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Automotive Industry

Futurama - Engineer - General Motors - Brief Article

Automotive Design & Production, March, 2002 by Gary S. Vasilash

There probably won't be a vehicle like this one for another 10 to 15 years. There will be plenty of resistance against it coming to be. The status quo is a tough thing to topple. Yet some people at General Motors have driven a stake in the ground-and that ground is in the future.

THE STORY SOUNDS A BIT HOLLYWOOD.

"We started with the premise, 'What if we were inventing the automobile today rather than a century ago? What might we do differently?'" So recalls Rick Wagoner, president and CEO of General Motors.

While it would be nice to think that the people at the top of the world's largest automobile manufacturing company are actually asking one another about such lofty speculations, the story sounds just a bit too much like George Washington and the cherry tree--something a bit too wooden.

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Regardless of that, the answer to the question is something that could (yes, I am being deliberately tentative here, not wanting to go out on any limbs) have profound effects on the state of automotive design, manufacture, retail, service, finance--you name it.

The name of the result is AUTOnomy. Observes Larry Burns, GM's vice president of Research and Development and Planning. "This is not just an exercise. We are serious about this."

How serious? Consider this: AUTOnomy is a "concept" car. It's the sort of thing that gets rolled out on the stages of the world's premier auto shows so that the buying public can get a glimpse of their potential transportation future. Generally, really good concept cars serve as models for much milder production vehicles at some point. Sometimes, the concept cars actually have mechanicals beneath their handcrafted skin. But they are fundamentally models.

AUTOnomy is more than your classic concept car, even though it had its debut at the 2002 North American International Auto Show. GM is seeking 24 patents related to the business models, technologies, and manufacturing processes for AUTOnomy.

So maybe the story is a little stagy. Maybe the AUTOnomy seems like science fiction. Maybe, just maybe, this really will be the future of transportation.

THE NEW ART.

Sometimes people talk about cars as being like sculptures. Generally, they're thinking about the shape of the vehicle. But there is another way of thinking about the vehicle--car or truck--with a sculptural analog: the internal combustion engine is a huge block.

"A fuel cell stack can be spread around the vehicle and can take any shape you might imagine. It doesn't have to be bunched up like the cylinders on an internal combustion engine," says Christopher Borroni-Bird, head of GM's Design and Technology Fusion Group and program manager of AUTOnomy. No block to design around.

Note the name of that group: Design and Technology Fusion. These are people who are tasked with leveraging design and technology of finding beneficial strengths between the two. Adrian Chernoff, AUTOnomy Program Architect (and former Disney Imagineer), notes, "This is about the creation of some thing that we haven't seen before."

Which is only partially true. We have seen something like it before. It is a four-wheeled vehicle. It is a car or a truck.

When asked about that fundamental architecture--the four wheels, parallel sets--Burns acknowledges, "Maybe we should have reinvented the automobile around two wheels or three wheels." He's thinking about the two-wheeled Segway Human Transporter. The AUTOnomy has all-wheel-drive, all-wheel-steering, and Silicon Valley-sized computer power. "This could be thought about as a four-wheeled Segway in terms of its maneuverability," Burns says.

He adds, "Perhaps we didn't go far enough."

But where they are pointing is someplace that many people will have a tough enough time wrapping their minds--and businesses--around. If the people at GM are right, then this could be a whole new approach.

Wayne Cherry, GM vice president of Design, makes an important observation: "There's no engine to see over." Each of the wheels has integrated drive motors. There's no limiting lump of iron and/or aluminum.

What's more, the mechanical linkages that have been part and parcel of every car built for the past 100 years-as in the steering system and accel/decel system-aren't there, either. There's no steering column to design around. These mechanical linkages have given way to X-by-wire technology, technology that GM's partner on the AUTOnomy, SKF (Goteborg, Sweden), has transitioned from aircraft to automobiles.

That-the elimination of the block and the elimination of the linkages-in large part, changes the art of the automobile. More than the block is missing.

BEYOND TONY HAWK.

Fundamentally, the AUTonomy is a skateboard, which Wayne Cherry describes as having "design integrity with or without the body," This skateboard is approximately six-inches thick. It contains the fuel cell stack (i.e., that which converts the hydrogen into electricity [with the byproducts of heat and water]) as well as the tank that holds the hydrogen (a conformable tank of some sort; Borroni-Bird notes that they will have to develop a different hydrogen storage system than is presently available in order to achieve the kind of range [-300 miles per fill-up] that they are seeking). The heat exchanger is designed into the sides of the structure. The body attachments (four of them) are in the skateboard, as is the "universal docking connection," which is the power communication port that connects the body system to the skateboard. The docking station is where the X-by-wire connection is made. The skateboard for the concept as introduced is 175.8-in, long and 74-in, wide; it has a 122-in. wheelbase.

Automotive Industry

Futurama - Engineer - General Motors - Brief Article

Automotive Design & Production, March, 2002 by Gary S. Vasilash

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