News From the Auto Industry

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.