Empty Promises: The Top 10 Automotive Technologies We Didn't Get

[Blake Noble]

Empty Promises: The Top 10 Automotive Technologies We Didn't Get

By black-knight (Editor/Reporter) for Cheers and Gears.com

Saturday, 8th January, 2011

For over a century and a half, mankind has made amazing strides in automotive technology. The car itself has been an amazing tribute to just how far we as human beings will go to keep our spot right on top of the food chain in the grand scheme of things and to how ingenuitive we are to keep solving problems. However, we sometimes don't exactly lend well to ourselves and push the envelope as far as we have in the past in the name of invention and innovation, and with your help we have chosen a some of the high-tech wizardry we should be driving now but somehow aren't.

Now, dear reader, I will say I was hoping you would have been more active in this top ten list, so perhaps I'll allow more time for the next one. Those who did drop a line left very good suggestions and I tried to make sure that none went to waste. On a curious but very understandable note, most technologies named had to do with alternative fuels and propulsion. So, without further adieu, here is what we should have optional or standard as features when we decided we should cave in and drop a fat check on a new 2015 Chevrolet Generica Brougham LS Supreme.

10. Flying cars

This one didn't even remotely make the number one spot because, well, if you seriously took "The Jetsons" or "Back to the Future Part 2" (which has eerily proven to be more exact in numerous ways than the aforementioned cartoon) as any indication of what the year 2015 would hold, then you really were living in cloud coo-coo land. Perhaps some people got off on the idea of being able to drive a Jetmobile to their new space-bound apartment, but I somehow fail to care. Perhaps that's a result of being 10 years old when the year 2000 finally hit and I didn't see this stuff come out overnight. Even still, we have been promised this bit of technology for something like 50 years now. At least make it optional, I guess.

9. Side and Rear view video cameras

Sure, there are a lot of vehicles that have back-up cameras built into their SAT-NAV systems to show you what's pulling up behind you, but numerous concept cars over the years have decided to answer the question: "Why can't we just do away with mirrors entirely and use nothing but cameras?" With concept cars, such as 2005's Ford Iosis, stepping up to the plate to do so you'd think we'd already have this as an option by now, especially on a few supercars (not naming names, Bugatti) where rearward visibility doesn't even come as an option.

8. 90 percent reconfigurable interiors

The old Ford Visos concept had a particular simple and rather clever feature where interior comfort and lighting could be adjusted to suit the driver's mood. Feel like driving a ballpoint pen into your boss' tires? Well, hold that thought, slip behind the wheel, fiddle around with a few controls, and relax in your car and don't think too much about how he asked you to stay late when you already clocked 20 hours of overtime. It almost sounds like a safe alternative to smoking.

Then there was Ford's Model U concept from 2003 (which was so clever, some of it's features have allowed it to make multiple appearances on our list) that had just about every surface of the interior covered with integrated tracks to mount a variety of different storage bins to or to simply throw the seats around should you take a huge fit to play musical chairs in your car and then proceed to live in it.

7. Better intercooling systems

Forced induction systems (read: turbochargers and superchargers) are becoming a standard feature on more and more engines lately to keep small displacement powertrains from being incredibly underpowered. Air-to-air and water-to-air intercooler systems currently in use are slightly ineffective. One day, though, a Ford engineer decided to tinker in his toolshed to come up with a neat feature shown on the 2004 Ford SVT Lightning concept called "SuperCooler technology" where the air-con system cools a spare, small bottle of coolant and then proceeds to dump it all into the intercooler when you mash your foot down on the throttle. The result is a decent increase in performance figures versus current layouts. Ford, incorporate this for the next-generation EcoBoost engines, 'kay? Thanks.

6. Recyclable materials

Ah, so here the Model U makes it's second appearance. The cheeky little runabout had the clever idea of using organic, recyclable materials in its construction in areas where it seems to matter. For example, the rear tailgate skin was made partially from soy beans. The foam used to cushion the driver's arse was also made from soy beans and the lubricants used to oil some of the moving parts of the car were made from sunflower seeds. Mmmm ... tasty. Well, in a different kind of way.

5. Reconfigurable platforms

Don't worry. This list isn't exactly in order of importance because most everything named so far seems to be fairly important, so yes, this one can be considered to be ranked fairly high up on the list. If you will, care to think back to 2002. GM introduced a massively impressive concept car dubbed the Autonomy, which sat upon a platform that looked like a gigantic skateboard that housed all of the vital hardware for a car. So, say you wanted to convert your Caprice Family Truckster into a Silverado Custom Deluxe, all you had to do was show up at your local hometown Chevy dealer and drop a fresh body on that same platform. How's that for versatile? The later Hy-Wire concept built upon those premises with a conventional looking package (but had an eerie cavernous interior due to the lack of any physical hardware being in front of the driver). This was 2002?

4. Weight saving measures in mainstream cars

Oh, boy, have cars gotten fatttttt over the years. For the record, a brand new 2010 V6 Camaro has about the same curb weight as a 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu. The Camaro is a unibody pony car with a smaller engine that uses some pretty flashy technology while the Chevelle is a body-on-frame all steel car with a cast iron small block V8 that's considered to be quite the boat in size by today's standards. Yikes. Sure, that go-fast red two door thing tacked to your bedroom wall might have an extensive use of carbon fiber, aluminum, and magnesium, but so far the common man hasn't seen such exotic materials in his four-door sedan by Fridigdare since, well, ever. With CAFE regs becoming more and more strict and, as a result, increasingly idiotic, mainstream automakers have told us newer cars will be going on a crash diet ASAP and yet Buick's new Verano compact car is a hefty little boy that has a fuel economy rating of just 31 mpg highway. Childhood obesity indeed.

3. The Chrysler Turbine car (yes the entire car)

This brute of a car was indeed years ahead of its time, which is what more or less what lead to its ultimate demise. It looked surprisingly normal, behaved like an actual car should, and was powered by a turbine engine that had few moving parts and could run on any combustible liquid you could pour down into it, which was proven when the Mexican president ran it on a bottle of cheap tequila. Think of it as Mr. Fusion for the 1960s and, by the way, I'd love to see what a bunch of hill folk could run it on. You could get every last bit of the 425 lb-ft of torque out of the engine at an earth shattering 0 rpms although it only produced a weak 130 brake horsepower (diesel engines, eat your heart out). Chrysler built 50 of them, couldn't figure out how to make it comply with pollution regs, then killed it. The design of the car would be reprocessed into the first Dodge Charger and Chrysler would later on develop a new turbine engine that was air-friendly and thrown under the hood of a Coronet. Chrysler kept at developing this new powertrain until it was almost production viable and would make good under the hoods of a few '79 LeBarons. Then it asked the U.S. government for its first bail-out, after which The Feds told Chrysler that a turbine car was "too risky" and to put an immediate halt to the program. Hmmmmm ...

2. ICE and Fuel-Cell Hydrogen Powerplants

Like rear-view cameras for mirrors, so many concept cars had this particular feature: the ability to run on Hydrogen. The Ford Model U. The GM Hy-Wire. BMW took a 7-Series out to a Bavarian barn and made it run on it. Honda had one or two concept cars that could do it. Chevy had the Sequel. Hydrogen is combustible, renewable fuel source that doesn't have nearly as many drawbacks it used to have and produces water clean enough to drink as it's only emission. Why wait until 2018 to see an affordable production car run off of it? I think it's time we see this happen much sooner rather than later.

1. Alternative fuels

Solar power has been around since, well, we had a Sun to get it from. The wind's always blowing. Someone who really liked to play "Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake" as a teenager actually made fuels from algae a reality finally. We're thinking of ways to make fuel from chocolate and, speaking of food, McDonald's is constantly throwing out free fuel if you own a diesel-engined car. Then there is Hydrogen which we just touched on earlier. We do have E85 Ethanol at filling stations ... but not all of them and, hey, shouldn't all cars have FlexFuel technology rather than some of them? I think it's safe to say we're all sick of paying $3 bucks in hard-earned change for a gallon of Dino juice, and we already have dozens of replacements lined-up, so why we can't fill our tanks with any of them?

[Camino LS6]

I'm glad that you tackled this topic - it is extremely important.

It is the sort of thing that we should talk about all the time rather than just when it generates a headline. Keeping this in the forefront of our thinking generates a mindset of innovation. That mindset is precisely what we need as opposed to the current, non-productive thinking that revolves around sacrifice and hopeless conservation. That is the mindset of decline, and needs to be rejected outright.

Don't regulate, innovate.

[@dmin]

I love the Hywire. Its a shame that GM like forgot about it. It still looks good and is relevant to this day.

Also is GM the only company that makes functioning concepts? the sixteen was drivable as well as the hywire.. and a crap load of others.

[Justin Bimmer]

#10 exists. I have seen it in the flesh.

Flying Car

[Blake Noble]

#10 exists. I have seen it in the flesh.

Flying Car

That's no flying DeLorian. The design is so cumbersome, I don't even know if it even counts.

why didn't i run into this researching the article?