Automotive Engineering - April 2024 - 2

EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL
Sebastian Blanco
Editor-in-Chief
sebastian.blanco@saemediagroup.com
The future is back
As I was working on this issue's cover
story - a look at the current state of
low- and no-carbon fuels and the potential
they hold - the cyclical nature
of life made itself readily apparent
(once again). I will warn those of you
who were involved in the automotive
industry a decade or two ago that you
might experience similar flashbacks
when you read about how eFuels could,
if everything works the way it's supposed
to, provide a way for much of
today's internal combustion engines to
power legitimately zero-new-emission
vehicles, especially in regions of the
world where EVs don't yet make sense.
find out which is better. The point is,
things often move in cycles. As different
as the auto industry is from where it
was in decades past, certain ideas just
cycle their way in and then back out
before returning.
Design touches offer a few easy-to1966
Electrovan
That's great. Well, it sounds great, at
least. The many promises made by producers
and researchers of synthetic fuels
sound strikingly similar to what the
companies supporting biofuels were
saying back when George W. Bush was
still president. The fuel is cleaner, they
said. We can keep (some of) the same
infrastructure, or just modify it slightly,
they said. This will work with EVs to
make the whole future brighter. That
was the message.
Obviously, ethanol and biodiesel have
not taken over the world's gas stations.
Just ask the Coskatas, BioWillies and
Solazymes of the era. There are, of
course, notable technical differences
between those biofuels and the nextgen
eFuels that some automakers and
oil companies are researching today. I'm
not trying to compare them directly to
2 April 2024
spot examples. Take the PT Cruiser's
retro look at the turn of the century or
the way the just-revealed Rivian R3's
silhouette could be mistaken for an
Audi Quattro coupe from the 1980s at a
distance. But I'm most interested here
in the cycle where we repeatedly search
for workable alternatives to petroleumbased
fuels. It's not just the next generation
of synthetic fuels where one can
spot the repetition. Engineers worked
on building a modern electric vehicle
decades ago, and then they stopped.
And then they started again. At this
point in the story one has to, of course,
mention the great success EVs had in
the early days of the automotive industry.
Same with hydrogen. When GM
talks about its latest hydrogen advancements,
it often includes a mention of its
first H2 vehicle, the 1966 Electrovan.
We're not going in circles. We are on
the precipice - and stop me if you've
heard this before, but doesn't it feel
real this time? - of actually shifting our
transportation options away from fossil
fuels. When I look back on the path
we've taken, it reminds me not of a
straight line where we made all the
perfect executive decisions and product
plans and engineering efforts the
first time. Instead, it's an odd spiral that
reveals all the times we've circled back
to something we tried before, but that
now thanks to some new technology or
a changed regulatory reality, it's time
to try again. It's herd behavior. We
can't yet quit fossil fuels, in part because
our system was designed with
their energy density as the standard,
but if history tells us anything, it's that
we will keep trying.
Sebastian Blanco, Editor-in-Chief
Chris Clonts
Senior Editor
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AUTOMOTIVE ENGINEERING
GM
Automotive Engineering - April 2024

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Automotive Engineering - April 2024
