McCormick was eager to report that GM is right there in the thick of fuel cell research, with enormous amounts of money to spend and rock-solid management support to protect it.
GM is working with various suppliers to build the definitive fuel cell system, McCormick says, starting with gasoline (though stuff that needs to be a lot cleaner than anything available now) as the short-term fuel with hydrogen taking over when the infrastructure for that is built, which will be years if not decades from now.
McCormick genuinely does not seem to care that GM is unlikely to be among the first of the car companies to market fuel cell vehicles. GM's game plan is to nail fuel cell technology so absolutely right that suppliers and buyers will flock to the product and buy a million of them before anyone else reaches that magic goal.
As McCormick quickly pointed out, if a company doesn't sell that many of them there's no point selling any at all, since you can't make money at much smaller volume.
There is enough big-syllable technology in fuel cells to put engineers and engineer-wannabes into the ninth degree of nerdvana, but as a boredom prevention measure we will skip right over all that.
What you do need to know is that fuel cells will change almost everything about the auto business, excpet of course the way the vehicles themselves operate.