The Powerhouse Quotes

“America’s battery team was largely foreign born. There was the occasional American-born battery guy—the families of most of the researchers on Thackeray’s small team had been in the United States for generations, as had Chamberlain’s. But Thackeray himself was born in Pretoria. Chamberlain’s deputy, Tony Burrell, was from Palmerston North, on New Zealand’s North Island. Chamberlain’s immediate boss, Emilio Bunel, was Chilean. The same was true across the American battery brain trust: though John Goodenough grew up in Connecticut, Stanford’s Yi Cui was born in China, Berkeley’s Venkat Srinivasan in India, and MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang in Taiwan. In the industry, not just Sujeet Kumar and Atul Kapadia but almost their entire team of scientists was born in India.
Moroccan-born Khalil Amine unapologetically hired only foreigners. His group included not a single American-born researcher.”
― Steve Levine, The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World

“This is the Prius,” he said. The car he pointed to was a shell with wires hanging out. “It is an example of what they look like when we are done,” he said. This particular examination had proven exceedingly useful because when the second-generation Prius was released in the mid-2000s, some wondered whether Toyota had cheated on the fuel economy tests. Hillebrand’s team had showed that, if the company wanted to, it in fact could game federal evaluators. That was because the car could be programmed with advance knowledge of the curves, stops, and hazards that all automakers knew the test featured. So armed, it could adjust and conserve gasoline. Hillebrand’s team did not demonstrate that the Prius folks did cheat. But the opportunity to do so was sufficient. He sent word to the Environmental Protection Agency, which devised a randomized test that was harder to con.”
― Steve Levine, The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World

“This particular examination had proven exceedingly useful because when the second-generation Prius was released in the mid-2000s, some wondered whether Toyota had cheated on the fuel economy tests.”
― Steve Levine, The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World