‘I want to see red’: General Motors is teaching its engineers to fail fast and ‘speak fearlessly’ as they take the EV battery fight to China

The General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Mich., still looks the way Eero Saarinen drew it in the 1950s: low glass-and-steel boxes set on a grid, end walls of glazed brick in saturated colors, massive man-made lakes, everything in its right place. The campus was dedicated in 1956 and has been a National Historic Landmark since 2014. As Fortune walked around on a recent site visit, it felt like a massive public high school. Fitting in like a bright Lego set is the $900 million investment in the Battery Cell Development Center (BCDC), a massive light-gray rectangle, and the Innovation Center, which resembles a blue-and-yellow battery pack sitting on top of a historic building. If GM is a giant campus, longtime GM battery engineer Andy Oury is the cheerful science teacher, polo shirt tucked into his blue jeans, driving around in his large (all-electric) Silverado. Just the weekend before, he said, he drove it 220 miles to Traverse City, where he powered his camper off the truck all weekend and towed a wood chipper around town. Oury joined GM in 1999 and became interested in batteries about a decade later, as GM began work on the Chevrolet Volt. This plug-in…