GM's Sequel concept, the next iteration of the automaker's hydrogen fuel cell vehicle efforts that began with its AUTOnomy and Hy-wire concept cars, is about the size of a Cadillac SRX and can travel up to 300 miles on its hydrogen supply, the automaker claims. Sequel can also move from to 60 mph in less than 10 seconds, a number GM says it has achieved thanks to rapid advances in the fuel cell, by-wire and wheel hub motor technologies found on the vehicle.

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GM Sequel: Reinvented Automobile No Longer Just a Dream
Improves Upon First 100 Years
DETROIT - The bold push from General Motors Corp. to reinvent the automobile, first revealed in the AUTOnomy and Hy-wire concept cars, became that much more real today with the unveiling of the GM Sequel.
The technologies embodied in Sequel, such as fuel cells, by-wire and wheel hub motors, have developed so fast that GM has been able to double the range and halve the 0-60 mph acceleration time, compared to current fuel cell vehicles, in less than three years, according to Larry Burns, GM vice president of research and development and planning.
"Three years ago, our chairman and CEO, Rick Wagoner, challenged us to completely rethink the automobile," Burns said. "The Autonomy and Hy-wire concepts were the outgrowth of that challenge - a revolution in how vehicles would be designed, built and used in the future. But, they were concepts. Today, with Sequel, the vision is real - not yet affordable, but doable."
Sequel embodies GM's vision of reinventing the automobile with a fusion of technologies that includes advanced materials, electronic controls, computer software and advanced propulsion. According to Burns, it's an exclamation point for GM's comprehensive global advanced technology strategy that is addressing efficiency and emissions, from today's engine and transmission technology to hybrids and, eventually, fuel cells as the ultimate answer.
"GM's goal," Burns explained, "is to design and validate a fuel cell propulsion system by 2010 that is competitive with current internal combustion systems on durability and performance, and that ultimately can be built at scale affordably."
What excites Burns is that Sequel's performance is achieved with technology available today and does not depend upon some science yet to be invented.
"We've achieved remarkable gains in range and acceleration by using our fuel cell system technology that exists today," Burns said. "That's a real breakthrough. For anyone tracking the viability of fuel cell vehicles, this is encouraging news."
Sequel, about the size of a Cadillac SRX, travels up to 300 miles on its hydrogen supply, and accelerates to 60 mph in less than 10 seconds. Current-generation fuel cell vehicles have a range of between 170 and 250 miles and cover 0-60 mph in between 12-16 seconds, depending upon whether a battery is used.
"With Sequel," Burns said, "virtually everything is packaged in an 11-inch 'skateboard' chassis, building on what we first showed the world in the AUTOnomy and Hy-wire. Sequel points to a vehicle that, in the future, will be better in nearly every way - quicker, surer-footed, easier to handle, easier to build, better looking, safer and only emits water vapor."
Other benefits include:
· Unequaled control on snow and ice, or uneven terrain
· 42-percent more torque for unparalleled acceleration
· Shorter braking distances
While Sequel should excite customers, it also should encourage world governments, Burns added, because of its potential to address societal concerns.
"Sequel helps address major societal issues, from eliminating auto emissions, to helping the world transition to renewable and stable energy supplies, to reducing the chance for crashes and traffic congestion," Burns said.

DETROIT -- General Motors has developed a fuel cell vehicle that could be built in small volumes, according to Larry Burns, General Motors' vice president of research, development and planning.

"This is a real car," Burns says of the Sequel, GM's latest incarnation of advanced technology. "This is a doable car."

That's a big step forward. GM's past fuel cell concepts were too far out for the average consumer or for the average assembly plant.

GM tried to reinvent the car with the AUTOnomy and Hy-wire concepts, both on the flat "skateboard" platform.

In skateboard vehicles, all drivetrain components are enclosed in a low flat platform.

The AUTOnomy and Hy-wire showcased advanced technology, but they were one-off, futuristic concepts that were never meant for production.

Though on the same platform, the Sequel is closer to a realistic production model.

But it is not an affordable car. For now, Burns will settle for making progress.

The Sequel combines many of GM's existing technologies, including fuel cells, by-wire technology and wheel-hub motors.

But the car, about the size of a Cadillac SRX, breaks new ground for GM in several areas.

GM has doubled the range on the Sequel to 300 miles, halved the 0-to-60 mph acceleration to less than 10 seconds and increased power by 25 percent over previous models. And the car still emits only water.

Burns says the automaker's goal is to design and validate a fuel cell propulsion system that could be manufactured and sold by 2010.

GM has said that producing the vehicle for sale would depend on a hydrogen fuel infrastructure and adoption of regulations for the technology.

"Ultimately, we want to build something at scale affordably," Burns says.

Among the Sequel's other benefits, compared with previous GM concepts, are better control on snow, ice or uneven terrain; a 42 percent increase in torque; and shorter breaking distances.

The by-wire system use electrical signals and actuators to operate the accelerator, brake and steering, and chassis-damping subsystems.

"This allows it to respond faster and have greater sensitivity, which provides for more precise vehicle control," says Nick Zielinski, GM's vehicle chief engineer for advanced system integration.

But the big news is in the increased range.

With a 25 percent more powerful fuel cell stack, GM's next-generation fuel cell power system helps the Sequel achieve a 300-mile range.

That range is made possible by advances in high-pressure storage that enables the vehicle to carry 8 kilograms of hydrogen in three cylindrical tanks, more than double that of GM's HydroGen3 fuel cell vehicle.

More range adds to the possibilities.

Says Burns: "We haven't discovered anything yet that says this can't be done."

The guys who “killed” the electric car are busy bringing it back to life. “The problem with EV1 was the range between charges, but now we’ve got an electric vehicle technology that produces its own electricity,” General Motors vice chairman Bob Lutz said. He was waving around his trademark cigar at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, where the press and various government figures and celebrities (in California, they’re often the same people) were being afforded the opportunity to drive the Chevrolet Sequel concept car, the latest development in the company’s fuel-cell program, heir to the 2002 Autonomy and 2003 Hy-Wire.

“The fuel cell architecture gives us tremendous ability to do a lot of significant things and we need to proceed to full production,” said Lutz, more famous for backing the development of cars like the Dodge Viper and Pontiac GTO than for tree-hugging environmentalism. But Lutz went so far as to say he’d postpone some high-performance product development, if necessary, to keep GM’s fuel cell project moving toward small-scale production by 2010 and “commercialization” in the 2015-2025 period.

Clearly, something’s up. It’s a race to production. GM is hardly the only player—Honda, for one, is right there at the front, too —and the car development chief is standing trackside shouting “go!”

Driving Sequel turns out to be unremarkable, which is the most remarkable aspect. It drives much like any crossover vehicle, only without engine roar or conspicuous transmission shift points. Push on the accelerator pedal and it surges up to 60 mph in about 10 seconds. Stomp the brake pedal and it stops like a car—no goofy reactions as it switches back and forth between regenerative and friction braking. And it steers just like a car, complete with road feel. The suspension could use a little dialing-in, but only because the electronically controlled shocks were installed just a couple days before we drove it.

All this is remarkable because the previous generation version we drove in France three years ago—the Hy-Wire—felt like a corporate-funded science fair experiment, laden down with weird control interfaces (twist the steering grip to accelerate or brake, for instance) and different-for-the-sake-of-different attributes meant to emphasize the technology more than to serve a potential customer. It was limited to 40 mph and felt slow and cumbersome.

We cut Hy-Wire some slack because most concept cars feel clunky and cobbled together, but Sequel feels like a preproduction prototype—a little rough around the edges, maybe, but something you could imagine showing up at dealerships in less than a year. The cost of the technology at this stage is still several times that for a regular drivetrain, though dropping rapidly, so it’ll be somewhat longer. The (artificial) limitation is at an interstate-friendly 90 mph and it feels fine at highway speeds. The powerdensity of the fuel cell has nearly doubled, and the car’s range has been extended to the magic 300-mile mark, just like a real car’s. There are neat high-tech touches, like the way the rim of the speedometer changes color to indicate regenerative braking, or the interface to the screen on the dash, which works more cleanly than iDrive, at least.

It’s all seems quite ordinary, even though all the mechanical systems that have been at the heart of automobiles for 120 years now have been digitized and electrified. No hydraulics. Few gears. There are fans, because there’s plenty of heat to dissipate, but the loudest noise inside is actually an electrical hum from a DC-AC converter—engineers assure us it will be easy to eliminate.

The four-wheel steering is by-wire. So are the brakes, and of course the accelerator, fully electric. The suspension is even wired into the ECU. It gives up nothing compared to cars on the road today: There’s traction control, ABS, stability control, all actually easier to implement electrically. There’s been great progress in providing appropriate feedback to the driver.

Take the steering, supplied by Visteon. Sensors measure the torque at each wheel—not drive torque for this purpose so much as that generated within the suspension and steering gear as the wheels react to the road surface and steering inputs from the driver. This digital information is fed into a computer that commands a motor mounted on the steering wheel shaft to generate appropriate resistance or reactions at the steering wheel. This is essentially the way advanced driving simulators work, only instead of reacting to pre-recorded information it’s all happening in real time. The feedback feels real, which it is—it’s just that the information transmitted from wheel to fingertips is digital rather than vibration. There’s a mechanical backup for the steering, but you’d need at least three simultaneous failures in the by-wire system to bring it into play.

That’s just one example of how a completely electric car will work. When it’s all down to control systems and software, new worlds of personalization open up, and the distinction between one car company’s fuel cell car and those of its competitors will boil down to control systems. GM, with engineers experienced on these control systems going back to its EV1 program, says this is where it sees its potential advantage.

“We’ve found elegant solutions, that add no cost, to problems others have solved in a roundabout way,” says R&D leader Larry Burns. Going back to the Autonomy “skateboard” concept of 2002 and EV1 before that, GM has been focused on reinventing the automobile around these new drivetrains.

So it’s ironic that one compromise returns a small centerline “hump” to the floor. The center hump was gone in Hy-Wire, but that vehicle sat higher and had a meager 160-mile range. Sequel, GM says, will go 300 miles on the 8 kg of hydrogen stored under pressure (10,000 psi vs. only 5000 psi in Hy-Wire) in expensive carbon-fiber tanks centered in the chassis. That gets them out of the way so you need not step up so far into the car as with Hy-Wire, but sit into it as you would with a typical crossover. It also moves the storage tanks away from the impact zones. GM says Sequel meets today’s safety standards.

It’s a hybrid, really, that charges its SAFT-built Lithium Ion (L-ion) battery pack with a fuel cell instead of an internal combustion engine. The fuel cell is the continuous power source with the battery pack functioning much as it does in Prius or other gasoline-electric hybrids, to store energy from regenerative braking and for a “burst” of power on demand. Sequel uses 42-volt systems for the drivetrain and by-wire systems, and 12-volts for instrumentation, lights and control systems.

If the hydrogen thing all goes wrong, or just comes more slowly than anticipated, the technology is applicable to other forms of hybrid and even battery-electric propulsion. Lutz took some hits for saying so—as if it meant he lacked commitment to the fuel-cell aspect—but from a car-guy standpoint the source of the electricity is less relevant.

In Sequel, a single motor drives both front wheels, while there’s a motor in the hub of each rear wheel. A long-term goal is to put a motor in each wheel, simplifying controls for things like traction control by driving each wheel independently. For now, these liquid-cooled motors are light enough for the rear axle but the un-sprung mass—33 pounds—is still too high to use them on the front axle. Sequel weighs 4474 pounds, or somewhat less than a 4x4 Trailblazer. At 119.7 inches long, it is essentially the size and mass of a Cadillac SRX.

Lest you doubt the production intent, nearby sat a fuel-cell powered Equinox, 100 copies of which will hit the road in the States in about a year, with more targeted for Asian, European and South American markets. Production scales up by orders of magnitude—first there were the Opel Zafira-based HydroGen3s, built by the handful. Next, the Equinox, of which there will be hundreds. By 2010, GM says it will be counting its fuel-cell powered vehicle production by the thousands. After that? The goal is the same as it was when we drove Hy-Wire: GM wants to be the first auto-maker to build 1 million fuel cell cars.

The usual knock on hydrogen fuel-cell cars is the infrastructure/supply question. Where’s the hydrogen going to come from, and how much energy will it take to isolate it? The most abundant element in the universe is generally found on earth only tied to carbon or oxygen and can be separated from water by electrolysis or from natural gas by, essentially, burning off the carbon and oxygen. What few people realize is that there’s a lot of hydrogen being produced by energy (i.e. oil) companies already—it’s generally derived from natural gas, which petroleum companies have in abundance, and used to remove the sulfur from diesel fuels (demand increased a lot lately as the U.S. moved to “clean” diesel Oct. 16), in industrial and pharmaceutical processes, and even to “hydrogenate” oils for use in processed foods. How much hydrogen do they make today, transporting it through pipelines or by truck? Enough annually, says Burns, to supply a fleet of 200 million (yes, million) fuel cell vehicles. Adding a hydrogen filling station to an existing gas station would cost about $1 million, according to GM partner Shell. It would take about 120 to serve the L.A. area properly—Shell sounded ready to step up to 40 stations. When you think of locating stations nationwide, it looks like a ton of money, but compared to the considerable costs of doing things like building an Alaskan pipeline or other costs of searching for and shipping oil around the globe, it looks more reasonable. Problem is that, for a while at least, energy companies would be called upon to invest and support both systems.

But GM has another trick up its sleeve, and it might not bode well for oil companies that don’t adapt quickly: a home appliance could generate hydrogen from either water or natural gas—both of which are already fed into most residences. “One thing we found out with EV1 was that people hate stopping at service stations—home refueling is a big plus,” said Burns.

The energy to create hydrogen at home would come from electricity—power companies would happily run their generating stations all night at the same rate as they do during the daytime peak demand period. This would, of course, increase point-source pollution from generating plants, but given that a fuel cell is roughly twice as efficient at generating power as a gasoline engine, there is a net gain to be found. Burns’ frequently quoted line about “removing the car from the environmental debate,” though, includes a large dose of optimism about how much of the new electrical demand would be met by solar, wind and hydro-power generation, not to mention nuclear plants. He suggests the latter could be located on U.S. military bases for security purposes.

GM has intellectual property rights applicable to a home hydrogen appliance—“it’s basically a process that runs a fuel cell in reverse.” Honda has been pioneering the installation of fuel cells in Japanese homes as electrical generating stations, but Burns says GM CEO Rick Wagoner steered his team away from that approach.

“Rick didn’t want us to get distracted by stationary power and distributed generation. He said, “Don’t forget you’re in the car business.”

That the commitment goes to the top speaks well for Sequel’s future. After all, the last thing GM needs is a movie entitled Who Killed the Electric Car: The Sequel.