All,
"Did I say anything that made your butt pucker?"
I've known Larry Burns for 25 years. Most of those were as an Executive Vice President at GM, the boss to thousands of people. You have to understand, that is how I still see him. One of the brightest, quickest minds I have ever seen, especially in auto show media scrums. A visionary. I have been all over the world with him. China, Japan, India, Dubai. Monaco. London. Germany. We have been with Presidents. Heads of State. Political leaders.
I have had the great fortune to tag along with Larry to many great events. And he has said many memorable things. But never that phrase.
It was at the end of a Shift podcast with Pete Bigelow of Automotive News. Pete and I looked at each other on the Zoom call, a little surprised perhaps. And I wanted to be witty.
I wanted to say, "Larry, the only time recently that my butt puckered was when Head Coach Dan Campbell of the Detroit Lions went for it on 4th and 2 against the San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game, up by 17 early in the third quarter and I had a bad feeling about that call." But, I didn't think of that until later.
You see, Larry has always been a step ahead of me -- and everyone else in the room. He sees things. Trends. And thinks about things much deeper than I ever will. He never assumes the status quo will always continue. And he doesn't parrot what you have already heard. It's fresh. One step ahead.
He lost his hearing in his early 40s. Totally deaf. Went to bed one night after watching "Seinfeld" and woke up the next day, with nausea and a loss of hearing. As you can imagine, that one singular event shaped the rest of his life, as he told journalists John McElroy, Frank Markus and Gary Vasilash on a recent talk show.
"Yeah, I"m an optimistic technologist in terms of life's experiences," Larry said on the set of Autoline AfterHours. "You guys know I lost my hearing in the early 90s. I hear today with cochlear implants and the journey from 1993, when I got my first implant, to today has been one of learning by this technology. Better batteries, better speech recognition, better software, better electrodes."
For the longest time, even with the cochlear implants, Larry couldn't hear music. When we would travel abroad, he counted on me to be his translator. Especially with accents. But even with me, and knowing my voice, he had to see my lips moving. Read me. Face to face. Never from the side or from behind.
One day, we were walking from press interview to press interview in Washington, D.C. It was a beautiful Spring day. He grabbed me by the arm and stopped me. "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" I said.
It was music. A high school marching band practicing in the distance. It was the first time in over a decade that he heard music. Fast forward to today and you can't tell that Larry is deaf. So, I know firsthand what he means when he says what comes next.
"You can't help but be an optimistic technologist," he said. "I know sometimes people see me as a dreamer or I'm hyping something. I get that. But you've got to put the storytelling with the world of the possible. To give people hope. To get them excited. And, furthermore, to push back on the people with the vested interest in the old way. Because they are very, very good at pushing back!"
I am so glad Larry stands up to the Luddites, the old guard protecting the status quo.
And Pete Bigelow and John McElroy both thanked me profusely for helping to schedule Larry on their shows. And why shouldn't they? Because he drops gems like this one with John.
"I believe there is going to be a day when I get my hydrogen in a cartridge, delivered by Amazon."
John was floored. "Wait a minute, wait a minute," John interjected, laughing as he said these words because this is vintage Larry and just what he wanted his listeners to hear. "Go into more detail."
Larry: "When I was back at GM and the fuel cell team was reporting to me, and Byron McCormick was leading (the GM fuel cell team), the industry sorted down to 700 bar, or 10,000 psi. That's compressed hydrogen is what we would store in the vehicle (to deliver more than 300 miles range on a single tank).
"Meanwhile, scientists have been working on new classes of material. One class of material is called graphene, which is a very thin material with a huge surface area. And they are creating ways to put hydrogen into matrixes of these materials. And the hydrogen doesn't chemically bond with these materials. It's held in place by these forces of how atoms interact with each other. They are called Van der Waals' forces. And it looks like we can get the same amount of hydrogen at 50 bar as we have at 700 bar."
Let's unpack what Larry is saying here. To store hydrogen safely and to store enough of it to go 300 miles or more, you have to create these expensive carbon-wrapped tanks. What Larry is saying would dramatically decrease the cost of hydrogen and the space needed to contain the gas in your vehicle. Like, you could fit eight of these graphene cartridges in the space currently given to the modern gas tank in conventional vehicles.
"That means a cartridge, like the one I have under my sink to filter my (drinking) water," Larry continued.
It would be like the old days when people had milk delivered by milkmen with milk chutes built into the side of a house. Amazon would know when four of your eight canisters were empty and would deliver them with the next package. That, ladies and gentlemen, solves the hydrogen infrastructure problem just like that.
"They swap out my empties and put in my fulls and I'm not worried about this one bit. Amazon makes hydrogen at their fulfillment centers, at scale, using electrolyzers and renewables.
"Do you think Amazon would like to sell energy? Yes! Do you think it's a breakthrough to not have a fixed infrastructure at corner gas stations? It's a breakthrough, John!"
I love this stuff!
Gary Vasilash put a tough question to him. With the slowing pace of EV sales, are the legacy OEMs becoming "technologically pessimistic" or are they being pragmatic marketers? Listen closely to how skillfully, tactfully Larry answers.
"I think it's the latter. It's exciting to tell stories about autonomous cars and electric vehicles. So; it's natural that the media will pick on these stories.
"The auto industry is extremely complicated. You're talking about vehicles with tens of thousands of parts, sourced from around the world, safety-critical products and a market that is highly differentiated. Somehow, it tends to get oversimplified. Let's not forget, the fastest growing segment has been electric vehicles. On my stump speeches -- I think I have been pretty consistent on it -- no one should be betting the farm" on the transformational technology, Larry said. Just be prepared.
He uses plug-in hybrids as an example and takes us back to the Chevy Volt, a vehicle which Larry championed inside GM. A 40-mile EV range meets most commuters needs and "makes all kinds of sense for the transition period.
"But some of the regulators wouldn't give credit for that. They wanted ZEV. Zero. No matter how good the plug-in is and how good a fit it is (for the transition), they believe it will keep fossil fuels in play.
"The reality is the amount of fossil fuel used in the world is enormous. We are not going to get off of it in one step. We can't say, 'shut down oil and natural gas' because we put $7,500 on the nose of an EV and go, 'It's done!'" And he says this, Larry brushes his hands together as we often do when we complete a project.
"We need oil. There's 250 million vehicles in the US that need gasoline! We've gotta find a way to manage the transition Transportation is not the only sector contributing to global climate change. I think we are contributing 15 percent." Other industries need to step up, need more pressure from Congress.
It's at this moment that I want Larry to run for office so I can vote for him and some sober thinking in our government.
"As soon as politicians wake up and bring some sanity, I think we will be in good shape."
And as Larry concludes his answer, he acknowledges the great and important work that journalists do, particularly auto journalists like Frank, John and Gary. "We need a common understanding and that's the important role you play." And suddenly -- surprise, surprise -- we are all on his side of the debate.
One more thought provoking idea and I've got to be on my way. This comes from Pete's Shift podcast.
"Pete, I would contend the biggest competitive threat to auto companies in the future is not another auto company. It's how is this maturing of digital technology,shaping things we do every day? And how's that going to change our need to hop in a car and go somewhere? And that's really an important question that needs to be defined by the industry. If you would have asked me before this conversation, 'What's the what's the biggest threat to a traditional US automaker?'. I would have probably said, 'The Chinese automakers.' But your you just made me think about that in a different way. It's not another automaker, it's the idea of what we use a car to go do or do we even need a car anymore? Perhaps we need fewer cars or or different vehicles to do a different task. I see this as a very exciting opportunity."
"... Both of my daughters, they're in their middle 30s. And they, when they got their first car, they had already had their cell phone for four or five years. And I asked them, 'What would they give
up first? Their car or their cell phone?' They would give up their car before they did their cell phone, because it's such an important part of how they live their lives. I recognize the jury's still out on
remote work. But there's something going on there. Not every job, not every day. But there's something going on. Or even if everybody just commuted to work three days a week, instead of five days a week, you're going to have an impact on travel.
"Also think about the household as the consumption unit. So we had a car for each daughter, my wife and I had a car. Now let's say in the future, rather than having a four-car household, my two daughters lived near me. They don't, but let's say hypothetically they did. And they each had a car and my wife and I had a car. And we could reposition those three cars autonomously. So on the days where my wife and I needed two cars, given what we were doing, Hillary's car could come over and I could use it. Or Natalie could borrow Hillary's car. And suddenly, you could have three households sharing three cars instead of maybe three households with six cars.
"And I think this new DNA for mobility machines -- I'm not going to use the word 'car' here -- is electric, connected, autonomous. And then you think about how that machine or device fits into your life in terms of what you need to do that requires movement. And now when you move somewhere, you move in a fashion statement. And because this thing is probably more like a 1500-pound machine than a 5,000- or 6000-pound machine, it's far less costly."
See what I mean? One idea just spills into the next and suddenly, you have a very different future.
So no, Larry, my butt didn't pucker. My heart raced. My brain is tingling -- for lack of a better word -- as the billions of neurons fire up my nervous system..
I'm actively thinking about the future. Can't get it out of mind. Excited about what could be. And that's exactly what you wanted to have happen, isn't it?
And now for the rest of the news.
Scott