The Transportation and Urban Analysis department I worked in did next to nothing for GM’s bottom line. We were created because GM needed to show Congress and the rest of the country how GM was interested in preventing potentially negative impacts of its products on urban areas. All those goodwill efforts were made redundant in December of 1974. This was the moment GM managers discovered their profitable large cars had stopped selling due to oil shortages. I joined GM just as that occurred, in mid-December 1974.
Maybe a year or so after I joined GM, I asked Roger Tobin why everyone around me seemed to be so unhappy at their jobs. Roger said, “Everything was great until you got here.” Made sense. Our department was doing research nobody much cared about, and we were directionless. But also, my hiring was the last in the company due to a hiring freeze imposed just minutes after I arrived.
Rothery had an idea that day in my office in what must have been early 1978. He said the engine research department, down the hall from us, was very interested in why emissions were so poor when engines were cold. He thought maybe we could look into why fuel economy is poor when engines were cold –perhaps this could be a good bootleg project.
Bootleg projects were things to keep us busy when there was nothing assigned for us to do. We often had down-time while waiting for other people to do critical tasks on assigned projects. These bootleg projects should be relevant to GM and should be cleared with our bosses. I brought the idea to Tobin and he agreed to help.
GM had lots of people working on fuel economy, but Tobin and I thought GM was likely missing the big picture. In our case, we were asking, “What is the total US impact of poor cold-start fuel consumption?” The US was importing huge amounts of oil, US foreign policy was being driven by oil supply issues, and tangible threats to international peace revolved around our ability to secure enough oil. Tobin and I were less concerned about the impact of oil shortages on GM’s ability to sell cars, but we were banking on our bosses’ ability to sell the research on this last item alone.
The research was eventually published in an SAE Proceedings, so I will leave out much of the technical details here. However, it is important to mention all of our information about fuel economy of a single vehicle under cold start conditions came from an earlier study by Charles Scheffler and George Niepoth of the Power Development Group at GM’s Engineering Staff. This link should get you to an abstract of their article from 1965. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44554260.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)
I have displayed a copy of the “blue cover” report Tobin and I wrote. As you can read, blue cover reports were company classified. To circulate research outside of GM, there must be a “green cover” report which comes after an arduous, months-long approval process. The last step in the process is a sign-off by the top product committee in GM, chaired by the company president.
Our job was to calculate just one number, and it required a lot of mathematics. The research went swimmingly until Tobin and I made one serious mistake. We did not go to a party.
As we were closing in on this one number, Spreitzer was holding an appreciation party for Martin Beckmann. Yes, that Martin Beckmann. Beckmann had been consulting for a few different projects in our department and those projects were winding up or otherwise terminating. Beckmann would no longer be needed. Spreitzer wanted the whole department to come to the party, even though Tobin and I had had no professional interaction with him. We showed up briefly, then left to finish our work. Spreitzer was most unhappy with us, and he rightfully blamed the cold start project.
We maybe could have survived that event, except soon after that every single current project in our department was cancelled.
Alan Horowitz, Whitefish Bay, October 13, 2019.