps out the battery.

But skeptics like Vijay Vaitheeswaran may have a
hard time believing that these cars are the solutions.

"I would watch very carefully what GM actually
does," he said. "The country saw a small moment
of hope, you know, for electric cars for zero
emission vehicles in the '90s, when California
saw GM produce the most aerodynamic production
car ever made. It was called the EV1. And it was
very popular amongst those who could get their hands on it."

You can see the end of that sad story in the
documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
Filmmaker Chris Paine was the director.

"In the 1990s, California told car companies that
they had to put electric cars on the road," he
said. "It took about eight years for a variety of
industry interests to kill these mandates. And as
soon as they killed them, the car companies took
the cars back and destroyed them. And people were
very upset about it. In General Motors' case,
they took the cars out to Arizona and they secretly crushed them all."

Today, Bob Lutz admits that crushing the EV-1s
may not have been the best way to conclude that experiment.

"Now, it turns out that from a PR standpoint
probably the dumbest move we ever made," Lutz
said. "It was done for all the right legal
reasons, but PR-wise it was dumb. So, now I'm
getting e-mails saying, 'I hope you rot in hell.'"

But Lutz says that this time, GM is dead serious about the electric car.

"I mean, this car means more to me than anything
else I've had anything to do with in the 42 years
that I've been in the business," he said. "I
think this is because it's transformational. It's
all new, which is why it just truly excites us."

Tesla and GM both face the same technological
roadblock: coming up with a safe, powerful, long-life battery.

"This is what the battery box looks like if you
pulled it out of the car," Eberhard said. "And
what's inside here is a system built around
standard lithium ion batteries. So if you broke
open the battery pack on your laptop computer,
you'd find a set of these inside - 6,831 of these."

Scrappy little Tesla Motors may hope to save
money and development time by adapting
off-the-shelf battery parts. General Motors,
though, has the mass market to think about, so
they're developing a new lithium-ion battery for
the Volt from the ground up - a huge,
international, multimillion-dollar effort in labs
like GM's battery testing lab, where Denis Gray
is the director. The lab tests prototypes from
the two engineering firms that are working on the Volt battery.

"Some of us replace our cell phones, our
Blackberries, every year because a new model
comes out or we've gotta change the battery,"
Gray said. "I can't do that when it comes to
vehicles. Customers won't be very happy with me
if I change it after six months."

The entire Chevy Volt project hinges on Gray's
ability to lick the battery problem.

"Bob Lutz, Rick Wagoner, they're constantly
asking how are we doing? Are we making the progress that we need?" Gray said.

In other words, if Gray's team doesn't come
through, then there will be no Volt.

"The problem is nobody has done a lithium ion
battery pack this big," Lutz said. "And we say
it's the big unknown because it is. But our
battery suppliers say, 'Hey. Stop saying that.
We're telling you the battery's gonna be okay.'"

So who killed the electric car? Nobody, yet. In
fact, just about everyone's excited by the
possibilities - even Vijay Vaitheeswaran.

"I think it's a real grassroots revolution," he
said. "Could be the next big grassroots
revolution in American politics. What I call the
great awakening of America to climate change and oil addiction."

Chris Paine is excited; in fact, he's making a sequel to his movie.

"The next film is, 'Who Saved the Electric Car?'" he said.

The first Teslas will hit the streets this fall.
And if the battery gods smile on GM, Bob Lutz's
Chevy Volt will be joining it in two years.

"Will it live up to its promise of 40-plus mile
electric range?" Lutz said. "Will the battery
last ten years? Can we bring it in at a price
that most people could afford? If the answer is
'yes' to all that, then I think the future for
electrics is absolutely unlimited."


The Rebirth of the Electric Car
By DAVID POGUE NYTimes Sept. 16, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2007/09/20/technology/circuitsemail/index.html?8c\
ir&emc=cir

This past Sunday, my report on the rebirth of the
electric car aired on "CBS News Sunday Morning." You can see it here.

CBS gave me a juicy long time for the
segment--but the truth is, there was enough good
material to fill a miniseries. Like the interview
with auto-industry superstar Bob Lutz, now a top
executive at General Motors (vice chairman,
global of product development), and the driving
force between the upcoming Volt electric car.
He's a funny, smart, engaging guy, although he's
certainly got GM's interests at heart.

But since I now have the luxury of an
e-newsletter, and you have the luxury of a scroll
bar, here it is: is a longer chunk of that interview.

DAVID POGUE: The Volt, as I understand it, has
both a gas and engine and electric motor. But it's not a Prius, right?

BOB LUTZ: No. What happens is in conventional
hybrids is, there are very few batteries and
they're just designed to give an electric assist.
It's this constant interplay between gasoline and battery.

The Volt is basically an electric vehicle. With a
range of--we're shooting for a minimum of 40
miles. And then, so that people don't get caught
out, when the battery reaches a certain minimum
state of charge, there is a very small
internal-combustion engine, four-cylinder engine, that kicks in.

It could be a small diesel. It could run on
ethanol. Could run on compressed natural gas. It
could be anything. But that engine never drives
the car. It's not hooked up to the wheels. Think
of it as a portable generator that gets your battery back up.

Now, if you want to make a big, long trip, like
from New York to Chicago, you can do it. But once
you're beyond the range of the batteries, then
the small piston engine is probably going to be
working most of the time, and your mileage will drop.

But we have impeccable data that show that 82
percent of the daily trips in the United States
are 40 miles or less. So, I think there's going
to be a lot of people who find that throughout a
month, they'll never burn a drop of fuel.

DP: Got it. Now [walking over to a skeletal model
of the Volt], we have this cool, uh--

BL: Cutaway.

DP: --cutaway. Hey, I don't know where you got
this invisible chassis material, but it's great. Give me a quick tour of the--

BL: Yeah, okay. This is the small gasoline
engine. These things that look like a big stack
of blue CDs are to simulate the lithium-ion batteries.

Now, as we are now working with the lithium ion
suppliers, the batteries may or may not have
exactly that shape. In fact, one of suppliers is
even looking at doing them in little foil bags,
like those airline toilettes. Except you'd accordion the whole batch of them--

DP: --And they're not as useful in wiping your face.

BL: No, you would not wan to wipe your face.
Although lithium... you know, if you're bipolar,
you can eat your battery. (LAUGHTER)

DP: So, what about torque and RPM? Is it all measured differently?

BL: Yeah, batteries have tremendous performance
and torque. Our performance targets for the Volt
are 0 to 60 in around five or six seconds. Top
speed of 120 miles an hour for a limited time. A
hundred miles an hour is sustainable.

DP: And how about the mileage?

BL: If the electricity is produced by renewable
means and non-fossil fuels, the mileage is
infinite. By our calculation, if a person does a
60-mile trip, so that the internal combustion
engine has to help for the last 20, we figure the
equivalent mileage would be about 150 miles per gallon.

DP: And, ah, I heard you have a special program
for journalists to get a free Volt?

BL: Yeah. (LAUGHS) Actually, what's planned for
journalists is... We've run into a great deal of
skepticism on this program. There are cynics, and
some of them are our competitors, who say, "Don't
be fooled by what General Motors is showing you.
They have no intention of building this thing.
This is just smoke and mirrors to take
everybody's mind off their sport utilities," and so forth.

And in order to allay that, at various stages of
the program, we are going to bring in members of
the media. I'm hoping that as early as spring of
'08, we will have the first rough prototypes
running, which will permit members of the media
to drive 30 or 40 miles purely on batteries and
listen to the internal combustion engine kick in.

DP: But you understand why people are skeptical.
I mean, you're still lobbying to keep the Federal
mileage requirements from going up, and so on.

BL: Well, we and Toyota! And Honda. And everybody.

You know, the media likes to say, "The Detroit
Big Three are fighting the fuel economic
proposals." No, no, no--the whole automotive
industry is fighting! Why? Because they're impossible.

I mean, it's easy for the Senate to say, "You
know what? 35 miles per gallon sounds like a good
number." And then somebody else says, "Oh, why
don't we say 40?" I mean, these are crazy numbers.

They never talk to us and actually ask us, "What
are you capable of doing without having to raise
the price of cars by six or seven or eight
thousand dollars?" So unfortunately, logic doesn't always prevail.

What if Congress passes a law that says, to
preserve the nation's highway infrastructure,
starting 2017, cars are no longer allowed to
touch the road? They must levitate two inches
above the road! It's our duty to say, "Hey, folks. It ain't going to work."

DP: Actually, I heard Toyota has a prototype.
(LAUGHTER) OK, let's get back to the Volt real
quick. Are you still hoping for 2010 for the release?

BL: It'll either be late '10 or early '11, but
we're still holding everybody's feet to the fire for 2010.

DP: And what are the technical roadblocks?

BL: Well, the problem is nobody has done a
lithium ion battery pack this big. But our
battery suppliers say, "Hey. Stop saying that.
We're telling you the battery's going to be OK."
We get the first experimental packs from our two
developmental suppliers in October. And then we can start bench testing.

DP: And are you saying, as the cameras roll, that
at this moment, you firmly believe that this puppy will see the light of day?

BL: Yeah, I firmly believe it. A lot of us see it
as the most interesting and most fascinating
technical challenge of our whole careers. I mean,
this car means more to me than anything else I've
had anything to do with in the 42 years that I've
been in the business. I think this is because it's transformational.

Everything else has been a better version of what
somebody else has already done. Dodge Viper, very
exciting, but it targeted the Chevy Corvette.
Chevy ZO6, we said, "Well, we're going to do
better than that." You're always benchmarking something that already exists.

This...it doesn't exist. It's all new, which is why it just truly excites us.

DP: And the price?

BL: My personal target still is to bring this car
into the market at, you know, nicely below
$30,000. And if we achieve that, it will really
become a viable solution. If we have to charge 60
or 70 or 80, then it'll be bought by Hollywood
celebrities and other entertainment figures, and
the odd politician for going to rallies, and that'll be it.

DP: How much of this prototype is what it's really going to look like?

BL: A lot. Obviously, it's not going to have,
like, 22- or 23-inch wheels. But you always do
that with show cars. You have way bigger wheels than you put in production.

It's going to be close enough to the show car to
where, when people see one on the road for the
first time, they're going to say, "That's the
Chevrolet Volt." And it'll be totally different
from any other General Motors car, which I think
is part of the secret of the Prius. By driving a
Prius, everybody knows, "Oh, that person is
concerned with the environment." Being noticed
for what you're driving is very powerful motivation for what you drive.

DP: OK, one last question. In the big picture,
looking decades out, of all these contenders—you
know, biofuel and hydrogen and electric—what do you see?

BL: Well, I have to separate my personal view
from the official corporate view. And they're not that inconsistent.

The corporate view is, we think ethanol is best,
and we think that is going to grow. Perhaps not as fast as we would like it to.

There's certainly a place for diesels, for
certain applications. But it's not a cheap and easy solution.

I think there will be a lot of play on
conventional hybrids, gas electric hybrids, which
we're doing in our full-size sport utilities and
pickup trucks and a lot of other vehicles. Again,
unfortunately, a fairly expensive system.

And then I think, in many cases, the conventional
gasoline engine will continue to exist, albeit in
more complex and much more sophisticated form,
with a lot of devices and mechanical
sophistication built in to squeeze out more fuel
economy. Of course, that isn't free either.

Fuel cells probably will play some role, although
that is somewhat dependent on how fast the
fuel-cell refueling infrastructure gets propagated. So--

DP: But you didn't mention electric in all that.

BL: Well, that's because I was saving the best for last.

DP: Oh. (LAUGHTER)

BL: Electric is going to play a big role. A lot
of the answer to your question depends on how
good a job do we do commercializing the Volt.
Will it live up to its promise of 40 plus mile
electric range? Will the battery last ten years?
Can we bring it in at a price that most people
could afford? If the answer is yes to all that,
then I think the future for electrics is absolutely unlimited.

Visit David Pogue on the Web at DavidPogue.com

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Felix Kramer fkramer@...
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
http://www.calcars.org/news-archive.html
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