6 ms·

Motorola’s 1990s Corvette EV Project

99 points by mauvehaus 3y ago

bjelkeman-again 3y ago
Ok, twenty years may seem like a long time. But this, to me, is an example of why it is really hard to push through inventions in large companies. Management doesn’t think like investors do. And even when you talk to investors, you often have to talk to a lot of them to get some traction. How would you run R&D and new business in a large company? Facebook has spent $10 billion on Metaberse. I think running an internal accelerator, just like Y-Combinator, with internal startups (with their own budget, own teams etc, just like any startup) would have a bigger chance at getting a good result than what they did.
- toast0 3y ago
  Internal accelerators don't tend to work that well anyway, but you also need a different corporate structure than Facebook has. You need something where there's a lot more of distinct internal businesses, then it's easier to manage more of those. More like Yahoo or Google where there's clear groups. You also need to figure out how to let these internal startups use at least some of the corporate resources, but make their product public without mentioning the brand. Having a big brand on a new 'startup' makes a lot of expectations and meeting those expectations reduces the flexibility of being a startup. There needs to be three clear paths for these things: shut it down, subsume it into the brand, spin it off as independent. But only one of those has clear value for the parent.
  - horeszko 3y ago
    Is anyone still running the old shunkworks departments to launch new ideas/technologies? A small group off the side left to do there own thing seems like it could work
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      I guess the old Bell Labs or Xerox PARC are the examples that most people here might be familiar with. But just because it sometimes works well doesn't mean it always does, or even usually does. It's a risk; a lot of academic research doesn't produce anything very practical, and the same is probably true with corporate research, only in the corporate case there are a lot more people expecting a return on their investments.
      - rnk 3y ago
        Can we spin a story about Google and their failing to take advantage of AI opportunities, open AI plus Microsoft coming up crush them in search? Apparently Google hasn't really tried that hard to commercialize their AI stuff and they had worries that it would tell lies and talk about uncomfortable things like say Nazis. So Google fudged their future kind of like Xerox... and this could be what finally seriously hurts them.
  - _ea1k 3y ago
    Its a difficult thing to do, tbh. Too many drive to produce results and its just a managed entity that often fails for the wrong reasons. Too little and it ends up being a skunkworks that has fun, produces curious things, and never makes money. Simulating real market dynamics is pretty difficult.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  > Management doesn’t think like investors do. I feel like some big acquisitions fail this way.
- cronix 3y ago
  Like Xerox Parc, which is where much of our modern stuff came from. Mice, touch pads, GUI, etc. It produced all sorts of marvelous tech. The problem was Xerox didn't realize what they had and companies like Apple and Microsoft just copied it and ran.
  - masswerk 3y ago
    > The problem was Xerox didn't realize what they had I'd contest this (quite popular narrative): Xerox developed the Star as an highly integrated product and introduced it in 1981, 2 years before the Lisa and 3 years before the Mac. It may have been too early, though, as this was before capable microprocessors and the hardware was somewhat limited. Development started in 1977, which was about as early as PARC-based software became sufficiently optimized to make this a viable option, and the first D-processors, Dorado (rejected for its complexity and price point), became ready for evaluation. Arguably, it would have been hard to release a thoroughly engineered system like the Star significantly sooner. (There were also other GUI-driven spin-offs, outside Xerox, like PERQ, which also failed to make the proverbial dent in the universe.)
- jeffbee 3y ago
  This is not all management, it is special to hereditary businesses. There is no rational justification for a series of CEOs to be descendants of the prior CEO. Motorola's third-generation heir crashed it into the ground, because he had no particular talent or qualification for the role.
cyberax 3y ago
Back in 90-s your only realistic choice for batteries was nickel-metalhydride chemistry. And that's around 50 Wh/kg of energy density for the assembled battery pack, compared to 150 Wh/kg for Li-Ion. With a huge number of issues: you can't fast-charge NiMh batteries, and the self-discharge rate is horrendous. Then there is the question of the control circuitry. The first truly reliable high-voltage IGBTs started appearing only in mid 90-s. Before that, you in practice had been limited to synchronous permanent-magnet DC motors. So I think that EVs really started happening almost immediately after all the enabling technology got there in the early 2000-s. The first Tesla Roadster was released in 2008, so perhaps you could have shaved 3-4 years from that, but not much more.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  NiMH was far superior to lead acid, superior to nicad, and much cheaper than lithium ion. The biggest issue with NiMH was that it was heavily encumbered by patents owned by Ovonics / Cobasys, who were acquired by Texaco and then Chevron...who did everything they could to prohibit the battery tech from getting into electric vehicles, with (among other things) Texaco/Chevron having universal right to "veto" any proposed sale/use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...
  - cyberax 3y ago
    Sure. Oil companies tried to delay EVs, but I just don't think it really mattered. Practical EVs happened just about as soon as they became feasible, once the enabling technologies fully matured. Even the best NiMh batteries were inferior to the worst LiIon batteries from the early 2000-s. RAV4 EV was pretty much the best example of what is possible with NiMh, and it was pretty weak: 70hp motor, top speed of 80mph, range of 90 miles.
    - omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
      I think it did and still does matter. Slowing battery development also slowed other aspects of EV tech. To be fair, most auto manufacturers weren't and to some degree still aren't fully on board with even their own EVs. If it wasn't for companies like BYD, Tesla, etc, pushing EVs forward, I think we'd still be stuck with compliance cars. NiMH wasn't great though. I think the best was the NiMH EV1 at 142 miles of range.
slicktux 3y ago
So many ads just to read an article…
- clouddrover 3y ago
  If you don't like ads then use an ad blocker. uBlock Origin is a good one: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
  - dotcoma 3y ago
    And while you’re at it, protect yourself from trackers, too! https://privacybadger.org https://privacybadger.org
jumploops 3y ago
It's interesting how technological progress can be so obvious to some, but limited by factors ultimately outside of their control. A tale as old as time! I often wonder, will self-driving cars face a similar fate? Will we have a self-driving winter where legislation/popular opinion/economics causes the current crop of startups to fall under, only for others to succeed in 10-20 years' time?
Aloha 3y ago
Sometime you can get to the future too soon. Even if Motorola had invested vast sums into development, I'm not sure it would have prevented the company from being broken up as it was in the 2000's. Because only now, 30 years on from that time are electric cars coming into their own - and they're not really mass market yet - mostly still for now anyhow, just a thing for people of means. I think that'll change, but we are not there yet.

99 points by mauvehaus 3y ago

Ok, twenty years may seem like a long time. But this, to me, is an example of why it is really hard to push through inventions in large companies. Management doesn’t think like investors do. And even when you talk to investors, you often have to talk to a lot of them to get some traction. How would you run R&D and new business in a large company? Facebook has spent $10 billion on Metaberse. I think running an internal accelerator, just like Y-Combinator, with internal startups (with their own budget, own teams etc, just like any startup) would have a bigger chance at getting a good result than what they did.

toast0 3y ago
Internal accelerators don't tend to work that well anyway, but you also need a different corporate structure than Facebook has. You need something where there's a lot more of distinct internal businesses, then it's easier to manage more of those. More like Yahoo or Google where there's clear groups. You also need to figure out how to let these internal startups use at least some of the corporate resources, but make their product public without mentioning the brand. Having a big brand on a new 'startup' makes a lot of expectations and meeting those expectations reduces the flexibility of being a startup. There needs to be three clear paths for these things: shut it down, subsume it into the brand, spin it off as independent. But only one of those has clear value for the parent.
- horeszko 3y ago
  Is anyone still running the old shunkworks departments to launch new ideas/technologies? A small group off the side left to do there own thing seems like it could work
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    I guess the old Bell Labs or Xerox PARC are the examples that most people here might be familiar with. But just because it sometimes works well doesn't mean it always does, or even usually does. It's a risk; a lot of academic research doesn't produce anything very practical, and the same is probably true with corporate research, only in the corporate case there are a lot more people expecting a return on their investments.
    - rnk 3y ago
      Can we spin a story about Google and their failing to take advantage of AI opportunities, open AI plus Microsoft coming up crush them in search? Apparently Google hasn't really tried that hard to commercialize their AI stuff and they had worries that it would tell lies and talk about uncomfortable things like say Nazis. So Google fudged their future kind of like Xerox... and this could be what finally seriously hurts them.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  Its a difficult thing to do, tbh. Too many drive to produce results and its just a managed entity that often fails for the wrong reasons. Too little and it ends up being a skunkworks that has fun, produces curious things, and never makes money. Simulating real market dynamics is pretty difficult.
_ea1k 3y ago
> Management doesn’t think like investors do. I feel like some big acquisitions fail this way.
cronix 3y ago
Like Xerox Parc, which is where much of our modern stuff came from. Mice, touch pads, GUI, etc. It produced all sorts of marvelous tech. The problem was Xerox didn't realize what they had and companies like Apple and Microsoft just copied it and ran.
- masswerk 3y ago
  > The problem was Xerox didn't realize what they had I'd contest this (quite popular narrative): Xerox developed the Star as an highly integrated product and introduced it in 1981, 2 years before the Lisa and 3 years before the Mac. It may have been too early, though, as this was before capable microprocessors and the hardware was somewhat limited. Development started in 1977, which was about as early as PARC-based software became sufficiently optimized to make this a viable option, and the first D-processors, Dorado (rejected for its complexity and price point), became ready for evaluation. Arguably, it would have been hard to release a thoroughly engineered system like the Star significantly sooner. (There were also other GUI-driven spin-offs, outside Xerox, like PERQ, which also failed to make the proverbial dent in the universe.)
jeffbee 3y ago
This is not all management, it is special to hereditary businesses. There is no rational justification for a series of CEOs to be descendants of the prior CEO. Motorola's third-generation heir crashed it into the ground, because he had no particular talent or qualification for the role.

cyberax 3y ago

Back in 90-s your only realistic choice for batteries was nickel-metalhydride chemistry. And that's around 50 Wh/kg of energy density for the assembled battery pack, compared to 150 Wh/kg for Li-Ion. With a huge number of issues: you can't fast-charge NiMh batteries, and the self-discharge rate is horrendous. Then there is the question of the control circuitry. The first truly reliable high-voltage IGBTs started appearing only in mid 90-s. Before that, you in practice had been limited to synchronous permanent-magnet DC motors. So I think that EVs really started happening almost immediately after all the enabling technology got there in the early 2000-s. The first Tesla Roadster was released in 2008, so perhaps you could have shaved 3-4 years from that, but not much more.

KennyBlanken 3y ago
NiMH was far superior to lead acid, superior to nicad, and much cheaper than lithium ion. The biggest issue with NiMH was that it was heavily encumbered by patents owned by Ovonics / Cobasys, who were acquired by Texaco and then Chevron...who did everything they could to prohibit the battery tech from getting into electric vehicles, with (among other things) Texaco/Chevron having universal right to "veto" any proposed sale/use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_automotive_NiMH_batteries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_encumbrance_of_large_au...
- cyberax 3y ago
  Sure. Oil companies tried to delay EVs, but I just don't think it really mattered. Practical EVs happened just about as soon as they became feasible, once the enabling technologies fully matured. Even the best NiMh batteries were inferior to the worst LiIon batteries from the early 2000-s. RAV4 EV was pretty much the best example of what is possible with NiMh, and it was pretty weak: 70hp motor, top speed of 80mph, range of 90 miles.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 3y ago
    I think it did and still does matter. Slowing battery development also slowed other aspects of EV tech. To be fair, most auto manufacturers weren't and to some degree still aren't fully on board with even their own EVs. If it wasn't for companies like BYD, Tesla, etc, pushing EVs forward, I think we'd still be stuck with compliance cars. NiMH wasn't great though. I think the best was the NiMH EV1 at 142 miles of range.

slicktux 3y ago

So many ads just to read an article…

clouddrover 3y ago
If you don't like ads then use an ad blocker. uBlock Origin is a good one: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
- dotcoma 3y ago
  And while you’re at it, protect yourself from trackers, too! https://privacybadger.org https://privacybadger.org

jumploops 3y ago

It's interesting how technological progress can be so obvious to some, but limited by factors ultimately outside of their control. A tale as old as time! I often wonder, will self-driving cars face a similar fate? Will we have a self-driving winter where legislation/popular opinion/economics causes the current crop of startups to fall under, only for others to succeed in 10-20 years' time?

Aloha 3y ago

Sometime you can get to the future too soon. Even if Motorola had invested vast sums into development, I'm not sure it would have prevented the company from being broken up as it was in the 2000's. Because only now, 30 years on from that time are electric cars coming into their own - and they're not really mass market yet - mostly still for now anyhow, just a thing for people of means. I think that'll change, but we are not there yet.