I stumbled across this article from 2001 talking about GM’s hybrid car and for some odd reason, they’ve yet to start selling them. Kind of strange when you look at the performance of the thing.
My recollection is hazy but isn’t it GM who has stated that hybrids are a dead end and they are commited to fuel cells?
And wasn’t it GM who made a big media splash around 1996 with their obviosly-intended-to-fail-based-on-the-name hybrid car, the Impact? That also went nowhere?
GM had the lease-only EV-1 all electric car.
Despite the owner’s protests, all the cars were destroyed once the lease program was completed.
I used to see those on my way to work. I remember that they were recalled, and I heard that some owners attempted to hide the cars because they liked them so much.
If I had a business, that’s what I’d do: Not allow people to have products they really want. If they want something similar, they can go to Toyota or Honda!
Of course, in the meantime, they’re watching their market share erode, and I guess that their hope is that they’ll be able to recoup it when they come out with a fuel cell car. I don’t expect that they’ll have much luck with that.
Actually, that was the original prototype for the EV-1.
Ah. My memory was indeed hazy. 
Thanks for the info on EHV-1, it was interesting. I read about the Impact in Discover magazine and still remember being impressed with the regenerative braking concept.
It also held my own personal Grand Heavyweight Champion of Bad Car Names title, until it was recently unseated by the Crossfire. (fill in the blank: innocent bystanders were ___ in the Crossfire)
BTW, I too am dubious about the imminent future of fuel cell cars. I was just responding to your question about why GM hasn’t brought out a hybrid.
I didn’t actually think that you believed it, otherwise you’d be a GM exec! 
It’s coming out in the fall. Press lightly on the pedal and it gets pretty good gas mileage. Press it really hard and hold on to your knickers.
It’s the 500hp Z06 Corvette!
wha?
Oh, GM’s hoping for a hydrogen economy for their rollerskate platform. Funny thing is, the improved mileage you get in a hybrid doesn’t offset the change in price. I’m also not convinced the reduction in gas offsets the production/environmental costs of the batteries and associated additional guts in the hybrid.
Meanwhile, I wanna know when I can buy my diesel-electric hybrid car in the US. I heard Toyota’s working on it for Europe. I’ll put biodiesel in it! Wheeeee!
Back on topic, GM does have one hybrid vehicle. Its the Hybrid Silverado full-sized pickup. The mileage is totally weak (19c/21h vs. 17c/19h) so I don’t really see the point. But whatever.
http://www.chevrolet.com/silverado/hybrid/
GM were involved in an engine debacle before weren’t they, seriously preparing to use rotary engines in all their vehicles before pulling out and abandoning them. They had quite a pretty concept performance car IIRC, based on the use of this engine.
That’s not unusual, or particularly noteworthy. ALL of the major manufacturers toy with technology, review it, then move on as it doesn’t provide what they need.
Case it point: In the early 90’s they had a ZR-1 Corvette fitted with a high-pressure hydraulic system and VERY expensive (at the time) computer to develop an active handling system. Too expensive to use.
Fast forwar 15 years and the computational power is now there, but more importantly, there’s a class of fluids that change viscosity when an electic current is applied. (http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/mr_materials_010905-1.html) Now the computational power is enough to evaluate the system every_inch at 60 mph, and a change to the system is simply changing the voltage applied to the shock.
So, calling their rotary R&D work a debacle is characterizing it a little strongly.
Of more note is theri work with lotus in camless motors. Each valve is actuated by a solenoid and is held in a sligntly open posistion is applied. This allows nearly infinite re-tuning of the motor for economy or performance, including shutting down individual cylinders, and bringing the motor to a dead stop at lights. (close valves on the cylinder at the right position, run a little spark, and start the motor without a starter motor.)
Yup, and they were going to sell them to AMC who was planning to put them in the Pacer. When GM decided to cancel the engine at the last minute (mainly in a hissyfit over environmental regs) AMC had to scramble to redesign the Pacer to fit AMC’s existing engines.
Y’all seem to be experts here, so…
When do you think fuel cell and hybrid cars, instead of fossil-fuel powered cars, will be the standard for automotive vehicles?
Barring a technological breakthrough, or a massive spike in gas prices (say going from current levels to three times as much in a short period of time, like a couple of months), it’ll be ten years at least before the standard gas powered car is replaced by something else.
Supposedly, one of the reasons internal combustion engine cars took off had more to do with an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease than anything else. In the early days of automobiles, one could buy steam, gas, electric, and even hybrid vehicles at a wide variety of dealerships. NYC suffered an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, and in order to slow the spread of the disease, sealed the watering troughs for horses in the city, so that they couldn’t be used by non-condensing steam cars as well as horses, and barred horses from the city. This meant that if you wanted to get around you had to rely on public transportation or buy your own car (and if you owned a taxi service, you had to have cars, if you wanted to stay in business), it was also at this time that Henry Ford introduced his Model T car.
The steam, electric, and hybrid car makers had all been rather slow in developing new technology for their cars (or in some cases, even updating their designs) so when the crunch hit, they all either switched to gas or died (most of them died). Had the outbreak not happened, or if the car makers had been more willing to spend money on R&D before the outbreak, it’s possible that gas cars wouldn’t be the dominant form of automobile today.
If gas prices had held steady (which they might have, if the oil companies had built any new refineries in the past 20 years), hybrids would probably be little more than a curiosity.
Well, the current direction is a positive one. (IIRC the hybrid Accord is the most powerful version of that car you can get.) But you need to change your perceptions a little. Hybrids only get their mileage gains in in town stop n go traffic. On the highway, they’re not really any more fuel efficient than their gas and diesel counterparts.
Further, Fuel cell and hybrid cars are STILL greatly dependent on petroleum, the currently most inexpensive way to create hydrogen is by ‘removing’ it from petroleum. Hybrid cars, in some cases, are more efficient, but still reliant on a petroleum economy.
The problem is, where petroleum comes from is still a hotly debated topic. Fields that were considered drained empty have been discovered to be refilling. Other fields that have been considered tapped out are newly useful as better techniques are developed. Reserves in hotly debated places (like Alaska) dwarf the supply coming out of the OPEC nations.
IMHO, the Jury is still out on when we’ll run out…and it ALL makes for good news fodder.
Replying to the OP…
Last fall, when I scolded my Saturn dealer (a division of GM) about the introduction of their new SUV line (My thoughts about SUVs in general belong in the Pit, not MPSIMS), I was told that it was done as a first step to bringing out a hybrid vehicle in a couple years. So…
If the dealer wasn’t lying to me, and their schedule doesn’t get pushed back, GM will have a hybrid vehicle in a year.
My guess is never. The only reason people talk about fuel cells is because it’s comfortably far in the future. It allows politicians and auto makers to say “See, we’re serious about saving the environment!” without doing the actual hard work, just a token basic research. If politicians were really serious about reducing oil usage they would put tougher restrictions on fuel economy, invest in public transport, offer more perks (incl. tax breaks) to owners of fuel-efficient vehicles (not just hybrids but any fuel-efficient sub-compact car), tax gas at higher rates, etc. If auto makers were serious about it - wait, why would they be, if consumers weren’t interested in it, and nobody is forcing them to be?
I wouldn’t hold my breath. Saturn was supposed to introduce a convertable about the same time they brought out the Vue.
It will be interesting to see if GM actually produces one. From what I’ve observed, only the pre-production mock-ups get phenomenal mileage. To date, all of the hybrids in production only get a couple of miles better mileage than similarly-sized compacts with internal-combustion engines only, and there’s a price-premium for the hybrids that cannot even begin to be justified by the 2mpg gain over the “traditional” compacts.