GM and the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) revealed the jointly developed Chevrolet Colorado ZH2 today. The concept is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell and was intended to explore hydrogen technology for military applications.
The modified Colorado rides on 37-inch tires and stands at more than 6.5 feet tall. The truck is also more than 7 feet wide and is built on a stretched, reinforced Colorado chassis. The truck features a specially modified suspension that will help it handle the rugged terrain of the extreme field tests scheduled for next year. Those tests will determine hydrogen-powered vehicles’ viability on the battlefield.
The Colorado ZH2 uses an Exportable Power Take-Off (EPTO) unit that can be detached to provide electricity in remote areas where power would otherwise be unavailable. One benefit a fuel cell offers over a traditional generator is its near-silent operation. Another is that water, a precious commodity in the field, is produced as a fuel cell’s only emission. The trials will evaluate the ZH2 for its quietness, reduced thermal signature, electric wheel torque at all speeds, fuel consumption and range, and water production capabilities.
Most of the Colorado ZH2 was assembled at GM’s Advanced Vehicle Integration center in Warren, Mich. Vehicle calibration then began at Milford Proving Ground, and will continue into 2017. After calibration is concluded, TARDEC will take over for field trials. GM says its 119-vehicle hydrogen test fleet has racked up 3.1 million miles on fuel cell power. We’ll find out whether or not fuel cells will work for the military sometime next year.
Plans to produce the Ford Ranger pickup and a new Bronco SUV at the automaker’s Michigan Assembly plant may have just been confirmed by a regional UAW boss. In an interview with Detroit Free Press, the UAW member let slip that the two vehicles, which were rumored to be coming to the Michigan plant, mean more for U.S. jobs than the small cars that are being shifted to Mexico.
The comments were made in a piece about UAW members’ reactions to U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump’s criticism of Ford’s decision to move Focus, C-Max, and other small car production to its plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.
“I think Trump needs to get his facts straight,” said UAW Local 900 plant Chairman Bill Johnson, who represents workers at Ford’s Wayne, Mich., plant. “He is absolutely beating up on Ford for doing what everybody else has already done.”
“We hate to see the products go to Mexico,” he continued. “But with the Ranger and the Bronco coming to Michigan Assembly that absolutely secures the future for our people a lot more than the Focus does.”
The revelation aligns with a UAW contract that was made public late last year. In it were details of an unnamed “new product” coming to the Michigan Assembly plant in 2018, followed by a second new model in 2020. Sources at the time said those plans referred to the global Ford Ranger and the Ford Bronco. The rumors were further fueled by Ford’s announcement that it will add four nameplates to its global SUV lineup by 2020.
Little is known about the reborn Bronco, but it could share architecture and powertrains with the Ranger. A Ford Bronco was last sold in the U.S. in 1996.
Like the cherry on top of the 2016 Paris auto show, Hall 8 sits at the top of a hill just above all the new-car display areas. Hall 8 is generally filled with vintage cars staged in sometimes elaborate dioramas according to a theme. This year’s theme was “L’Automobile Fait Son Cinéma,” or the Automobile in Film, and the gathered vehicles mostly starred either in French TV shows or movies, those shot on location in France, or those filmed elsewhere that featured French cars. The vehicles collected are not necessarily the actual ones used in the productions, but they’re all dead-ringers, and they may just inspire you to some unexpected Netflix queueing.
1961 Peugeot 403 Cabriolet, Columbo
The “Detectives and Secret Agents” display featured the iconic French shlubmobile piloted by everyone’s favorite rumpled LAPD homicide detective, Frank Columbo during 69 episodes of the ground-breaking “how-catch-em” series, wherein the audience always witnessed the crime and its perpetrator in the first scene, then spent 73-98 minutes watching actor Peter Falk methodically and often apologetically reel in the bad-guy.
1985 Renault 11 Taxi, A View to a Kill
Agent 007 drove a few French cars during Roger Moore’s tenure in the role including this hapless Renault 11 taxi (aka Alliance, stateside). Bond commandeers the cab under the Eiffel Tower, giving chase to a villainous skydiver, decapitating the cab on a road barrier bar, and then losing the rear end in a T-bone collision. The fuel tank must be under the driver seat, because the plucky front-drive Renault keeps running and delivers him to the River Seine bridge, under which the boat the bad guy landed in is passing.
1980 Citroën 2CV, For Your Eyes Only
Who can forget the epic Bond chase scene wherein 007 manages to evade two carloads of baddies in powerful Peugeot 504s while piloting a lowly deux chevaux. He does this, of course, by variously barrel rolling it (and piloting it wheels down) more or less straight down a steep hillside planted in olive trees, while the Pugs mostly stick to the paved switchbacks.
1964 Citroën DS 19, Fantômas se Déchaîne (Fantômas Unleashed)
This 1965 film starred Jean Marais as arch villain Fantômas opposite Louis de Funès as the earnest but outclassed commissaire Juve and the journalist Fandor, also played by Marais. The Fantômas trilogy, starting in 1964, was France’s answer to the James Bond phenom that was sweeping the world at around that time, but with the suave, gadget-guru protagonist on the other side of the law. In this installment he makes a daring aerial getaway in his DS when it sprouts wings and a tail.
1965 Alpine M65, Michel Vaillant
Michel Vaillant started out as a character in some short stories published in the Franco-Belgian comics magazine Tintin before spinning off his own comic book franchise in 1957, which is still published today. In it, the Vaillant family runs a car and truck manufacturing business that starts up a Formula 1 racing team, with Michel serving as its star driver. In a mid-’60s TV series based on the characters, Les Aventures de Michel Vaillant, he switched racing series to drive an Alpine. The series included live racing footage from Rallye Du Nord, Magny Cours, Nürburgring, Monza, Targa Florio, Le Mans, Monaco, Rouen-Les-Essarts, Sebring and Reims.
1982 Mini 1000, Mr. Bean & 1993 Renault 4R4 Les Visiteurs (The Visitors)
Rowan Atkinson, an inveterate car guy and collector, played the bumbling and pratfall-prone Mr. Bean, who (naturally) drove a lime green Mini in the popular British TV sitcom. The French connection here comes in the 2007 film Mr. Bean’s Holiday, wherein he wins a train journey vacation to Cannes. Numerous Beanean misadventures result in his hitch-hiking the last leg of the journey, only to be picked up by an aspiring actress (coincidentally driving a Mini identical to his) on her way to the 59th Cannes Film Festival. The yellow Renault next to it featured in France’s number-one box-office hit of 1993, Les Visiteurs, a fish-out-of-water tale of a medieval knight who time-travels to the end of the 20th century.
1969 Porsche 908/2 Spyder, Le Mans
Heralded as the greatest racing film of all time, this Steve McQueen vehicle used footage filmed on the Le Mans circuit during 1970. It included the season’s actual 24 Hours of Le Mans race in mid-June. McQueen had intended to co-drive a Porsche 917 in the race with Scottish racing legend Jackie Stewart, but that car was not accepted. Instead, the movie shows him starting the race in a blue #20 Gulf-Porsche 917K. The Porsche 908/2 which McQueen co-drove to a second place finish in the 12 Hours of Sebring served as a movie camera car, capturing actual racing footage. It completed 282 laps and finished in ninth place, but without covering the requisite minimum mileage, due to stops to change film in the cameras.
1974 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9, Ronin
Director John Frankenheimer’s finest car-chase work appeared in his 1998 film Ronin, about a band of rag-tag guerillas attempting to retrieve a mysterious case from a band of really bad guys. In an initial attempt to do this, a big, bad, brown Mercedes chases down the target caravan, along coastal roads above Nice, France, as Robert De Niro fires a rocket launcher while standing in the sunroof. It ends up pursuing the Citroën XM in which “the case” is riding, at very high speeds, through the narrow streets and alleys of Vieux Nice. Must-see movie-watching for any car-nut who hasn’t seen it.
Roland Krüger has skied to the South Pole. Twice. The second time, solo. Spending 55 days on skis, tackling an unrelenting uphill slog from sea level to more than 9,000 feet across the vast, white, empty underbelly of the planet, is something that requires gritty determination, stoic self-reliance, and unwavering self-belief. Which probably makes Roland Krüger well-suited to being the man now running Infiniti.
Infiniti started life in 1985 as Project Horizon, a task force set up inside Nissan to create a new luxury performance brand for the U.S. market. The Infiniti brand was announced in 1987, and its first car, the Q45 sedan, was launched in 1989.
The Q45 was equally as sophisticated and well-built as the Lexus LS 400 that was launched the same year, and it was also more entertaining to drive. But while the LS 400 is remembered as the car that sent Mercedes-Benz into a tailspin, forcing expensive last-minute engineering changes to the W140 S-Class, the Q45 is mostly remembered for having an ad campaign that didn’t show the car and a badge like a Texas belt buckle instead of a grille.
Nissan, like Toyota, had spent a lot of time, talent, and money developing a sedan that in terms of technical expertise and quality execution was the equal of anything from the luxury car establishment. Only problem was, like Toyota, Nissan didn’t truly understand what it had labored so mightily to create. Before long the Infiniti badge had been slapped on quotidian Pathfinders and Primeras gussied up with wood ‘n’ leather interiors.
Rebuilding the Infiniti brand DNA is going to take consistency over a long period of time.
Luxury is where the real money is in the car business these days. Luxury or premium brands only total 10 to 12 percent of overall vehicle sales worldwide, but they account for a hefty 50 percent of global auto industry profits. The math is compelling: With a few notable exceptions, there is a surprisingly small difference between a luxury car and a rental lot queen in terms of basic design, engineering, hardware, and manufacturing costs.
When Renault-Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn, a man with a gimlet eye for the bottom line, realized this a few years back, he figured Infiniti was the answer. It was, after all, the nearest thing Nissan had to a premium brand. But the back catalogue of iconic Infinitis, vehicles that might clearly define the brand’s DNA, is painfully thin. Think Q45, G35, FX50, and you’re pretty much done. That’s not much of a knife to take to the Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi, Jaguar, Range Rover, and even Cadillac gunfight.
This paucity of icon cars means not even Infiniti insiders can clearly articulate what the brand stands for. Ghosn says Infiniti is not about doing what everyone else is doing, that it is not about copying traditional, conservative notions of luxury.
“We will not try to be all things to all people, but everything to some people,” he says. Yes, but what does that look like as an automobile?
Roland Krüger hopes you think it looks like the new Q60 coupe, a chic two-door that riffs on many of the design cues established with the 2009 Essence concept car. Or perhaps like the QX30, the compact crossover that’s built on the same platform as the Mercedes-Benz GLA. Or maybe the forthcoming QX50, an Audi Q5 and BMW X3 rival that will be powered by Nissan’s radical new variable-compression, 2.0-liter, turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Or even the swoopy replacement for the Q70 sedan that’s taking shape in the Infiniti design studio in Atsugi, Japan.
It’s going to take more than the launch of a handful of cars and crossovers to turn Infiniti into a successful global luxury performance brand, though, no matter how well-styled or well-equipped they may be. And that transformation is certainly not going to happen overnight. Rebuilding the Infiniti brand DNA is going take a consistency of application and execution over a long period of time.
