Larry Burns is on a mission: to reinvent the automobile using nonpolluting hydrogen fuel cells. As the vice president of R&D and strategic planning at GM, he's one of the people who will be called on to lead the US auto industry into its next incarnation.
Burns has been a persistent advocate of hydrogen power and other advanced propulsion and materials technologies for cars. His thinking is, the industry can keep making small energy improvements in the current cars it makes -- or it can take a big leap forward to build a whole new kind of car.
“GM can't have its business growth capped by energy, safety or environmental issues. We need a transition from the internal combustion engine -- a technology that has been essentially the same for 120 years. ... We have the opportunity for an all-new automotive DNA based on electric motors and fuel cells.” — Larry Burns interviewed on Wired.com
Via an article in the Wall Street Journal: The machine, which GM says it aims to develop by 2012, would run on batteries and use wireless technology to avoid traffic backups and navigate cities. Watch Dean Kamen of Segway talk about inventing and giving >> Watch Larry Burns of GM talk about reinventing the car […]
Continue reading