GM's Billion-Dollar Fuel-Cell Bet

nakhla writes "Wired is running a lengthy article detailing GM's billion-dollar effort to invent a radically new fuel cell vehicle. The interesting part is that GM's engineers are no longer trying to squeeze a fuel cell engine into a traditional car design. Instead, they're building a completely new type of car from the ground up. No gears, clutch, braking hardware, etc. It's all drive-by-wire (computer controlled). Even the engines are located in each of the 4 wheels. It's a fascinating read, and the article outlines economic reasons for such a car, as well as environmental concerns and practical uses (imagine powering your house with the excess electricity generated by your car). For anyone remotely interested in the future of automotive technology, this article is very interesting."

Comments

More info at designnews.com

[bartyboy]

Design News had an article about this type of car in January. You can find it here.

A car uses much more energy!

[apsmith]

Umm, you have any idea how much energy the average car uses up? If you drive 12,000 miles a year, at 20 miles/gallon, that's 600 gallons of oil or about 14.5 barrels, energy content = about 25,000 kWh per year (see this Conversion table). So your car is using about 4 times as much energy as your house. If you drive a lot and have a gas guzzler it's probably 10 times as much or more.

GM's idea is actually a pretty good one - it could easily be much cheaper to power your house from the fuel cell in your car than from the electric grid (high efficiency and no transmission losses, and no middle-men).