General Motor's plan for a 5-passenger, 4-door family sedan with triple the mileage of mid-90s car will be on view at the Detroit auto show in January.
The hybrid-electric Precept is GM's "proof-of-technical-concept vehicle" for the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) program, which started in the middle of the last decade.
The next step in the program is a working prototype by 2004. The other firms taking part in PNGV should also be showing their tech models off this year.
GM says there are more than 100 innovations on the Precept "technology demonstration vehicle," many of which the company hopes to apply to its conventional production vehicles.
According to Ron York, director of the Precept program, "If you look at how GM has approached developing advanced class vehicles, we quite literally go to extremes to break down traditional design and engineering paradigms." York says that is his team's "rule of conduct, and the results have been remarkable."
York makes the point that the "pathway to high fuel efficiency is well known. You reduce the energy demand of the vehicle and then find a way to provide that energy more efficiently."But to go from these fundamental principles to a family sedan that needs about 3 litres of gasoline to go 100 km (which is a conversion of the U.S. program's 80 mpg target) takes a tremendous amount of innovation, York points out.