Aussie GM leader bullish on EV timetable

The Australian engineer at the heart of General Motors’ drive to go all-electric is confident the US automotive giant can make the move even quicker than it is currently forecasting.

Travis Hester, whose GM title is Chief EV Officer, made the bold prediction in a feature interview in the June 2021 issue of Wheels magazine after being quizzed on the company’s already bold objectives in the battery electric vehicle space.

And he also made it clear he wanted Australia to be part of GM’s electrified revolution.

GM has made a US$27 billion ($35 billion) commitment to selling one million EVs per annum globally by mid-decade, attaining North American EV sales leadership and launching 30 EVs globally by 2025.

It has also announced an ambition to eradicate tail-pipe emissions from all light-vehicle by 2035 and go carbon neutral by 2040.

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All this is wrapped up in an over-arching mission first announced in 2017 to achieve zero crashes, zero congestion and zero emissions in “the future”.

“Absolutely,” Hester told Wheels when asked if he wants to beat the current timelines. “We are doing everything we can to encourage adoption, promote the education, fix not just the cars but the infrastructure around the world.

“There are great reasons to do this from our business point of view, but there are also societal benefits all over the place to doing it like this and we are pretty inspired by that as a mission as well.”

Hester admitted GM’s mixed success in fulfilling business aims – remember it shelved the ground-breaking EV1 electric car in 1999 and went into bankruptcy in 2009 – mean the company’s promises and his enthusiastic support for them will be taken with a grain of salt by many.

“I guess the proof is going to be in the vehicles we start to deliver and people will either be early believers in our mission or late believers in our mission,” Hester told Wheels.

“But it’s coming and we are going to show you in a pretty strong way over the next four to five years.”

As for Australia, Hester says he wants GM EVs to sell in his home country, it’s just a case of when.

“I am such an EV advocate I hope to bring EVs to everyone and that doesn’t mean just North America. That means all places around the world, including Australia.”

Hester has been in his current role only since last November. He was recruited to the post by GM boss Mary Barra and number two Mark Reuss. His department is called EV Growth Operations and while it employs only 600 staff it reaches into every part of the company and works with the Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick and  GMC brands to push forward the EV transition as quickly as possible.

“I will spend a lot of time with the heads of the brands,” Hester explained when asked to describe his role. “Then I’ll be over in product development talking about charging and batteries and chemistry and a lot those areas.

“A little bit later we are talking about over the air technology and how that works and how we can get some great product to market.

“Then next minute we are talking about charging deals and how we get chargers into people’s homes and how we can influence the charging network across the county and across the globe.

“Then it might be off to IT and talk about phone apps and how we link that all together.”

Hester, from Bendigo in country Victoria, joined GM’s defunct Australian Holden division in 1995 after graduating from Melbourne University. He worked on Commodore VS, VT and VE and the fifth-generation Chevrolet Camaro based on the Holden-developed Zeta architecture.

He moved to the USA in 2003 and has worked in a variety of ever-more important jobs since then.

Despite a background in piston engines and a love for racing cars, Hester says he is a true EV believer.

“We try and make cars have instant torque with no turbo lag, we try and make cars quiet, we try and make them instantly accelerate to shoot a gap, we try and make them more spacious on the interior without making the exterior too big,” he said.

“All that is right there in an EV, it’s the solution to what we have been trying to do for a long time here.”