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Byron McCormick — slightly balding and with glasses — looks just like your grandfather. This seems reasonable enough because he is a grandfather. And those grandkids have made him a true believer.

"I didn't think about it with my kids and they're grown up now. But I look at my grandchildren and I think to myself, the decisions we make today are going to directly affect them when they're my age, say in 2050. We have to do this, to make these changes," McCormick says over lunch at Electric Drive University.

McCormick, executive director of General Motors Corp.'s fuel cell activities, argues passionately for a complete shift in thinking about energy usage and supply. And it is his job to do something about it — right now and every day from now on.

What he and the rest at GM are doing about the future of transportation, clean transportation, is the rationale behind the GM-hosted Electric Drive University — which is part public relations exercise, part high-tech seminar and part policy deep dive.

At times, all three threads overlap, as in a lengthy discussion about hydrogen fuelling infrastructure — or more simply, where you might end up filling your hydrogen fuel cell car if it ever goes on sale.

Consider: there are more than 170,000 gas stations in North America and only about 20 hydrogen filling stations, none of which are truly accessible to the general public.

GM officials here say the installation of hydrogen pumps at 12,000 filling stations would give 70 per cent of U.S. motorists access to the fuel. GM estimates that hydrogen pumps at 12,000 stations would cost $10-billion (U.S.) to $15-billion.

This would put hydrogen pumps within about three kilometres of each other in the 100 most populated metropolitan areas in the United States, and would also allow for at least one pump every 40 km along the 210,000 km of major highways in the U.S.

For the record, no oil company has committed to investing in hydrogen pumps and none of the auto companies has the money to build all these stations alone.

Still, despite this and many, many other hurdles, the most striking part of the whole exercise here at the "university" is the earnestness the eight seminar leaders — all GM people and mostly engineers painfully unable to dissemble — bring to their presentations.

If they don't believe in changing the status quo of the auto industry, in moving away from high-horsepower gasoline and diesel engines into clean technologies that don't pollute and in no way harm the planet, they should leave GM and head down to Hollywood. It is Oscar time.

Cynics and those who hate and mistrust corporations in general will, of course, argue that GM and the other car companies are not really serious about changing the way they do business. Perhaps. But if so, why would GM publicly advocate for a strategy to displace petroleum as the source of 35 per cent of the world's energy today?

"We'll need 70 per cent more energy in 2030 than in 2004," says McCormick, arguing not just GM's position but his own: that energy diversity, with an emphasis on clean and sustainable energy, is perhaps the critical issue of our time.

Growth in the global car industry alone presents a major energy and environmental problem. This year, global sales of cars and other light vehicles will hit about 70 million vehicles; within a decade, as emerging countries such as India and China embrace an automobile culture, sales will soar to more than 91 million vehicles.

"The real question is what are we going to leave for our grandkids?" McCormick says.

If we plan to leave them a healthy planet, he adds, hydrogen fuel cells make the best sense as the No. 1 way to propel cars. Done right, fuel cells are a sustainable energy carrier, one requiring zero petroleum and producing zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The truth is, fuel cell cars are really electric cars. They use the electricity produced by a chemical reaction in the fuel cell — in a nutshell, hydrogen meets oxygen — to create energy to drive electric motors that turn the wheels. In a very real sense, a hydrogen fuel cell is really a battery, not an engine at all, as some have suggested. In short, a fuel cell car is really an electric car running on hydrogen-fuel-cell batteries.

"You know that movie Who Killed the Electric Car?" says McCormick, who was one of the lead engineers on the EV-1 electric car that GM produced and then phased out in the 1990s. "No one killed it. It's right here. We're working on it."

Peel away all the layers of strategy documents and product plans and public pronouncements, and what lies at the core of GM's vision for its own future is the electric vehicle.

GM is aiming to reclaim the lost mantle of automotive technology leadership from foreign auto makers such as Toyota, Honda, BMW and others, by becoming the world's biggest, best, most profitable purveyor of electric cars.

McCormick's boss, GM vice-chairman Bob Lutz, says the company hopes to launch a family of electric vehicles in the very near future. They represent the runup to GM's stated plan to fully commercialize hydrogen-fuel-cell cars — to sell them to the public at an affordable price some time in the next decade.

Of course, we've seen promises about fuel cell cars before, most notably from Canada's own Ballard Power Systems. They have proved to be broken promises.

Burnaby, B.C.-based Ballard, the largest supplier of fuel cells for hydrogen-powered cars in the past decade, agreed in November to sell its automotive fuel-cell business to stakeholders Daimler and Ford.

Ballard, in fact, hasn't made money since 1998 and its failure to sell fuel cells to power cars and trucks has pushed down its market capitalization from a peak of about $8.4-billion in 2000 to about $600-million today. Despite all its dreamy statements about clean transportation, Ballard has managed to supply fuel cells to only about 130 cars, trucks and buses since the late 1990s.

The Ballard fiasco gives skeptics the right to be, well, skeptical.

So it's no wonder that, since the beginning of this year, GM has been engaged in a massive public relations effort to convince the world that it is serious about technology leadership in general and electric cars in particular.

All this began last January with the unveiling of the Chevrolet Volt concept car at the Detroit auto show. The Volt is a plug-in hybrid, a car designed to run on rechargeable lithium ion batteries, with a small onboard engine for mobile recharging. Range: 55-60 km between charges.

GM, however, needs suppliers to develop the batteries required for electric vehicles, and it isn't yet certain the suppliers will come through — though GM's Lutz says a running prototype of the Volt will be on the road by Easter.

GM is actively mapping out plans to produce a wide range of electric models beyond the Volt, and those plans include showroom-ready fuel cell vehicles.

Meanwhile, GM officials from Lutz down have vowed to launch an affordable Volt in three years or so.

What makes these recent promises different and perhaps even believable is the bigger picture.

In 2007, GM and other auto makers have plenty of motivation to make real moves on the "green" front. Some argue the auto industry has met a perfect storm of events that are serving as the catalyst for change, massive change.

One event is the energy-price spike that has led to surging pump prices. The wars and other skirmishes in the Middle East have also cast a spotlight on the West's reliance on oil supplies from unstable suppliers. And a surge of green consciousness symbolized by former U.S. vice-president Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize and his Oscar for the movie An Inconvenient Truth has clearly taken hold.

All this matters because this storm is affecting consumer behaviour, and at its heart the auto industry is a consumer products industry dependent on motivated buyers. There is little doubt now that many, many consumers are serious about wanting alternatives to the status quo. Big car companies ignore those sentiments at their peril.

"We know that our success in the future is contingent on delivering technology that is meaningful to society," McCormick says. "The whole spirit of the company is driven to do this."

Or to put it more bluntly, in the words of McCormick's colleague Scott Fosgaard, "trust that corporate greed" will get the job done.

GM, to its credit, is devoting significant resources to its advanced powertrain efforts — to electric drive technology and all sorts of other high-tech initiatives. Today, GM is working on 14 new powertrain programs, including the company's first attempt at a new type of gasoline engine it says can deliver significantly better fuel economy without requiring the emissions controls that drive up the cost of diesel engines.

This system, called a homogeneous charge compression ignition or HCCI, promises to be 15-per-cent more fuel efficient by using the compression of fuel and air, rather than a spark, to produce the heat required to power the engine.

The problem here is that HCCI engines tend to knock under heavy loads and burn fuel inefficiently at light loads. HCCI engines perform best when running at a constant speed. That's why one use for HCCI is in model airplane engines. GM, though, sees short-term possibilities for HCCI.

But it is the push for electric powertrains that is at the centre of GM's boldest efforts. Take the new Chevrolet Tahoe/GMC Yukon dual-mode hybrid that's rolling into showrooms. In a way, the Tahoe/Yukon hybrid is an electric vehicle.

It has the first gasoline-electric hybrid system for big trucks and sport utility vehicles. GM says the system will increase fuel efficiency by 20 to 25 per cent over its gas-only counterparts.

But the jewel in the crown of GM's hybrid efforts is the electric plug-in hybrid, the Volt, which GM says will be ready for the road by the end of the decade.

Here the challenge is to create a battery that lasts without overheating, recharges quickly and is small enough and affordable enough to sell on the mass market. No such battery currently exists and GM's rivals, most notably Toyota, publicly say they do not believe one is imminent.

GM's Lutz disagrees and says critics will have egg on their faces come Easter, when a Volt prototype hits the road. Moreover, a few years after the Volt becomes a production car, GM says fuel cell electric cars will become a reality.

Last June, the company announced that it would reassign more than 500 engineers working on fuel cells and fuel-cell-vehicle development from the auto maker's research operation to its powertrain and global engineering divisions. In short, the whole effort is moving from the lab to the factory floor.

"This says, 'Not only have we done it in a lab, we're ready to do it for real,'" said Larry Burns, GM's vice-president for research and development.

The employees, located mostly at GM facilities outside Rochester, N.Y., and Mainz-Kastel, Germany, won't move but will now report to leaders on the manufacturing side of the business. Another 150 workers will continue working on the research side to develop next-generation fuel cell technology.

McCormick and other officials insist that GM is now focusing on getting fuel cells into vehicles and making sure they meet safety and durability requirements.

So GM is promising a 21st-century electric car for the masses. And, if successful, the company stands to reclaim the bragging rights to technological leadership.

Says Lutz: "We lost our reputation for technological leadership and innovation. And we see the Volt as one of the many steps necessary to get it back."