Exclusive from The Electric: GM’s New CTO Says the Company Should Make Its Own Batteries

In 2003, General Motors killed the EV1, its first electric vehicle, and it has been branded a Luddite ever since. Gil Golan, who worked on the car as a young engineer, argues that the rap is unfair. Golan, named this month as GM’s chief technology officer and vice president of research and development, says canceling the EV1 was not a knock against technology, but simply recognition that the car had been introduced before its time. GM has meanwhile kept plugging away—producing the Volt plug-in hybrid in 2010, the fully electric Bolt in 2017, and most recently the electric Silverado pickup, which can go 450 miles on a charge, among the longest ranges for any commercial EV. “It’s an amazing vehicle,” Golan told me, lounging on a hotel patio outside Detroit. “It’s not a converted existing truck. This is designed A to Z to be an electric truck.”

If Golan sounds defensive, it could be because GM is in fact on the defensive: Notwithstanding those debuts of electrified vehicles, GM until recently was not really in the EV game, certainly not with the determination of Tesla or China’s Byd, the industry’s runaway leaders. Those companies raised and bet hundreds of millions of dollars on EV and battery factories over the last 15 years. GM didn’t go big until 2020, when it promised to release 30 new EVs by the middle of the decade and later to go all electric by 2035. 

For now, those vows remain mostly talk—we don’t know which, if any, of GM’s coming EVs will prove appealing to consumers. If the company does produce numerous compelling EVs, we don’t know whether its current talks with the United Auto Workers union will result in a contract that allows it to sell those vehicles at a competitive price. As with other traditional automakers, we also don’t know—to be blunt—whether GM can survive in its current form if it can’t successfully manage the transition to EVs. The success of Tesla and Byd suggests that some of the key determinants of GM’s fate will be its vehicles’ batteries and software.

So there is a lot of pressure on the 58-year-old Golan, who quietly took over his triple role as CTO, head of R&D and president of GM’s venture arm on Sept. 1, replacing Kent Helfrich, who will retire at the end of the month. Golan has never worked anywhere but GM, joining the automaker as an engineer straight out of graduate engineering school in Israel, where he was born and grew up. We met earlier this month in the Detroit suburbs, talking for more than an hour about batteries, autonomous driving and assorted other technologies that now fall under his supervision. In an industry whose executives tend to look stiff even when they go tieless and open a collar, Golan was simultaneously laid-back, intense and straight-talking. “He’s one of the few folks I have met working for an [automaker] who I could also see inside of a Tesla or a startup,” said Michael Granoff, managing partner of Maniv Mobility, an Israel-based venture fund that invests in mobility companies. “He’s more entrepreneurial, less corporate, than most in those roles.”