[The Toecutter]

More quotes:

The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM’s Revolutionary electric Vehicle, by Michael Shnayerson, page 47

“Cocconi had designed a charger that used the inverter’s circuitry- simplicity itself. That way, a driver could recharge by merely plugging a cord from the wall into a socket on the car. But Hughes’s engineers had found that Cocconi’s charger tripped the ground fault interrupters of nearby wall sockets. Also, the charger itself added mass, which cut into range. The answer, it seemed to Hughes, was obvious: take the charger offboard. Now the engineers would have the freedom to design a system that was both safe by Underwriters Laboratory Standards and could be coded and packaged more easily. Cocconi was furious. He felt that with time he could easily design an onboard charger that avoided tripping the ground fault interrupters. Why squander the economy of a design that used existing parts? The reason, Cocconi felt, was that Hughes wanted to corner a new market in offboard chargers. Make people buy something they don’t need and charge a lot of money for it, he scoffed. Capitalism at work.”

page 203

“They tried to stop us from going to California,” Ovshinsky railed later about the USABC. “They threatened us! I said to them, ‘Look, the Communist Party no longer runs the world. A party line cannot be imposed upon people who don’t believe in it. The consortium is set up to make sure the American public has an electric car. It was not set up to fight the mandate. We are a battery company, and we’re not going to lie to the public’” John Williams, the churchgoing GM head of the USABC’s management committee, deeply resented Ovshinsky’s implication that the USABC had deceived anyone, and that he, Williams, was slanting the facts.”

page 217

“Baker met the press flanked by the heads of the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power and southern California Edison. The utilities would rewire drivers’ garages to accommodate chargers; they would help troubleshoot problems; already, they had begun building prototype charging stands and stations for the Los Angeles area. But even as GM reached out for their help in making PrEView a success, its lobbying money was spent to thwart the mandate that the utilities saw as their guarantee of an EV market. For Southern California Edison and the other investor-owned utilities, GM’s greater sin was in doing nothing to distance itself from the Oilies’ frontal attack on their bid to raise $630 million for EV infrastructure. Already, the Oilies has cowed the utilities into trimming their request to $425 million in a campaign of misleading print ads, op-ed pieces, and the like that seemed to sway public opinion. At an upcoming hearing before the Public Utilities Commission, the Oilies hoped to reduce that figure to zero. The carmakers had nothing to do with that campaign, they protested, and piously lamented the Oilies’ tendency to trash EV technology along with social policy. But as Richard Klimisch of the AMAA acknowledged, the interests of the Big Three and the Oilies were parallel. And as John White, a seasoned environmental lobbyist in Sacramento observed, it was hard enough fighting either the Oilies or the Big Three. Together, they were almost insuperable.”

page 247

“With the Ranger announcement, Ford mentioned that the pickup would retail for $30,000, a whopping premium over the $11,000 price of the Ranger’s gas-fueled version. Somehow, an internal Ford memo outlining the truck’s specifications found its way to environmental advocates on either coast. The memo, with jottings from a strategy meeting, seemed genuine; the “target” price it set for the Ranger, the price Ford thought it could achieve by 1998, was $21,000. Over the summer of 1995, Ford wielded its $30,000 estimate like a club over the California commissioners. At that price, Ford lobbyists told them, no one would buy the truck. In private talks, the rhetoric took on a menacing edge. Though the lobbyists were careful not to be overt, the commissioners got the message: Ford would sabotage its own EV program, if necessary, to make the mandate fail.”

page 248

“The shortest answer to the safety issue was that no major carmaker would be allowed, much less want, to produce EVs whose electrical components were not approved by Underwriters Laboratory, the independent group that tests the safety of all electrical devices sold in America. In Impact’s case, any failure in the electrical system, as in a crash, would shut down the system; so would any spillage of acid or release of hydrogen gas. The battery pack and wiring were also completely insulated; as a dramatic test, the batteries had been charged underwater. Because the pack and inverter transferred high-frequency watts, they were even safely certified and licensed by the FCC, as if they constituted a radio or television station.”