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Review Of GM's HyWire Hydrogen Concept Car
SanLouBlues writes "Autoweek has a detailed review of a test drive in GM's HyWire concept (second item). The gas and brakes are both on the steering wheel which may be placed on either the left or the right with little effort. Overall some very positive marks for such a radical car."
As for the drive by wire, brake by wire, does that mean we will finally have real "backseat drivers"?
Ah, so the familiar motion of going for the horn might produce either a burst of acceleration or a sudden stop. Is the horn on the floor?
But why does it have to be so damn ugly?? Is that the company's way of making sure the thing doesn't get accepted??
If it's ugly, the consumers won't like it and thus the whole concept will be proven to be unacceptable... hmmm...
WTF?
Oh yeah, well, that won't happen until the government stops subsidizing the oil industry. :)
You do realize that the failure of alternative fuels are the result of alcohol taxes, the hemp ban, and low fossil fuel energy prices, right?
The government has more to do with these sort of things than you think.
Part of the reason these hybrid cars aren't taking off in some circles is because, quite frankly, they look retarded.
People don't want a car that looks like a bubble with three wheels or controls in places they're not accustomed to.
People just want a car! Plain and simple. Most people don't care what is under the hood as long as the car is familiar(controls where they should be, etc..) and they can fuel up anywhere. Cars are meant for convenience as far as most people are concerned. Despite what really bad Sci-fi movies would have you believe, the 21st century just isn't ready for some of these new radical concept designs.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
what ever happened to "if it aint broke, dont fix it?" I dont see why we were having such a problem using our feet so as to need us to use our hands for brakes/gas.
How long will take to implement these types of vehicles in America? I'm betting it will be difficult to break the special-interest deathgrip that Big Oil has on America. These new vehicles, while fantastic for the environment (and for many other things), will no doubt eat into the profit of major corporations that depend on America's crippling reliance on petroleum products.
I hope for a speedy incorporation of this wonderful technology, but I prepare for the typical halts to progress that corporations often impose.
Transistors and Beer!!
ntill the goverment MAKES people do something about their waste - People will do nothing
And I suppose the fortunate transition from coal gas was the result of such governmental control, or because it was expensive, dirty, and dangerous?
It sounds like the car is fueled by hydrogen. People won't buy the cars until they can get hydrogen fuel at nearly every corner gas station. Nobody want's to travel a long way to buy gas, or worse, find themselves low on gas 100 miles from the nearest hydrogen station.
The gas stations will not invest in the eqipment to dispense hydrogen until there's a large number of the cars on the road that can use it.
Jason ProfQuotes
Alchol taxes? In the US, the alchol excise tax only applies to alcohol that is produced for beverage purposes. Alcohol produced for fuel purposes is not only exempt from the excise tax, but is actually subsidized.
Using any console racing game will only re-enforce this. Please, oh please don't move the "gas" and brake pedels to my hands. My first thought when I first saw GM's vehical is what happens when I'm crusing down the street then reach to change the radio station? I stop accelerating? Let's just hope that they find a way to get the costs down and then remember to sell it to us in the US.
It's like electric heating/stoves/etc in homes.
I got into the most ridiculous argument over the weekend with a flaky chick who fancies herself a savior of the earth. She got into a rant about how I should feel ashamed that I use oil to heat my house, burning it and creating pollution, while she has an electric furnace.
Eventually I gave up trying to explain how all her electric system does is centralize the source of pollution to the power plant. She seemed oblivious to the fact that millions of tons of coal go up in smoke to make that electricity.
I didn't even bother to bring up the fact that my furnace is much more efficient, and that all the work and money I put into upgrading my homes insulation over the last year means that the furnace fires up for at most an hour or two a day.
She probably would have gone through the roof if I told her I planned on removing the 2 electric water heaters in place now, replacing with one larger oil-fired heater.
Sure, she's a flake. But there are plenty of flakes out there, ready to hop behind the wheel of a brand new hydrogen car, completely oblivious to how much energy it actually takes to drive. All they understand is 'steam comes out instead of smoke so it's saving the planet!'.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Capable of 97 mph and long-range travel, the HydroGen3 would satisfy most drivers' needs today.
Is this equivalent to the infamous quote: "Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM..."?
I would hope that you could hack the "skateboard" so you can go faster than 97 mph. Can you imagine the mod chip business for this?
I only mod up parents of "mod parent up" posts...
While I'm pretty sure you're kidding there are a few reasons to do this onthe HyWire car specifically.
First, the controls are really different, twist = acceleration, squeeze = brake. Not terribly different from motorcycle controls when you think about it.
Second, this is probably not going ot turn into a production vehicle. It is sort of a meta-concept car. The fuel cell stuff is all squished into an eleven inch slab centered roughly at the wheel axes. Basically, less the controls, the everything useful but the passengers fits into this tiny space. Next they bolt a bunch of random stuff onto the top. It allows them to design a bunch of body plans without having to remake or remount the engine every time they come up with a new body concept.
The weird controls probably evolved out of this in a way, they wanted a interface module that could be removed easily. Pedals, because of their location relative to the slab thingy would require a commitment on their part as to where a lot of stuff would go. This way they can play around with configuration to their hearts content.
Not entirely unlike a 'skinnable' car when you think about it. I think it would be kinda neat to see in a production car, modular form like this. You go in, choose a chasis power rating or something, then choose a bunch of options (two, three, four, or six seats, truck bed, trunk, seats that recline all the way back, sporty aerodynamics, maximum cargo space, driver seat with a high field of view etc). Then you leave for a few hours while they bolt the thing together. Okay, maybe not, but, it's an interesting concept. Imagine, instead of renting a truck for the weekend to move, you go down to the dealership and rent a truck bed, they hold onto your rear seats until you come back.
As far as the completely transparent front design, I imagine that takes some getting used to, what with the road being that much more obvious as it streams past you.
Uh, yeah it is. Honda's been making cars that'll do 120mph with less than 90hp for decades. 97mph is a joke. Then again, I've never fully understood why cars in the US can go 120mph which is double the old national speed limit.
Because infernal combustion engines and their associated machinery like gearboxes aren't efficient when run near the upper or lower limits of their capability, but in the middle. Upper is defined here as maximum rpm, not torque (which occurs closer to the middle rpm), and lower is the idle rpm. Car gearboxes aren't like aero engines; there is a direct relationship between engine rpm and wheel rpm via the gearbox.
If you want a car that runs well at 60mph, you have to built one that peaks at 120.
Yes, but the honda weighs a lot less. Keep in mind, this thing's the size of a Cadillac DeVille, not a shoebox Honda. Serious room for 5 full sized passengers. And it's a constant torque curve, so it'll accelerate like crazy (which is really the reason I want the 4WD). Internal combustion engines generate torque (and HP) as their RPM's increase. Fuel cells use electric motors, which have the same torque at 10 RPM as they do at 10,000 RPM.
To turn your argument around, I've got a 1 HP engine in a radio controlled car, and it'll do 60. Some others will do 85 with not much more power. So Honda's not living up to that standard! How dare they produce inefficient cars that take 90 HP to get to 120 MPH.
So can you just turn the wheels 90 degrees and drive sideways into the parking spot? Sweet! This will sell in San Francisco.
Why do you think they call them "suicide doors"?
Not because of crash safety.
They got the name because if you open then while in motion, the wind will rip the door off, taking you with it. Modern suicide doors are made so that they can only open when the front door is open, making them impossible to open while in motion.
(appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
You can't really 'skin' it. Yes, the shells are interchangeable, but at the factory. A home user bolting on one of these in his/her garage is opening up all sorts of safety concerns.
I'm betting that your friendly neighborhood GM dealer would be happy to provide "Skinning" service so that you can rent a minivan skin for the holiday trip to grandma's and go back to your sedan for the next work week. If GM wants this idea to go over, as far as the dealers are concerned that idea is going to be massive. Dealers have been getting less and less return work over the last few decades; this is a way to send more business to the dealers. Of COURSE, they'll have to run a diagnostic before skinning, and suggest fixes for any problems they find...
I love this HyWire car. Too bad it's GM and not Ford doing it ;>
Geez, people. Many of you are acting like you have never even seen a morotcycle. Left hand is clutch (both for the transmission and for hanging on) and the right hand was throttle and main brakes. You steer with both hands.
Works great.
What the hell are you talking about? The only reason there is a strong biotech industry is because of the government. Government grants from the NSF and NIH fund enormous amounts of fundamental research. The applied research in corporations would never be where it is now if it hadn't been for government research paving the way. The corporations would probably have never developed some of the underlying ultra-high risk science.
Pass me some of whatever you are smoking.
For those of us who haven't figured this out yet.
Obviously, hydrogen is not an energy source when used in a fuel cell. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to be a replacement for gasoline. Gasoline is not an energy source in the same way hydrogen isn't. Gasoline is millions of years of stored solar energy.
It took millions of years to create the raw materials we use to make gasoline. Once we run out (and we will run out - we are taking it out faster than nature puts it back - it's just a question of when) we will have to either make more gas ourselves or split water to make hydrogen. There's no special difficulty hydrogen presents in this regard - anything we use to run cars is going to be in the end an energy storage device, unless we have nuclear/solar powered cars. Both are impractical, for different reasons. So we have two problems in the future - generate power to replace the huge stored supplys we current are tapping, and store it for use in automobiles.
People seem to assume hydrogen is being proposed as a power generator. FALSE. Hydrogen is being proposed as a way to store energy for use in cars, which can't generate power on site in most cases. Gas is stored power - so is hydrogen when used in a fuel cell. We can't practically create gasoline ourselves - it's much easier to split water and recover the hydrogen. Plus fuel cells are extremely clean and don't give us the byproducts gasoline does. An extra benefit.
That leaves the question of where to get the power to drive this system. That's a completely separate problem, and one of the most crucial. Solar and wind are the two major untapped as far as non-nuclear power goes. Nuclear isn't practical in the us IN ITS CURRENT FORM. Fusion power is under development, and if a power producing fusion plant can ever be created, that will provide lots of power with byproducts that decay in hundreds of years, not tens of thousands. That may be managable. Otherwise, we will have to adjust ourselves to run on only what power we can recover from solar and wind.
It's never popular to say it politically, but we can in fact do a great deal to lower our power consumption. Better consumer habits, more efficient homes and utilities, smaller cars, etc. etc. etc. If we can't solve fusion, the cost of power will force this change to take place. It's not an argument of "we shouldn't develop renewables and hydrogen because they can't deliever our current level of power." Sorry folks, it doesn't work like that. Our current level of power generation is unsustainable unless we shift almost totally to nuclear power. Peroid. We don't know exactly how long it will last, but it WILL come to an end. What is up to us is how we cope with it. I'd rather be prepared with the best we can do in alternatives. Hydrogen might allow us to run cars after we can no longer produce gasoline cheaply. Plus it's a cleaner system when the source power is produced from clean sources. It doesn't provide gluttonous power, true, but it might allow us to sustain the worthwhile parts of our lifestyle. That's why this is a development to be cheered on.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Fyi all steering systems on (I belive) all cars have a direct metal-on-metal conncetion between steering wheel and front wheels. This can't fail unles some big chunk of steel breaks, and that's why steering failure is the last thing you have to worry about while driving today. Yes, power steering can fail in the sense that you lose the power assistance, but you can still turn if you force the wheel.
Another thing that puzzles me, they claim it gets rid of steering & brake fluids to be more enviro-friendly. But then they say it still uses conventional (Brembo) calipers. I'll be damned...
They stopped making them for several reasons.
A. Not that many people were buying them. In terms of total sales, they were a failure. They weren't supposed to be a high-volume car, but they didn't meet sales projections. The people who owned them loved 'em, but most people didn't want a car that could only go about 50 miles from home.
B. GM lost money on it. Even with all the gov't grants and tax breaks, they still lost money.
GM also couldn't just "sell them". The cars were leased with charging stations which were still considered GM property. Also, there were no aftermarket replacement parts, buyers would need GM to make aftermarket parts for them, costing GM even more money. (No aftermarket supplier would make replacement parts for this car, there are too few to make up the money spent on development and production of the parts.
And most importantly, GM had millions, probably hundred of millions of dollars of development in these cars. That's why you had to lease one from GM, they didn't want Ford or Honda to buy one, steal all their ideas, then have them make a car that was profitable, because they had to pay basicly nothing for R&D. This is the same reason all the cars had to be returned to GM. It would be nice if GM let the cars go, so Ford or Honda could make a new/better electric car, but GM's a business, not a charity.
Also, these cars would cost something like $70-80 grand to purchase, that's a lot for an "economy" car.
There is a huge difference between that and this - Keeping your house warm is something you do because you need to - If HeatB is cheaper and cleaner thant HeatA then you do it
Cars on the other hand are something embedded in our culture - Think about all the different types of racing we enjoy - Think about the big American ideal of gliding down a empty stretch of freeway in a huge caddy with the top down
Think about the people who mod this and mod that on their cars - Will they be able to do that with a Hydrogen Burner (and where does the electricity come from? - Burning things or atomics? - or the small percent of power that comes from clean sources?) I don't think so
I know my first post sounded like a Troll - But I was just pointing out that people love their cars - And it will be a hard thing to change
It is hard to say what will happen, fuel cells have been the promise for years and years. This GM venture appears promising but who knows what will happen even 5 or 10 years down the road.
I love my gasoline powered car, it's reliable and fairly inexpensive to operate and maintain. However, I do definately see the advantages of hydrogen over gasoline if the technology is made as affordable as gasoline. The good effects of a cleaner environment will the clincher in the deal for most people once prices of both types of vehicles are roughly the same. Hydrogen is definately the future and GM and many other auto manufacturers see that.
Now I don't necessarily think the gasoline engine is going to completely go away, but I think over time it will be relegated to very specific jobs and for car enthusiast. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think that days of the internal combustion engine have more days behind it than it does ahead of it.