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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."
Last spring GM had demonstration units at the auto shows. Apparently you can lift one body type, such as 4-dr sedan, and replace it with another, such as pickup truck. Plug'n'play.
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here.
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GM is the only US automaker developing its own fuel cell in-house: at the company's Warren, Michigan, research facility; at a 300-engineer skunk works near Rochester, New York, that recently expanded by 80,000 square feet; and at a third center in Mainz-Kastel, Germany.
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I remember reading a magazine article about this earlier. My impression was that they are in the extremely early planning stages of any such endeavor. The idea of basing all their cars around a common chassis and powertrain sounds like an amazing way to reduced production costs all by itself, even without the fuel cells. Still, I am not holding my breath. The article I read quoted GM execs as saying something like, "We will make a decision on this around 2008-10." Sounds like they have a political interest in announcing this now. They probably want to avoid having the government force them into making fuel cell cars, and the best way to do that is to pretend they are already working on them.
It's always nice to imagine upgradeable hardware, kind of like the promise of DSP-based electronics that could be field upgraded with new capabilities in the future. There's just one problem with that scenario: lost future revenues. The manufacturer can't expect to earn much on those software upgrades, so once they sold you the hardware they have little incentive to follow up with software. Instead the "future" upgreadability ends up being just another selling point for hardware, without actually delivering it. There are plenty of ways of weaseling out of it.
This holds especially true of automobiles. The main investment with new automobile development is in the platform or chassis. While the body and interior are the most visible things and what define the car to the customer, they're really just eye candy and quite interchangeable. What differentiates the automobile and its driving and performance characteristics is its chassis: the rigidity of the frame, the suspension, and the engine and transmission. Car manufacturers guard their chassis as closely as aircraft manufacturers their wings.
I just finished reading a book on the take-over of Chrysler by Daimler, and one of the driving forces of the deal was the promise of platform synergies, saving a lot of money between the two companies by sharing platforms. But when it actually came down to doing it, the Mercedes folks were going to share car platforms between say an E-class and a Dodge Stratus only over their dead bodies. To them what makes a Mercedes a Mercedes is the platform--the rest are mostly components from third-party parts bins which anyone else could buy. If a customer could get the same chassis in a Stratus, why on earth would they fork out for an E-class? Incidentally, speaking of DaimlerChrysler, they're way ahead of GM in the fuel cell game, regardless of what the article might imply. In fact, the article seems to be an expanded advertising section by GM.
This all is not to mean that I don't think that GM's shared platform idea is a great idea, I just don't think that it will actually happen for competitive reasons.
That has happened in the past.. the original Volkswagon was very moddable thanks to the fact that the body basically bolts onto the frame.they ended up being used for the basis of other projects and there was/is a hobbiest industry dedicated to providing custom bodies.
I honestly don't think there as much of a diffrence between auto hobiests and computer as first appears. I have noticed that a lot of the traits I have that make me good with computers are the same ones make my father good with cars.
Is it any wonder why we both like to extract every last bit of performance out of our respective platforms and try random mods?
Photovoltaic cells would be an excellent source of energy for this process. A great deal of research has been/is being done on the feasibility of a "hydrogen economy." See eren.doe.gov. It sure looks feasible. But this still misses the point. You don't have to have it all worked out before you start. We didn't have a network of filling stations when the autmobile was first produced. These things feed on one another. The PV economy actually exists today, it is just ridculously small. The PV/Hydrogen economy doesn't exist today, but it may soon. When it does, it may not be competetive with the present system. But as fossil fuels get harder to extract (and note, we are not running out of oil, we are running out of oil at current prices. The price of oil will then rise to where more expensive methods of extraction become economical.), the price rises and at some point the PV/hydrogen system will be cheaper.
"It'll never fly, Orville" is a common reaction. Don't be fooled by the difficulty or the poor initial economy. All things being equal, this may be a non-starter, but a look at history shows that nothing stays equal. Ever.
did you know the oil industry owns the patent on NiMH battery technology? That might have had something to do with it. Toyota and Panasonic were/are being sued because they didn't use "D" cell NiMH batteries in the Prius like the ones in the Honda Insight.
BTW, The US government gave the US auto industry billions of dollars for the advancement of battery technology and they came up with nothing. All the while they told CARB that people wouldn't pay for an electric car and that you'd need to pay them $17,000 and give them the car. They hired experts to present this "case" to CARB. Just like the US auto industry turned away the Rosen Motors hybrid design, they will keep turning away anything which cost THEM money. They all jumped on the HYBRID bandwagon when it was shown how well Toyota was doing with the Prius but as soon as there was a way out( fuel cells ) they dropped the hybrid projects and started holding up the fuel cell banner. Only hybrids are here TODAY and fuel cells are just a "hopeful" technology.
And the result is no current change in fuel consumption for the foreseeable future. And if you thought Microsoft was bad, I'll bet the US auto industry is full of corruption at any cost.
IMHO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus