THE CAR OF THE FUTURE - The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future - page 118

ticks of the then-exotic systems they were trying to incorporate and
says, “h ere was a huge technology terror. Oh my god, we'll never make
the cost work, we'll never be able to get technology like fuel injection”—
something that now seems simple and ancient to carmakers—“on these
vehicles. It's just going to be too expensive. It's never going to work.”
A quarter century later, talk about electric cars sounds awfully similar
to him: “I see the same kind of fears now with the bat ery. You tell an
engineer, 'Hey, your job is to do this,' [they'll tell you] it can't be done
and they give you a hundred reasons they can't do it.” h en Layden
reveals his engineering roots: “h en we go away and put a team together
and do it in about half the time you thought it was going to happen
and a third of the cost.”
All the excitement, though, makes Schulz, the old-school executive, a
bit nervous. “You can get some academic to come up with some vehicle
made out of toothpicks and it's lightweight and it's the same size as
an SUV,” he tells me. “But in the car industry you got a make mil-
lions of them.” Companies also need to deal with mundane things like
warranties and liability. “I look at these Teslas,” says Schulz. “h ey're
from Silicon Valley and they're smarter than Midwesterners and all that
good stuf .” But he has a warning: “You get one safety recall, where
they've got to take their whole l eet and replace stuf and disassem-
ble the whole vehicle to do that, they're done, they're toast, and they
haven't tasted that yet.” h e message is clear: electric cars are far from
a mature technology, and there are many things that can still throw
them of course.

W hen I headed to the test track to try out the Focus Electric,

another car caught my eye. It was the new Ford Mustang, a
powerful-looking sportscar, and it would surely be really fun to drive. I
asked Layden whether I could take the 444-horsepower beast for a spin,
but that wasn't going to be possible.
A few weeks later, I l y into Grand Junction, Colorado, to begin
a week on the road. h e man at the airport rental counter politely
informs me that the fuel-sipping compact I have booked is unavail-
able. Would I like a Mustang instead? My i rst instinct is joy. My
second is terror: I'm planning to drive nearly a thousand miles over