MILFORD, MI: Even when Gary Witzenburg was an auto writer he was a serious, serious guy, and that gravitas is pre-eminent as he prepares to help me fire up the Precept 4-door sedan for some laps around GM's proving ground here.
"This is a moonshot vehicle," the primary babysitter of GM's ultra high-mileage concept car says yet again, and it is perfectly clear-yet again-that this is a warning as much as a clarification. The warning goes pretty much without saying, since concept vehicles like this often cost more than a US$1 million. So I ease the one-of-a-kind, futuristic-looking sedan out of the garage like I have a significant amount of over-caffeinated nitroglycerin in the trunk.
Witzenburg starts to relax a little as we leave the busy bit of this sprawling facility behind and head for its wide open spaces, and that enables him to take up the other side of the moonshot issue-the incredible technical reach of the Precept.
The genesis for the vehicle wrapped around me began with an idea from Bill Clinton early on in his presidency. He challenged Chrysler, Ford and GM to build a five-passenger sedan that would suit the tastes of today's five-passenger sedan buyers but get 80 miles per US gallon, which is a vast mileage upgrade from what such vehicles got then or indeed get now.
As part of the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), as the plan become known, the car companies would create a concept car capable of reaching such unlikely goals and show if off in the year 2000. The three companies followed different paths in this effort, but only GM was able to reach that 80 mpg goal; the other firms got close but paid more attention to the vehicles' costs. In Witzenburg's view, this is like being asked to reach the moon and failing to reach lunar orbit.