Shanshan Du and Yu Qin of Troy, MI have been indicted on charges including conspiracy for allegedly stealing GM hybrid technology between 2003 and 2005. According to the Detroit News,
Du, who was hired at GM in 2000 and worked in the company’s Advance Technology Vehicle Group, copied thousands of pages of GM trade secrets onto a portable computer hard drive five days after accepting a buyout offer in 2005. The indictment alleges the theft of secrets dates back to 2003.
GM estimates the value of the stolen documents at $40 million, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The indictment charges that Du and Qin set up their own company in hopes of transferring technology to the Chinese automaker Chery, but that no technology ever made it to the Wuhu-based automaker. And though this is an obvious opportunity for a laugh at the expense of “Chinese R&D,” the real story here is just how stupid Du and Qin were for targeting The General’s hybrid technology between 2003 and 2005.
To this day GM still has yet to develop a commercially successful hybrid drivetrain, and at the time of the alleged theft, only the highly unsuccessful BAS “mild hybrid” system (production start in 2006), the PHT truck mild hybrid system (production in 2005), and expensive, complicated “two-mode” hybrid system (production in 2008) were on track for eventual production. What Chery, Du or Qin saw in that technology is utterly baffling… and their attempt at industrial espionage may well have been the greatest compliment ever paid to GM’s long-abortive attempt to catch up with Toyota and Honda in the area of hybrid technology. Don’t believe us? Check out newly-minted CNBC contributor Bob Lutz’s take on GM’s hybrid woes at the four-minute mark in the video above.
You’re thinking like an engineer – it doesn’t work so it’s worthless.
You have to think like a crook. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t work, as long as it LOOKS like it will work. The people buying it won’t know that it doesn’t work for at least a year after they’ve paid me, and I’ll be loooooooong gooooooone by then.
Say,not to change the subject but, well, bad economic conditions are forcing me to sell my Rollex – would you be interested?
This comment right here makes me see how appropriate your nom de blog is.
Of course, I kid, I kid.
And you are right. It might even be worth some money to see what GM did to avoid the same mistakes.
The technologies you mention are the ones that got to the market. Are you sure they didn’t have developed anything else?
GM couldn’t have. The Board of Bystanders were so fixed on quarterly results for the last 30 years that they took the company right into the ground.
That said, it’s really only Toyota that pushed for this. There has been a LOT of companies that didn’t do a damn thing, including suppliers, that could have started, investigated or at least funded in the decade that it took to really get the Prius off the ground. Good luck? Yes. Superb timing? Oh yes. Widely unexpected success? More than likely. But they were there with the right product at the right time.
I’m not sure when this interview was taken, 2009? Very early 2010? But I like the fact that he glosses totally over the fact that the transplants have as much as – or more likely – more, local content as any NA GM assembly plant.
I thought he was pretty honest with “we made a mistake, didn’t think hybrid would be as important as it became”, but he totally blew this away with “we had the world’s first commercially viable electric car, the EV1…”
If this had been/were the case, the streets would be filled with them and the film Who Killed the Electric Car would never have been made.
Du and Yu Qin go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect buyout!
They stole GM’s hybrid technology, along with their Oldsmobile 1970’s diesel technology. I think they also stole the Aztec design just in case people in China want ugly vehicles. I’m sure one of the oil and head-gasket eating Northstar technologies gets stolen very soon.
Maybe November 2007. One of the quotes in this article seems to me to match up…
http://www.just-auto.com/news/gm-plans-volt-for-end-2010_id93147.aspx
“the real story here is just how stupid Du and Qin were for targeting The General’s hybrid technology between 2003 and 2005.”
Just cause their technology fail to sell doesn’t mean it was stupid to steal the technologies. They could build upon the technologies and they have some where to start, instead of starting from scratch, therefore it’ll save them time and money on R&D.
Which is why Ford selling Volvo to Geely is stupid. Chinese are a couple year behind with Car safety and they had to sell Volvo. Not that I hate the Chinese or anything but I’m rooting for my country.
I would have cheered if we could have exported the UAW with Volvo to China.
A little off topic but relevant to GM and their “hybrids”
Where Honda/Toyota/Ford had “hybrids” GM had a brilliant idea. Put start/stop technology in normal cars and make it invasive – nearly imperceptible to the customer. This would increase city mpg for a very low cost compared to the $5k premium a true hybrid adds.
GM failed to capitalize on a brilliant idea of evolving the common car ahead of the game. You’ll gain better CAFE reduction from improving your bread / butter cars than you will with a fraction of sales as hybrids. Instead GM took their start/stop technology and put on hybrid badges on their car and compared them to hybrids. Thank you Lutz for thinking you could bait and switch us with advertising and delivering a product that is substandard.