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

Re:Repairs Anyone?

[the Man in Black]

Best...Slashdot comment....ever.

Sorry bro, no mod points. But you get a hearty round of applause from me.

Re:Doomed to fail

[Reality Master 101]

They have demos running on the fuel cell equivelent of 6502s, but they are betting that the 8Mhz 68000 will be out soon, and that they can jam 128k of memory in there.

Perhaps, but the computer analogies don't hold up based on past experience. How many "billions of dollars of confidence" went into the EV1?

I don't think making an electric car is all that hard from an engineering standpoint. It's the power source that's hard, and it's not an automotive engineering problem. It's an applied physics and chemistry problem.