General Motors, as we know it, is dead. Long live (the new) GM.
The forced bankruptcy and the taxpayers’ new 60 percent ownership stoked the boilers of political debate. As the administration’s right hand was sealing the fate of GM, the left hand was mandating new standards for mileage and emissions. It left some people predicting that we’ll all be driving ugly little cars that run (slowly) on electricity, that trucks will become so expensive they’ll be used only for work.
For a different future, I give you John Greeson and The Cage.
Greeson is an entrant in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, which is dangling a $10 million purse before teams that create a clean, green, safe car that can be manufactured at reasonable cost.
The contest has drawn entrants from 25 states and 11 nations. (Greeson is New Mexico’s only entrant.) Of the 111 teams and 136 vehicles passing the first round of judging, only one – India’s Tata Motors Ltd. – is a major automaker. The rest are start-up companies, garage tinkerers, and students.
It’s fitting that Greeson, 34, is from Roswell, home to speed – Rocket Man Robert Goddard, one very agile horse, and little green men. He calls his team 7K Hamsters. His entry is The Cage, an SUV that runs on compressed natural gas. Like many of his competitors, he’s mum on the engine and drive train. In general, entrants’ strategies include alternative fuels, aerodynamic design, novel engine configurations, and new materials that reduce body weight.
“One of the goals of the engine is to create a realistic bridge to hydrogen,” he says. “It presents a lot of obstacles.”
Greeson began work on his first inventions at 18 and successes led to the founding of his company, Dairy Solutions. He’s applied his problem solving skills to diseases of cows as well as new kinds of engines.
“Everything in life is about logic, whether it’s an engine or a disease,” he says.
Greeson describes himself as a high-school dropout who has a fascination with physics. I would describe him as self-taught. It’s been my experience interviewing entrepreneurs that the most creative of our innovators often had a poor experience in school. And they routinely sneer at MBAs.
He’s working on The Cage in the same building where he does his dairy designs. Fancy facilities, he says, are less important than the research he does and the mental space to contemplate the engine and work through problems.
Costs of the effort have come out of Greeson’s pocket, so far, although the companies working with him have donated parts and computer systems. This too isn’t unusual among the entrants. While some, like California start-up Aptera Motors, are flush with venture capital (including an investment by Google), many will cost whatever their inventors can bear.
The next step in the X Prize is design judging, based on the vehicle’s features, production capability, safety and business plans. Teams passing this hurdle will enter the performance testing phase, a series of competitive events next year in four U.S. cities.
Greeson has a healthy respect for his fellow entrants: “You’re competing against great men. They’ve spent their lives doing nothing but this. It’s a hard thing we’re doing.”
But the beauty of this race is that, like capitalism itself, everybody has a chance.
I asked Greeson what he would do if he were the new CEO of GM.
“Be creative,” he said. “Come out with something different than everyone else has. You have to innovate. You have to bring something new into the equation. You can’t just keep doing what you’ve done for 50 years.”
He’s amazed that the internal combustion engine is little changed since the days of Henry Ford.
If I were GM’s new CEO, I’d hire some John Greesons.
© New Mexico News Services 2009