Vehicle of Change

The title article in the October 2002 issue of Scientific American talks about how hydrogen fuel-cell cars could be the catalyst for a cleaner tomorrow. As well as the sheer brilliance of the fuel cell and the ecological aspects of this (on which the article deservedly concentrates), I was also impressed by the modularization of the chassis. Shoehorn all the automotive systems into a flat skateboard chassis.

You then have wires, plugs and sockets to connect up to the systems in the separate upper body, like steering, braking and throttling. The article concentrates on the pioneering work that General Motors have been doing, but from googling around today, it looks like a lot of the other automotive companies are eagerly investigating this idea too. Can't wait for the real thing to come to market.

Now this approach allows the upper body to be interchangeable. Mum can put on the the minivan shell to pickup the kids from soccer practice. The eldest kid can plug in the sports convertible version for his hot date in the evening.

I'm not sure if they've thought it through completely yet. How exactly do you swap the vehicle bodies without 20 of your closest friends around, who can all bench press 250 pounds? Is there a market for a new type of garage here; a double height one with a gantry crane and the ability to winch the body shells up and down? Maybe a variation on public storage, where you keep the extra bodies and the storage company have the means to swap them for you.

Sure would be great to go to the local repair shop with some annoying automatic engine problem and come out again fifteen minutes later with a replacement skateboard and the problem gone. We do something like that now with our computer parts. We're not quite at the ubiquitous hot swapping of all parts yet, but it'll surely come. In the building at work, there are dozens of Sun Ray appliances. When there is a problem with one of those, it's just swapped out in its entirity and away you go with another one. Simple.

And when this motorized skateboard is productized and it really takes off, there's bound to be mods available. They've already started for Doom3. Anything that's new, good and popular will get copied and/or modified/improved, so it clear that this would be another market for companies to try to make a fast buck. There would of course be the Energizer mod, where the rear half of the vehicle would be taken up by extra plugin fuel cells, so you can just keep going and going and going...

Maybe some kind of turbo power mod to go with that sports convertible so it actually performs as well as it looks.

Or a version where the turn indicators don't work, and the car is equiped with an invisible force shield that automatically causes all other vehicles on the road to brake or swerve out of the way to avoid it. This would no doubt be popular with Volvo drivers.

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( Aug 12 2004, 12:35:40 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink