In the prior post I gave a general definition and overview of peak oil for those that have yet to track this development.  Until recently, the brightest minds unencumbered by vested oil interests have strongly suggested, and with good documentation, that the world could well run out of extractable petroleum sometime around the mid twenty-first century.

Up until a year ago, this was cause for great alarm.  Most countries in the world, with the U.S. being at the top of the list, have, in the last 50 years, allowed economic development, urban planning, real estate development and transportation issues to be made within the context of always having cheap oil to allow us to construct a society around the internal combustion engine.  If you were to look at a time lapse photographic history of the U.S .landscape from 1900 to 2000, taking one photograph a month for 100 years, the changes will be almost entirely based on an automotive culture.  This culture, while transforming the countryside, has basically been using the same mechanical invention, the internal combustion engine the entire time.  It has been as though once we fell in love with the car and the cheap gasoline that powered it we decided that we arrived at the highest point of civilization and our infatuation blinded us to any kind of consequence other than some nasty smog and ever lengthening drive times.  These were judged to be small prices to pay for an American Dream that gave us 300 horsepower …

In my last post I wrote about GM and the presentation it made to some of us in the media about the new battery technology they are developing along with several other companies.  At the end of that post I highlighted the two distinct lines of challenging questions that have come up in response. 

I will quickly restate these two before moving on to address them.  The first challenge to GM about their commitment to creating a new battery technology for vehicles is to directly question how serious the GM commitment is.  How can the people who were identified as launching and then ‘killing’ the electric EV-1 be taken seriously?  The second challenge is to the commitment of GM to not come out with a true electric car until there is the ‘perfect’ battery technology to do so.  In other words, since it will take several years to perfect the lithium ion battery to meet all the necessary criteria for use, why not just come out with vehicles that use the current nickel-metal hydride technology so that ‘green’ cars can be put on the road much sooner.

To restate simply:  Are you guys for real, and why wait for perfect when good is available? 

Is GM for real?  All evidence points to a truly serious, committed company that has set as one of its core missions to reinvent the actual DNA of the automobile.  First, GM is being extremely open to the press, bloggers and the world at large about what they …

One of the most important research and development efforts in the world today is the quest for the perfect battery to power electric cars.  We all know that there is global warming, air pollution, and an increasing dependence on imported oil.  We know that petroleum is a finite resource that will be depleted in this century.  We live in a country whose culture and functionality is so dependent on the automobile that an alien might think the car is the dominant form of life.  Therefore, the solution to all of these problems and situations is to reinvent how the 200+ million vehicles in this country are powered. 

It has been 120 years since the internal combustion engine was invented and first utilized for a personal mode of transportation.  In that time, the 20th century, practically every technological aspect of our lives has been consistently upgraded, changed or replaced by a new invention.  Not so the power train of the automobile, which, at its essence, is still the mechanical, internal combustion engine we were using in 1900.
This then is the historical context for what the automotive industry and many of its suppliers are attempting to do regarding the invention of an electric power source for all the vehicles we drive. As readers of this blog know, I had been invited by General Motors to meet with some of their top management last month prior to the Chicago Auto Show.  In follow-up to that, GM invited me …

It was great to meet with a number of the top executives at GM prior to the Chicago Auto Show to learn about the Chevrolet Volt, the company commitment to developing battery technology and to really find out how committed this company is and will be in the area of cleaner automobiles.  However there is one interview that truly stands out that needs to be shared. 

Larry Burns is GM’s Vice President, Research & Development and Strategic Planning.  Simply put, this means he is THE person responsible for leading GM into the future of clean transportation. It is Larry’s job to initiate and oversee  research, lead, innovate, prod, motivate  and yes, seduce all those he comes in contact with to buy into a new vision of automotive transportation.

At the outset of our conversation, I made it clear that I was very impressed with GM’s commitment to the Chevrolet Volt and supportive of the seeming commitment to market ever more efficient and green vehicles. That being said, I challenged him to show me what was on his drawing board that was more than just an aggregation of ways to increase over all fleet MPG by degrees and do enough green initiatives for the marketing department to be happy.  I wanted to hear plans for transformation, not incremental change.  I got what I asked for. 

Larry wants to change the automotive world, simple as that.  As our conversation went on, he became ever more impassioned about creating alternatives to the internal combustion engine; that …