IEEE Spectrum September, 2010 - 8

spectral lines

W

hen you see something that
is technically sweet," said
J. Robert Oppenheimer, "you
go ahead and do it, and argue about what
to do about it only after you've had your
technical success. That is the way it was
with the atomic bomb."
Each profession has a right to its
own indulgence-technical sweetness
for engineers, elegance for designers,
contrarianism for
journalistic pundits. It is
not the professionals but
their bosses who must
curb such enthusiasms.
Sometimes, though, the
bosses are out to lunch.
A case in point is the
Chevy Volt, a fundamen-
tally new kind of hybrid
gas/electric car whose
corporate parent, General
Motors, has chosen a
technical solution that is
not only sweet but coura-
geous. Rather than hook
an internal combustion
engine to an electric
motor in parallel-with
the engine sustaining
cruising speed and the motor helping
with the acceleration-the Volt links its
power plants in serial configuration. The
motor alone drives the wheels, with the
engine kept in reserve to recharge the
batteries. This technology allows the car
to realize many of the advantages of all-
electric drive while extending its range
with that still-unbeaten energy-storing
medium, gasoline.
Sadly, this scheme costs a great deal to
implement. That would be a mere detail
if the car were a prototype backed by the
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency or some bored billionaire. The
Volt might even make a certain devil-
may-care economic sense to boutique car
companies, such as Tesla Motors, that
need only sell cars to a handful of rich
people to stay in business.
8

NA * IEEE SPEcTrUm * SEPTEmBEr 2010

Now for our contrarian view: The
Volt won't sell in sufficient numbers to
make a difference to General Motors.
This wounded giant, recalled from
bankruptcy by a US $57 billion federal
bailout-the largest granted to any
manufacturing concern in history-
must sell the Volt in vast numbers to
make even a slight change in its bottom
line. And at the recently announced base

price of $41 000-even with the $7500
tax credit factored in-the car just isn't
going to rack up the kind of sales figures
that will matter to GM. "There are not
enough idiots who will buy it," Johan
de Nysschen, the president of Audi of
America, told auto writer Lawrence
Ulrich, a contributor to this magazine.
Plainly, the bosses at GM were out to
lunch. That, or they were so hard pressed
by their company's economic troubles
that they had to punt, hyping the Volt as
the secret weapon that would turn the
tide of war. In that sense, the company's
gamble can be called a success: Congress
wrote GM the necessary check, which
has prolonged the life support.
The technologies that the Volt's
engineers developed could make the
world a better place many years from

now, but by then GM may well have
been broken up and sold for scrap.
The moral of the story is that brilliant
engineering doesn't translate reliably
into commercial success, whether for a
start-up or a long-running concern.
By the same token, a technical failing
need not result in commercial failure.
Consider Apple's iPhone 4, whose sweet-
but-courageous solution to the problem
of wireless reception
involved wrapping two
antennas around the
edges of the device.
Hold the phone
in a particular way-
the infamous "death
grip"-and you connect
the two antennas, which
will attenuate the signal
and probably drop your
call. Consumer Reports,
the venerable nonprofit
rater of consumer
products, decided not to
recommend the product;
worse yet, comedians
poked fun at what has
become known as
"antennagate." It was the
glitch mocked round the world, in blogs
and on TV talk shows.
Yet none of that seems to have made
the tiniest dent in iPhone 4 sales, which
are already in the millions. Apple says
it is selling every single unit it can make.
Tech glitches or no, Apple products have
bold and clever industrial (as opposed to
technological) design. They're stylish and
captivating; GM's cars, not so much.
When does technical brilliance
matter, and when does it not? It
may be a question of pure luck or
the equally unanalyzable quality
known as charisma. GM long ago lost
that charisma, and Apple has it-in
truckloads. "For he that has, to him
shall be given, and he that has not,
from him shall be taken even that
which he has."
-Philip E. Ross
spectrum.ieee.org

Martin KliMeK/General Motors

Technical Sweetness Isn't Enough
http://spectrum.ieee.org
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2010
