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More on GM's New Fuel Cell Cars
Whispers_in_the_dark writes "Scientific American has an article about GM's approach to fuel cell based vehicles of the future. It appears that GM wants to build a common fuel cell based drive-by-wire chassis that it will mount the body panels, control systems, and passenger compartments. This would provide a great deal of flexibility and upgradability to the cars of the future. GM has even more details."
This isn't anything new. GM announced this at the North American International Auto Show in January.
Anyways, the idea is for a fuel cell car that can be easily produced and not put UAW workers out of a job. You have one plant making the core part of the car (the bottom part with wheels and all points in-between to make the car move). Other plants build the top part of the car (one makes SUVs another makes luxuary lines...). and plug the top part into the same base.
Now this 'plug-in' idea is not meant for the consumer to detach different car bodies at home, but it makes production cheaper since you're building the same engine.
I for one am glad that there seems to be one new idea coming out of Warren, MI.
AnamanFan - Trying to find the Truth, one post at a time.
GM wants to build a common fuel cell based drive-by-wire chassis that it will mount the body panels, control systems, and passenger compartments
There's a reason that different cars have different chasses. I'd like to see the ride a Caddie body on a standard size frame gets. In addition, the fuel efficiency of a small car (and how small could you make it) on a standard chassis would suck, too. This would lead to a bunch of cookie-cutter cars, most of which have lousy handling, don't perform well, and are ugly to boot.
Oh yeah... I forgot. This is GM we're talking about. Never mind.
That is all.
> It would kill the Western world's economy if done too quickly, and the larger companies with a keen interest in oil are going to make dang sure it doesn't happen too quickly, if at all.
... and the peace loving people ... Neither of the two have any foothold in the policy makers domain.
I dunno about this, the huge industries behind horses and steam engines could do little to prevent internal combustion.
I hear this conspiracy theory alot, but in the real world, how could they prevent a better technology? Do you actually see a law being written that forces you into a gas combustion engine?
> In the end, the only two winners would be the envrionmentalists
Hmm. Last I checked there was a huge "environmental" lobby spouting FUD and gloom and doom at every corner. Look at the energy crisis in California. We (America) has arguably more oil than the Arab world. We can't tap it because of the environmental lobby.
Same goes for the 'peace loving people'. You have a very lopsided view of government.
The world depends on oil, commuter vehicles are just a portion of that dependency. Millions of us heat our homes with it (more of it goes up my flue than out of my tailpipe), and there are plenty of other transportation technologies where hybrid fuel cells just don't apply, and wont for a long long time (planes, trains, ships, semis, buses). Electric wheels just dont turn as hard as gas-driven ones. (torque)
The dependency on oil isn't going away because of a car that runs on batteries.
This is exciting to me because it seems much more economical. It looks as though it would be less prone to breakdown, and easier to repair when one occurs.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The "California Fruitcakes" (Oh, Rush! you neologistic god!) are drowning in a oxide poison tank. The IC engine, over a hundred years old and horribly inefficient, needs to go the way of bustles and button-up corsets. The "fruitcakes" actually breathe in the gunk that most car drivers blow over into other states.
There is no reason, industrially, why lithium or nickel-metal batteries should cost what they do, save that the owners of the IP want them to cost that much. And as another poster in this thread said, these new battery techs are bough up by petrocorporations as soon as they show any promise.
The "free" market, isn't. The taxpayers ponied up hundreds of millions of dollars to car companies to develop non-IC powerplants. The car companies develpoed the Insight, an great vehicle, and several hybrid vehicles, which work great too. The battery tech has stagnated, tho, for no apparent reason. GM nuked the only working electric car, to the horror of its engineers.
Point is, they didn't make an alternative to their IC cars because, well, it's suicide for them! Electric cars don't have a tenth of the parts a present-day car has. They don't break down. Theat means the entire service bay portion of the automakers' bottom line is almost GONE. It means the cars don't fall apart as fast, since the stress on the engine is nil, so that means that they can't nearly as many new cars.
Endgame: they don't want their money machine to die. They won't give us electric cars, even if we give them free tax money to develop the tech. The "free market", as Adam Smith forsaw, is it's own worst enemy. The triopolists simply have agreed amongst themselves never to make the things, and they won't. It's not in their interests.
If we want an electric car that works, let the feds give cash to non-industry affiliated universities, with the stipulation that the IP generated becomes open-source to those that paid for it, the taxpayers. Then people can hack together their own powerplants.
I have real questions about how well this will behave with mediocre maintenance. Engine control computers have a good track record, though, better than was expected by auto engineers in the 1980s.
I worked on an engine control reliability project in the early 1980s, so I saw some of this happen. There were lots of backup modes; not only did the computer have a stall timer and could restart in less than a rev, but the ignition module had a hardwired backup (with no spark advance) in case the CPU quit. You were limited to about 25MPH in this "limp-home mode", as it was called internally. Presumably something of equally brutal simplicity will be provided for steering and brakes.
In the end it will all work, because, unlike most software companies, auto companies have to take legal liability for their failures.