by Ross Finlay (09 Jan 02)

There was a time when General Motors seemed to be run by a bunch of dead-beats who spent most of the day half-asleep in their top-floor office suites, dreaming of stock options and fat salary cheques, and coming to the surface every now and again to sign off yet another super-boring Yank tank.

My, how times have changed. As revealed at the Detroit Show, GM's AUTOnomy project is the most radical look at car design in the last 100 years and more. If that seems a ludicrous claim, consider what AUTOnomy takes as its theoretical starting point - the day before the first car in real-life history was invented. Pre-Benz, in other words.

What the AUTOnomy team did was to think about a car using 21st-century technology as the starting point of the whole design. That means, in particular, fuel cell propulsion and drive-by-wire controls. There was never any thought of using a conventional engine, a conventional platform, pre-1990s control systems or any kind of recognisable "architecture".

The actual AUTOnomy concept car as shown at Detroit happens to be a futuristic, almost outrigger-wheeled coupé. But that doesn't matter a toss, and we're not even going to bother with a picture of it. The show car might just as well have been designed to look like a Le Mans racer or a gully-emptier.

What matters here is the central concept, away beyond anything tackled by other publicly released design studies, which, however brilliant, simply progress the conventional car another few steps along the way. They're the down-the-line descendants of the 1886 Benz.

A Clean Sheet Of Paper

By contrast, the AUTOnomy design might have come from a different planet. It's based on a constructional idea GM likens to a skateboard, which de-couples the chassis from the body. Instead of a conventional platform, the four-wheel drive car sits on a six-inch thick chassis which contains, within itself, the whole fuel cell propulsion system. As Wayne Cherry, GM's vice-president of design, puts it, there's no engine to see over.

There are no foot pedals or steering column, either. The 42-volt electrical system includes a docking port in the centre of the chassis, to which the electronically operated steering, brakes, heating, air conditioning, central locking, window opening and so on are linked. Like the propulsion system, they're contained inside that six-inch thick skateboard.

Guiding the vehicle via the SKF drive-by-wire system is done not by a conventional steering wheel, but by a "steering guide", which can be placed anywhere. Similarly, electronic controls do away with through-the-floor brake and throttle pedals. AUTOnomy could have the driver's seat to the left, to the right, in the centre, right up at the front, or away at the back. Passenger seats could be placed anywhere on the completely flat chassis.

It's an interesting thought, too, that in the event of a crash there would be no damage to the driver from the steering wheel, column or pedals.

Bearing in mind the built-in low centre of gravity, an AUTOnomy car could be made to handle in a very sporting fashion, or ride like a limousine. The software behind the drive-by-wire system could accommodate all kinds of suspension settings from sporting to minibus or something like a farm tractor.

And that six-inch skateboard chassis, of course, could be the platform for almost any kind of bodywork. That appeals to a manufacturing company like GM, which can see the possibility of using just two or three differently-sized chassis for dozens of different vehicle types and body styles.

It has even floated the idea that an owner might lease different bodywork to fit, at different times, onto the same chassis - for instance, a saloon body for commuting, a pick-up for week-ending. With all the control systems linked to that docking port, offering a catalogue-full of body types would be far more straightforward, and a lot less expensive, than it is now. Mind you, no work has been done yet on how to provide those lift-off bodies with robust occupant-safety features. Plenty of time for that, though.

In place of present-day modular engine systems, where common-crankcase construction allows for a straight-four to become a V8, or a V6 to transmogrify into a W12, different kiloWatt power outputs could be achieved simply by altering the number of fuel cells in the under-floor stack.

Not Tomorrow, Though

Years ago, when fuel cell vehicle technology was beginning to come to the public's attention, an engineer friend warned me that "chemists are always promising something for nothing." We've certainly seen the brakes going on, as there's still no sign whatever of a hydrogen supply infrastructure being put in place - is it still true that there's only one hydrogen filling station in the whole of Europe?

A trickle of fuel cell vehicles have taken to the road, but their performance is still quite modest, and a number of designs showed up pathetically badly in a recent competition in California which included road sections and manoeuvring tests. Out of all the entries, only the latest version of the GM HydroGen Zafira qualified as a finisher.

We're expecting to see more fuel cell vehicles, notably from Mercedes-Benz, appearing within the next year or two. But the Peugeot appraisal, that it may be 2020 before the use of hydrogen cars becomes widespread, is echoed in the GM prediction at Detroit that fuel cell technology "will lead the industry in every region of the world, well within the lifetimes of most of the people visiting this show".

Even if production-ising it is away in the future, the AUTOnomy concept still has many attractions. No carbon dioxide emissions, of course. No need for fossil fuel, or for any of its derivatives like lubricating oil, transmission fluid or brake fluid. Bodywork and interior trim could easily be made of recyclable material.

Perhaps the most radical suggestion is that AUTOnomy could be far more than just transport. GM sees that 42-volt electrical system as being able to supply electrical power for a whole house.

On the other hand, a domestic natural gas heating system could be used to generate hydrogen for the car, so that your house becomes your filling station.

A lot of this sounds weird in the extreme, but only to those of us who haven't thought along these lines before. One rather good GM point is that it might be possible for less-developed countries to leap-frog into a hydrogen economy, just as China's modern telephone service missed out the conventional land-line system.

General Motors has applied for 24 patents covering different aspects of the AUTOnomy project, which has been developed by its Global Alternative Propulsion Centre facilities in New York State, Michigan, and Mainz in Germany. SKF in Sweden and Bertone in Italy also collaborated on the prototype.

Back to Ross Finlay column index