The global affordability war in autos comes down to a single variable: parts count.
Lawrence D. Burns, GM's former Vice President of Research and Development and Planning, documented this in his 2018 book Autonomy. What follows draws on Burns' account, as well as on what the competitive landscape has confirmed since.
The Cost Driver That Changed Everything
A previous TaaSMaster memo argued that the winner of the global automotive competition will be determined by industrial architecture, not technology headline.
The mechanism is straightforward: the number of components in a vehicle is the primary driver of its manufacturing cost.
Each part requires development, tooling, testing, and supplier qualification. Conventional internal combustion vehicles have thousands of moving parts - engine, transmission, exhaust, cooling, emissions. That complexity took a century to master.
It also created the moat that kept the number of viable global automakers small.
Electric drivetrains remove most of that complexity by design. The question Burns and his team were working through in the mid-2000s was exactly how much (and what the industrial consequences would be) when the answer became clear.
The Clean Sheet Question
In 1998, Rick Wagoner, the new president and chief operating officer of GM, sat down for lunch with Burns and asked a simple question.
If we were inventing the automobile today instead of in the late 1800s, what would we do differently?
Burns' answer: an electrical architecture, not a mechanical one.
That conversation produced the GM AUTOnomy concept, unveiled by Wagoner at the 2002 North American International Auto Show in Detroit - the first skateboard platform ever shown publicly at an auto show.
All of the propulsion systems were packaged in a six-inch-thick chassis below the floor. No engine tunnel. No transmission. No mechanical steering column.
Wagoner's framing at the reveal: "AUTOnomy is more than just a new concept car; it's potentially the start of a revolution in how automobiles are designed, built and used."
He was right. But did he fully understand at that time the industrial consequences of what GM had built.
The Third Bay
A critically important scene described by Burns in Autonomy has nothing to do with self-driving cars.
It takes place around 2005 at a giant GM warehouse. Company engineers used this warehouse to disassemble any vehicle they found interesting, spreading every component across the floor, bay by bay.
Burns was summoned there by Byron McCormick, GM’s Exectutive Director of Fuel Cells, and the engineer who led the company’s electrical architecture program. He reported directly to Burns, and had set up three bays in the warehouse.
The first held a disassembled Chevrolet Malibu. Thousands of parts highlighting the full mechanical complexity of a century-old ICE architecture spread across the floor.
The second held a Toyota Prius. The pile was even bigger. A hybrid adds electric motors and battery packs on top of a combustion drivetrain.
Two powertrains. More parts, not fewer.
Burns noted the obvious. McCormick said: "But wait."
The third bay held GM's own electric architecture - a prototype skateboard platform designed to accommodate any electric powertrain.
Where the combustion drivetrain had been, there was now a fuel cell stack, a hydrogen storage container, a heat exchanger, and a controller.
Burns writes in Autonomy: "Just one look at the parts spread out before me was enough to explain why Byron had summoned me to the assessment center."
He turned to McCormick: "Rick's got to see this."
Later, Burns walked Wagoner through the same sequence. Bay one. Bay two. Bay three.
Standing before the electrical architecture layout, Wagoner asked: "This is all the parts it requires?"
Burns confirmed it. And what registered in that moment was a manufacturing economics revelation.
Burns had established through earlier R&D work that parts count was the single largest driver of vehicle costs. Fewer parts meant a structurally different cost architecture - not incremental improvement, but a permanent reorganization of where cost lived in the automobile.
A simpler vehicle to build also meant a lower barrier to entry. Detroit, Burns noted, was about to get a lot less expensive.
The Insight That Did Not Become Action… and Why
GM acted on the insight incrementally. It did not act on it decisively.
The EV1, GM’s purpose-built electric vehicle, had already been cancelled under Wagoner in 2003. This is the same year Tesla was incorporated. By 2006, Wagoner told Motor Trend it was the worst decision of his tenure.
Burns told Newsweek in 2007 that GM could have had the Chevrolet Volt a decade earlier. Elon Musk said in 2017 that Tesla was founded in direct response to the EV1 cancellation.
The fairer framing is institutional. GM's most profitable products were large ICE vehicles. Its workforce, supplier network, manufacturing footprint, and labor agreements were all organized around ICE complexity.
Simplifying the drivetrain wasn't just a technology decision. It was a restructuring of an organization built around the very parts count the third bay revealed as the problem.
The company that could act without those constraints probably would be a startup with no transmission workers and no legacy to protect.
Tesla Proved It. BYD Industrialized It.
Tesla's Model S, revealed in 2009 and in production by 2012, was built on the skateboard architecture GM's engineers had conceived publicly a decade earlier.
Every element of the AUTOnomy and GM’s electric architecture appeared in production form: propulsion below the floor, simplified drivetrain and software as the integration layer.
Burns writes in Autonomy that the skateboard underlying GM's concept vehicles is "very similar to how Tesla builds its vehicles today.” This is not a concession to a competitor, but a precise description of what his own team actually developed first.
What happened next is less told in Western boardrooms. And it’s more consequential.
Wang Chuanfu is a chemist and metallurgist by training. He founded BYD in 1995 as a rechargeable battery manufacturer that supplied Nokia, Motorola, and others.
He understood battery economics before most automakers knew they should care.
In 2003 (the same year GM cancelled the EV1 and Tesla was incorporated), Wang acquired a small struggling state-owned automaker.
His reasoning was direct: the future of transportation would be electric, and BYD's battery expertise was a structural advantage waiting to be deployed.
He was right. And he moved faster than anyone noticed.
In 2008, BYD launched the F3DM, the world's first mass-produced plug-in hybrid.
It predated the Chevrolet Volt by two years and the Toyota Prius plug-in by four.
The world largely didn't notice.
That same year, Berkshire Hathaway took a $232 million stake in BYD - an investment driven by the late Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s partner and Berkshire’s longtime vice chairman, who described Wang as a combination of Thomas Edison and Jack Welch.
In 2009, Munger said he believed BYD would become the biggest car company in the world.
He said it when most Western analysts had never heard the name.
BYD took the architectural logic to its endpoint.
It owns its battery chemistry end to end - the component that replaced the combustion drivetrain as the primary cost driver.
Where Tesla validated the skateboard, BYD vertically integrated everything above and below it.
Its reported cell costs sit below $60 per kWh. Western OEMs are still treating sub-$100 per kWh as a medium-term aspiration.
That gap is not a forecast. It is already in the cost structure of every vehicle both sides produce.
The warning Burns delivered in that warehouse - that value would migrate to the battery and the software controller, and that any manufacturer who outsourced those layers would become a packager - is now a precise description of Wang's competitive position.
The manufacturers who own the fewest outsourced layers are setting the cost floor. The ones who don't are managing the consequences.
Wang Chuanfu was acquiring an automaker the same year GM crushed its electric cars.
He read the same architectural logic. He had no legacy to protect.
In competitive analysis, timing is everything. So is the weight of what you're carrying when the competition really begins.
If you have a perspective or disagreement, reply directly. I read every response.
Tracking Disruption in Global Autos