GM Lab Eco Initiative: investigating the "bare necessity" car & truck
 

I cringe as I post this because I realize GM's "investigation" is as much (maybe/probably more) about marketing an image of themselves as it is about actual product development.

So, if somewhere, a marketer at GM just smiled, I apologize.

But I still found the idea interesting, so here it is.

GM has spent time studing what would constitute a "bare bones" car and truck, the goal being a low total cost of ownership (the implication that best fuel economy is not the be all / end all).

They suggest they're talking to US customers to find out what they want, but I think if they ever produce anything remotely like these, it will more likely be for the rapidly expanding Chinese and Indian markets, not North America.

Then again, if Tata makes good on its promise to bring a US-spec Nano over here, the big players had better have a "stripper" up their sleeves to compete.

Without further ado...

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Bare Necessity Car

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzNzP_CbF2I

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Bare Necessity Truck

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLmXKF6s5a8

"They suggest they're talking to US customers to find out what they want"
Whoa now , let's not go overboard here.

"So I had two questions:
How can we design an optimally efficient vehicle? I mean really, what does that even mean?'
Ahh , maybe you better find out before you competitors do.

With that attitude I am not surprised they went belly up.
Good grief , I am astounded to be reading this these days and especially so from a company like GM.

Pete.

The reversible rear cabin bulkhead on the eco/simple-truck is an eye opener.
Big bed when it's needed, or large interior volume with 4/5 seating positions
when needed... :)

Slick, but no inherent fuel savings there. :turtle:

Taking the reversal idea a little farther, into the realm of aerodynamics and
fuel efficiency, what about a reversible, truly aerodynamic bed cap that
reversed into, or more likely clam-shelled around, the load bearing bed deck
and into the bed side walls.

High FE when the the truck is empty or has a small load, unrestricted height
when that is needed. :thumbup:

The folding/reversing mechanism to do something like this would be complex, but the multi-part removable hard tops that are on the market show that it could be done... or are those only on European cars? :p

It's marketing tripe. The guys with the brains already know and have known the answers to these questions.

Hell, the questions were answered 100 years ago:

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...n20Flyer-S.jpg

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...4fe3535961.jpg

Those "bare necessities" cars were from several years ago. The new Spark is the only thing that even relates to the old bare necessity cars. Nowadays making a good, reliable, and cheap car is tough. The Chevy Aveo base is the nearest, and not many people like them.

Geo Metro. :)

Those cars will never happen. A 6 foot bed is no an effective work truck. How did they plan on shrinking the truck? The animation shows a truck (in relation to the size of the plywood) that is about the same size as my Dodge Dakota. (Which BTW, gets 20mpg highway) I really want Government Motors to die, or at least truly listen.

New from GM for 2011: The 1994 Chevy S10.

The cars they have cooked up in this program seem pretty lame-o. Some of the concepts they showed (and they surely were showing what they thought are the best!) are downright fugly, and there were zero innovations mentioned. Wow, they need to have a fire lit under their butts. They should just improve the HHR?

They need to study actual successful small cars: the original Mini, the Toyota iQ, the Honda Fit, the Tata Nano -- all of these have something innovative that adds real function and value to the design.

The truck is also strange -- if you need absolutely need a truck, why do they insist on throwing in the rear seats? Give us a Tacoma from the late 90's and be done with it. Another take would be to have a built in AeroLid, and have removable rear seats?

Even the late '90s is going too far. Bring back the Toyota Sport Truck from the mid-70s, or its Datsun counterpart. Owned one when I was working construction back then, would load it full of boxes of ceramic tile & mortar, and drive to the job site on not a lot of gas.

This vehicle doesn't directly answer that question, but look at the shape of the cab/hood...

suzuki x head - Google Search

Kinda cool little runabout truck if they could remove some of the "X-TREME" from it, simplify it some...

If it weren't for the Tata Nano threat, I'd agree 100%. As it is, I agree 95%. :)

Awesome. Where do you find that stuff? :)

I like the idea of those... always lusted after em when I saw them on the street... went to check one out that was for sale... and couldn't physically fold my carcass into it! Not from being fat either.

Manufacturers: Please make vehicles that non-orientals can get into. Thank you.

Go back to the blog and see where I gave them a piece of my mind... even though I don't have any to spare! :rolleyes:

I find that stuff cuz I already know what it is hence I know what to search for. That one is an old Briggs and Stratton buckboard. I would love to drive one of those! :D

If my legs were flamingo-hinged, that just might work.

I guess the Metro is also a bare-needs car. But the GM you all hate is the Wagoner-controlled GM. Wagoner believed the SUV was the real money-maker. I am going to admit, I love GM. New GM, after they started over, is listening, and observing the competition. They have recently premiered some excellent vehicles. They are focusing less and less on the truck and SUVs. Their most successful large vehicle they have currently is the Equinox, which achieves 32MPG, which is best in class. Meager by Ecomodder's standards, but its a step in the right direction. The Cruze is rumored to get around 40MPG, and the Spark and new Aveo are going to get at or over 40MPG. The new GM is trying, and doing much better than the old GM.

This "bare necessities" car and truck wont see the light of day. GM decided to invest more of its time in the Volt, Cruze, Aveo, and Spark.

I'm a big fan of GM from the early days up to somewhere in the '70s.

They had management and engineering leadership in the '50s and introduced world-class product like the small block V8, and innovative product like Corvair. They absolutely OWNED styling leadership up through the '60s.

Then the Dark Ages came.

Perhaps with the right combo of leadership and engineering prowess, they can regain the crown. I'm thinking Ford has it among the domestics now.

KITT222 -

I'm crossing my fingers that GM succeeds. I like what I see in the Cruze. The Volt is out of my pri$e range but I do like it's drivetrain because I've always wanted a serial hybrid to make it into the real world.

CarloSW2

GM has long maintained a back lot with prototypes of everything from a motorized skateboard to a dedicated autobahn burner. However, if they think that much style is a "necessity" they have not noticed what people on a budget will drive. This is disappointing from the company that decided to fight Ford's price for a new model T by starting a market for used cars.

Wow, I just watched the videos last night. What absolute BS... I'd laugh at it, but its too stupid. Efficient? Gimme a break.

I know I needed a vehicle that can carry 4 people plus some luggage. At other times I need to carry ~1000lbs of potting soil or landscape bricks. Then there are times when I need to transport about eight 10' 2x6s plus four 16' 2x6s. not to mention the motors and transmissions that I transport sometimes. I also do some autocrossing in the summer and ice racing in the winter.

So I've done all these things with my current vehicle plus I still get excellent gas mileage, my vehicle looks great (to me), and is very cheap to insure and operate.

Now GM is trying to figure out how to make that vehicle?

Too bad Honda beat them to it almost 18 years ago!

It's my Civic VX. It is a bare necessities car too, no power locks, no power windows, no power steering...because it doesn't need any of that.

I feel that GM is on life support, and the only reason the plug is not being pulled is because of nostalgia, since it's obvious that GM doesn't want to make the car that would save them from utter demise.

It's a little bigger than it looks, when I first saw it I was thinking samurai-size, but it's kinda more trooper-size. At 6'1" I'd confidently hop into one. But regardless of brand and model, that vehicle does illustrate how to shrink the front of a pickup without necessarily shrinking the bed. If they wanted to take a serious bite outta the pickup market it would have to be a serious pickup though... not an exercise in half-assery like the ridgeline.

I wonder if this counts as a "bare necessity car": http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...nal-11841.html

Introducing the 2011 General Motors "Bare Necessity Car & Truck"

http://www.old-ads.com/images/2007/05/19/vw_ad.jpg
http://evalbum.com/imgm.php?n=490a.jpg&w=300&h=225

Comes with these fresh-for-2011 features! Runs on "Green" Biodiesel! Gets 40+ Mpg! Made from 90% recyclable material! (aka steel)

They still make them too!
Edit: found a Wikipedia link to them HERE

If it's that big, then what purpose does grafting an old van nose onto it serve? :confused:

Like taking a few inches of wheelbase and hood out if it does anything to improve efficiency?

Speaking of efficiency, I wanted to reach through the computer and strangle those punks on that video. They said "efficiency" about 87 times but didn't back it up with ANYTHING. :mad: :rolleyes:

Less materials, less mass? I don't think making the first 5 feet of a vehicle serve no purpose beyond housing the prime mover, is a particularly efficient idea - especially given that it's fairly well established that a blunt nose can be about as aero-efficient as a sloping one.

Were I to dig long enough I could probably find a pic of a '70s Chevy van chopped into a single cab with a pickup box on the back. There ya have it. Instant reduced driver ergos and engine access with no functional improvements.

I saw this in Jerome...

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/2172/photo0011by.jpg

:D

:eek: HA! I saw one in MN too!

Actually the one I saw looked pretty nice- I wanted to chase it down and talk to the guy but didn't. :(

Thinking of trucks, the easiest way to increase a trucks FE is to decrease its frontal area AKA skinny, best examples are kei trucks, there is one Daihatsu in CA legally licensed has a turbo 660cc 2 cycle with a dual range 6sp transmission and 4wd. He bought it from the parks service, small as it is rated at 3/4 ton and he pulls an 20ft enclosed trailer with it. And it is dimensionally very small, without a load it gets in the 30's for FE

Perhaps time to reconsider how trucks are rated and built, there are many who use a truck but need a full size because of weight and strength limitations & reliability not because they need the full dimensions of the bed.

Just a thought, I love kei trucks but wish they were longer with a diesel :)

An empty 20' trailer made of coroplast?

The puller has to have enough heft to keep the pullee from getting the upper hand!

http://i146.photobucket.com/albums/r...r/21510001.jpg

Put a box on the back... truck of the future! :eek:

The problem is every poverty spec car (thats what we're talking about here) has to compete with much nicer, much better equipped used cars. So unless you're a complete tool and incapable of dealing with not having a warranty, poverty spec cars will never sell in the US.

Unless the poverty-spec car/truck also gets 40+ mpg. Then you bring in a
whole new market of greenies, penny-pinchers and long-commuters.

Case in point, back when I bought my first '98 Chevy Metro (circa 2002),
I paid $3400 for it w/51K miles. I could have bought a '93 Buick (loaded to the gills with options as Buicks tend to be) for about the same price, but I had a long commute, and the Buick didn't get 50+ mpg.

Agree with the last part, but truthfully, even under Rick Wagoner, GM had
best-in-class fuel economy with the Malibu/Aura/G6 (2.4L 6-spd auto),
the Cobalt/G5 XFE, the full-sized trucks/SUVs (not even counting hybrids),
and 4x4 midsize trucks (Colorado/Canyon). They also had the first available hybrid full-sized trucks/SUVs, and Wagoner's the one that gave the go-ahead for the Volt and Cruze back in 2007.

GM made a lot of dumb moves in it's time, but the countless news stories back during the bankruptcy opining something along the lines of "GM makes only gas hogs with poor quality" were dead wrong....and that's despite having to pay exorbitant UAW wages and benefits that the Japanese makers didn't have to.

Toyota is now in the #1 spot and they're having a great time there too. :D

But you still chose to buy USED. GM couldn't care less about used car sales. It doesn't do them any good. Any self respecting penny pincher would never buy new, especially a stripped out car. Its the fundamental flaw of small cheap new cars. Nobody wants to pay new car money for a 3 cylinder bucket that can barely get out of its own way, but they sell great on the used market once the price has dropped at least 50%.

I like the idea of a 40mpg truck. I like the reversible bulkhead too. I owned a Nissan Titan king cab for a while. I needed the longer bed to haul my bike and other things around but often wished I had the space of the Crew cab when I was hauling friends around and had nothing in the bed.

These vehicles very well may never see the light of day, however I am sure there are new ideas being conjured up in this process. The people in the videos seem genuinely interested in being green and I see nothing wrong with that. The green ideas they come up with can be used on other vehicles or if nothing else serve as starting points for more ideas to develop.

I certainly understand your point, but it depends on the price. If GM were able to make a new bare-bones car that cost under $8000 with full warranty and gets 40+ mpg, you may not get all the penny pinchers, but you'll certainly get a few of them (penny pinchers would factor in maintenance costs), and you'd get lots of the greenies and the long-commuters. There are people who refuse to buy used cars...I'm not one of them.

I don't think they can do it with the safety and emissions regulations, though.
They came close with the Aveo5 Special Value ($9995 w/no-AC and no radio) back in 2007 and earlier, but I can't imagine how much more bare bones they can make it.

Are we? I thought we were discussing minimalism & efficiency. As for instance it's certainly reasonable to regard a Lotus as a bare-bones car in a good many respects, but they sure aren't poverty-spec :-)

vomited
 

I wanted to reply but I couldn't get beyond nausea.Thanks!