GM: Electrification of the car

GM: Live Green or Die, May 15, 2008. Business Week.

But Lutz is a pragmatist who believes the electrification of the car is the only way to preserve American car culture. "We were agonizing over what to do to counter the tidal wave of positive PR for Toyota," Lutz says. That month, GM came up with the Volt.

No one knew if something resembling supersize cell-phone batteries would work in a car. And GM executives confess the Volt was originally conceived as an image play

By January of this year, the Volt had become the centerpiece of GM’s green strategy.

Despite the tight schedule, Kruse says the batteries will be ready by 2010. "We’re making history," he says. "Fifty years from now, people will remember [the] Volt-like they remember a ’53 Corvette."

Even as the engineers toil to get the science right, Wagoner and Lutz are pushing to change GM’s culture. … That’s a daunting prospect.

…  Had Dr. Seuss depicted the company, he might have drawn a skyscraper in which the CEO hands out an edict from the top floor and a pastel-colored arm reaches out each window, passing the note 40 floors below to the rank and file. Wagoner is not given to cheerleading or, as one executive puts it, "