Saying Goodbye to the CEO Who Killed GM's Electric Car

Is the Obama administration's ouster of Rick Wagoner from General Motors cause for despair or relief? It's too soon to tell for the economy, but for energy and the environment, it's not a hard call.

Mr. Wagoner resigned on Sunday night, under pressure from the White House after GM, as well as Chrysler, failed to come up with restructuring plans that satisfied the Obama administration enough to front them additional government funding.

Many media outlets seem to be touting his departure as a bad-to-worse scenario. Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm praised the man who has helped lead her state's most important industry to the edge of bankruptcy. "General Motors' ousted chief executive is a "sacrificial lamb," she said, per Forbes and many other outlets, adding "that GM's now former CEO and chairman Rick Wagoner had worked for the company for more than 30 years and was trying to turn the company around."

How many chances do you get to turn around a car company? Earth2Tech calls Mr. Wagoner the "Volt/Hummer Chief," in honor of two of his biggest debacles:

Rick Wagoner — the 31-year General Motors veteran who worked his way up to CEO in 2000, allowed the company to drop its early lead in hybrid technology, pulled the plug on the EV-1 electric car development program, steered the company during an era of SUVs and 16 MPG Hummers and, when gas prices climbed late in his tenure, eventually championed the extended-range electric Chevy Volt concept along with frontman Bob Lutz — has resigned at the request of President Barack Obama’s auto task force. Under Wagoner’s leadership, GM has lost $82 billion over the last four years...

Wagoner had a more palatable way of talking about climate change than Lutz. But tucked into his efforts to smooth over Lutz’s statement last year that global warming is a “total crock” was an expression of doubt about the overwhelming consensus among scientists that humans are contributing to climate change. Quoted in the Detroit News, via CNET: "The data is pretty clear that the temperature on the earth is rising. There’s all sort of debates as to why but we’ve clearly come down on the side it makes sense for us to put our business in a position where we can participate proactively in reducing the amount of (carbon dioxide) emissions."

Jerry Garrett, at the Wheels blog on nytimes.com, is just one car/tech blogger today who reminds us that Mr. Wagoner did not always look ahead with much acumen, although "E.V. and hybrid programs... have been revived in recent years":

Mr. Wagoner took responsibility for killing G.M.’s EV1 electric-car program – the subject of the searing documentary film “Who Killed the Electric Car?” — and diverting the company’s resources away from alternative-fuel vehicles and hybrids. When asked by Motor Trend in 2006 what was his worst decision, he said: “Axing the EV1 electric-car program and not putting the right resources into hybrids. It didn’t affect profitability, but it did affect image.”

In a news analysis, New York Times reporter David Sanger calls the Obama administration's intervention in the ailing US auto industry "a risky path." "Uncertainty, angst roll on for U.S. auto workers," writes Reuters, and no doubt that's true.

What could possibly be the upside of this shake-up? Perhaps a US auto industry that aligns itself with the clean-energy, sustainable future instead of the dirty, litigious past: TriplePundit reminds us that the automakers put themselves right into this morass, having "fought for 20 years against increased fuel efficiency standards"...

GM has dragged its heels with every opportunity to change its business model and actually produce something consumers want to buy. It’s time for this behemoth to stop thinking about itself merely as a car manufacturer and start thinking of itself as a transportation company with all the flexibility of product and service offerings that implies...

The new CEO would do well to look beyond trying to keep up with innovation at Toyota and Honda toward other players in the industry like Zipcar the wildly successful car sharing company that has turned car ownership on its head. People in dense cities don’t need to own their own vehicles and deal with parking hassles if they can rent cars by the hour or the day in their neighborhoods. If GM looked beyond the production and sale of motor vehicles, toward the jobs people are trying to get accomplished with their cars (comfortable, safe, convenient, affordable transportation) they’d have better luck coming up with products that people actually want to buy.

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Image: The GM EV1 electric car. Via Wikimedia Commons. "The EV1 was the first modern production electric vehicle from a major automaker and also the first purpose-built electric car produced by General Motors (GM) in the United States. Introduced in 1996, The EV1 electric cars were available in California and Arizona in a limited (3 year/30,000 mile) "lease only" agreement....The EV1 was discontinued after 1999, with all examples subsequently removed from the roads in 2003 by General Motors and crushed, except for a select few kept for educational purposes or as museum pieces. The car's discontinuation remains controversial." Source: Wikipedia