GM Moves From The Laboratory To the Front Lines On Hydrogen Vehicles
Something tells me that General Motors is not willing to play second fiddle on next generation vehicles. Toyota pretty much slapped them upside the head with the Prius and other fuel-efficient vehicles and the Detroit automaker is taking the lesson to heart with hydrogen. GM announced earlier this week that it has moved 500 fuel-cell engineers and scientists from the laboratory side of the company into the chain of command that actually produces cars.
This move is more than symbolic as it shows an actual transition from the R&D and into the initial stages of commercialization of the vehicles. When pressed for a timeline on hydrogen vehicles showing up in dealerships, Larry Burns, vice president of research and development, offered that they could be available within five or six years. From the article,
Burns said he's not yet willing to say exactly when hydrogen vehicles will be mass-produced, but he said it should happen before 2020, the year many experts have predicted.
"I sure would be disappointed if we weren't there" before 2020, he said Wednesday at his office in GM's sprawling technical center campus in the Detroit suburb of Warren.
Of course, the promises of a hydrogen economy have been whispered in ears for decades without much to show beyond some "proof of life" concepts at trade shows and celebrity parties. There are still massive questions regarding high-price, fueling infrastructures, range, and storage capacity. To GM's credit however — and based on interviews I've had with their executives — there appears to be a genuine push to lead this market and take the crown of innovation before anyone else. Starting this Fall, more than 100 consumers will have the opportunity to test-drive their own personal fuel-cell vehicle for several weeks in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. That's a huge step towards realizing the future of alternative energy vehicles — even if we're still faced with a chicken/egg type scenario. Let's hope GM's big picture allows the other pieces of the puzzle to fall easily into place.
Tags: Alternative Fuels, Automobiles, Big Business, fuel cell, general motors, hydrogen, transportation
June 17th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
HYDROGEN POLITICS: Here is how it works:
While all of the falsified points against hydrogen have been counter in numerous papers, such as: http://www.rmi.org/images/other/Energy/E03-05_20HydrogenMyths.pdf
It is important to consider the following:
The oil and auto industry consider the battery industry to be a failed technology that can never be made or delivered in the form factor, price point, range or efficiency that they care about. (It doesn’t matter, for this argument, what YOU think.) So they got together and used “layered anti-evangelism” to manipulate the battery industry.
“Layered anti-evangelism” is an intelligence agency third world manipulation device that works like this:
1. Select the target: In this case it is hydrogen fuel cells, which have been demonstrated to beat batteries on every business front.
2. Select your internal agents. In this case lobbyists and “writers” that are paid by the oil and auto industry.
3. Have the agents contact and talk to the “sheep”. In this case the sheep are the writers for battery industry trades and heads of battery lobby or support organizations.
4. Have the agents convince the sheep via skewed data provision. In this case selected reports were written and then shown to the sheep to convince the sheep that hydrogen fuels cells would steal their funding, put them out of business and that the only source of hydrogen was from the “evil oil companies”.
So you have battery evangelists who are anti-hydrogen sheep:
Ulf Bossel of the European Fuel Cell Forum Alec Brooks- EV World Sam Thurber
Yet for every manipulated argument they come up with, they are shot down by hundreds of sites with facts, ie: http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid985.php
WHY? Because you can make hydrogen at home and the ability to do it fast, cheap and clean is coming 40 times faster than they thought.
This happened, using the same process, to:
1.) Electric light rail in America (US Vs. National City Lines, 334 US 573)
2.) The EV1 (Movie: Who killed the electric car) Etc.
The interventions of these ‘doubters’ fall into a number of clear categories which I’ll summarise as:
1 “You can’t succeed because no-one has ever succeeded at this (sports car making / battery-power / taking on the majors, etc etc) before”. - May I commend to everyone Dava Sobel’s wonderful (and short!) book, “Longitude”, which offers a perfect map of the tendency of government and the scientific establishment collude to reject true innovation. This effect can only be overcome when a tipping-point of perceived popular utility is reached, at which point the establishment suddenly has a bout of collective amnesia about their earlier denials. (Same story many times over, historically, of course - from Gallileo onwards.)
2 “It’s inefficient to carry around”. Rather as it’s inefficient to carry around a full tank of gas, perhaps? Or to carry around a SUV chassis which itself weighs a ton or more? (Come on, Detroit, you can find a better argument than that, surely?)
3 “This technology is not a solution and never will be.” This very much reminds me of the IBM’s famously short-sighted take on the prospect of home computing, back in the 70s. The language of these contributions, let alone their content, points to a thought-process rooted in volume-producers’
vested interests. Consider the successes of some other new-tech challengers of vested interests: Dyson taking on Hoover with a bagless vacuum-cleaner; Bayliss bringing clockwork (i.e. battery-less) radios and laptops to the third world; thin-film solar panels (sorry, can’t remember who, but you know who I mean). On this point, it was deeply depressing, at a high-level environmental science conference of the UK Government last year, for me to witness a “leading and respected” Professor of Transport rejecting electric traction out-of-hand with the words “it will never be more than just power storage on a trolley”. Given that this “expert” was advising ministers of state setting future national policy on alternative transport, my immediate thought was “Who pays this man’s research grant?”
So let’s be vigilant for any who claim, in a smooth way, that invention can’t possibly have the answers. From a position of some expertise in this field, may I remind readers that the “you-don’t-understand-how-our-industry-works” argument has been the policy instrument of choice for numerous corporate fraudsters and protectionists down the ages (Enron, anyone?). New York’s energetic DA, Mr Spitzer, has made a fine career out of challenging such thinking in the finance sector (with the simple rejoinder: “WHY does your industry work like that? Against customer choice?”). And then of course there’s the entire consumer movement (remember Flaming Fords? remember “Unsafe at Any Speed”?). We can and should ask the same questions of the conventional auto industry.
The good news is that genuine innovation will out - as long as ordinary consumers are able to find it and buy it. One of the early lessons of the twentyfirst century, thank goodness, is that the old-school, browbeating style of corporate communication - terrorising one’s customers into rejecting alternatives - increasingly fails as people wise up to making decisions based on their own independently-gathered information about benefits and risks. (Interestingly, a popular reaction against “selling by fear” is also now happening in the political field. Now why might that be?) As a consumer, one doesn’t have to agree with the in-ya-face techniques of anticorporate critics like Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock to still subscribe to the view that we can buy what we want to buy. We no longer want to be told by old-tech that new-tech is inherently suspect. Isn’t it old-tech that brought us dependency on oil, climate change, wars over energy sources?
So c’mon people, how about a reward system for “spot the spoiler”? I’m all for free debate on the issues, but some of these blogs smell rather like the work of paid old-tech corporatists trying to sabotage your success.
Challenge such interventions with the greatest possible vigour, and let consumers decide for themselves!
1.) Battery companies are spending millions of dollars to knock H2
because it works longer, better, faster and cheaper than batteries! Most of the people writing these screaming anti-H2 articles are battery company shills or have investments there. H2 does beat batteries on every front so the should be SCARED!
2.) The steel unions hate H2 because H2 cars don’t use steel. Steel is
too hard to afford any more so nobody will use it in any case.
3.) Activists hate H2 because they think it can only be made by the oil
companies and they hate the oil companies. This is a falsehood created by the battery and steel guys.
4.) Oil companies hate H2 because it is so much better than oil but they
only get to hate it unto 2030 when the affordable oil runs out. Then they know they must love it because H2 energy will be all that is left. The Oil industry is dismayed that H2 is coming on so fast and they are trying to slow it down even more.
5.) Other alternative energy interests hate it because it is getting all
of the funding because the polita-nomics are better with H2 than ANYTHING ELSE ON EARTH.
We have made hydrogen at home with free energy. If the gasoline in your car blows up it will do a VAST AMOUNT more death and damage than H2 ever will.
You are driving a MOLOTOV COCKTAIL. In 2030 oil is GONE and there is NO OTHER OPTION that can be delivered world-wide in time but H2!