General Motors has been in business for more than a century, but in its 112 years, the company has never faced such challenges as it does in today's rapidly electrifying and automating industry. The assembly line jobs from Detroit's heyday have been replaced by legions of automated industrial arms, almost as quickly as the era of internal combustion engines has been supplanted by EVs. Since 2014, it's been Mary Barra's job as CEO of GM to help guide America's largest automaker into the 21st century.

In Charging Ahead: GM, Mary Barra, and the Reinvention of an American Icon, author and Bloomberg automotive journalist, David Welch, recounts Barra's Herculean efforts to reinvent a company that has been around since horses still pulled buggies, reimagine the brand's most iconic models and bring EVs to the masses — all while being a woman in the highest echelons of a male dominated industry. In the excerpt below, Welch examines some of GM's earliest electric initiatives, like the popular but short-lived EV1 or the loss leader Bolt, without which we likely wouldn't have many of Ultium-based vehicle offerings.

Taken from Charging Ahead by David Welch. Copyright © 2022 by David Welch. Used by permission of HarperCollins Leadership, a division of HarperCollins Focus, LLC.

Battery-powered cars had captured the imagination of wealthy, tech-minded drivers. Tesla was the first to tap into that, becoming a hot brand in the process. Its cars began stealing customers away from the likes of Mercedes-Benz and BMW. But in 2017, when Barra was weighing up her own plug-in play, EVs were still only about 1 percent of car sales. They were still too expensive for most consumers and even at fat prices, they lost money. EVs sold by Tesla, GM, and Nissan could take hours to charge and only Tesla models could go more than 300 miles on a charge.

GM had been working on electric batteries and developing vehicles that would run on them. In no way was Barra flat-footed. But spending billions on cars with an uncertain group of buyers was seen as speculative and risky. Internally at major car companies, there were still voices saying that EVs were a costly science project. They assumed Tesla would run out of cash one day and carmakers could carry on as they always had.