The electrification of Motown was in full display this week at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show, which runs through January 23. In the past, press previews at the event have featured carnival-style new car announcements. Not this year, but there was still a subdued sense that although Detroit may not yet be fully recovered from bankruptcy and recession, U.S. automakers are getting back on their feet. And electric cars are emerging as central to that rebirth.
The shift is best captured by GM’s all-in bet on the Volt, a plug-in electric hybrid sedan. It’s hard to understate the scope of GM’s conversion with the Volt. GM was poised to pioneer mainstream electric cars with its EV1 over a decade ago, only to curtail the program in a series of decisions made infamous by the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
By the mid 2000s, with sales of big SUVs and trucks spinning off proportionally big profits, I can recall senior GM executives disparaging Toyota’s then small-selling Prius as a bad business strategy, describing it as a costly kludge of electric and gas technologies whose price could never cover its cost to build.
