Up Close and Personal with SAIC's Yez Concept Car

(page 6 of 6)

Back to the YEZ

That's why the YEZ is so important — it is the first SAIC concept we've seen and it sets the agenda.

Four concept vehicles were constructed for the expo — one lives permanently at the Chinese pavilion, one sits downstairs at the General Motors China SAIC pavilion, and two have shared live performance duties for ten minutes ever half an hour every day since May 1.

They don't actually photosynthesise but they are electric and SAIc let me have a short toodle around the confined back stage area of the pavilion - they have apparently run like clockwork since they were built, with the lightweight racecar shape offering ten hours of driving per charge.

The idea behind the YeZ Concept is that it will photosynthesize, absorbing carbon dioxide from surrounding air and emitting oxygen back into the atmosphere.

Among the many futuristic aspects of the YeZ (Chinese for "leaf" as Nissan already uses the name for a clever green concept that is heading for production) is a roof that incorporates solar panels and wheels that incorporate small wind turbines to harvest energy from the turbulence and windflow while driving.

Artificial photosynthesis has proven elusive to date, but there's every indication it will be a commercial reality within two decades.

Strangely, in the original write-up of the Yez a few months ago, we noted that although photosynthesis, solar and wind power were likely to be far more viable twenty years from now, we didn't share SAIC's optimism that the car would "work during both sunny and overcast days", particularly in beautiful not-so-sunny Shanghai where I've been for the last month and only glimpsed the sun a few times.

But spending a fair amount of time at the SAIC-General Motors Pavilion and in a specialist seminar entitled "Connecting the Virtual Superhighway" allowed me to see quite a few different presentations on future plans for the companies and the limited view presented of the Yez in the earlier press releases is actually far broader than has been previously disclosed.

The Yez could quite possible live in your apartment with you. This screen shot from one of the featured movies on the SAIC-GM stand shows a Yez owner, who lives in a high-rise apartment, walk to the edge of his apartment, step into his Yez and begin descending to the road below.

Another glimpse of the Yez from one of the presentations shows the Yez being charged in a parking station, so SAIC obviously has more in store for keeping the Yez full of beans than just solar, photosynthesis and wind power, than it has shared with us at this point in time.

Like many other vehicles which collect energy from the environment, the Yez is intended to become another node on the electricity grid and share its energy for other purposes too — seemingly by the same interface.

There were other glimpses of the Yez' functionality too throughout the displays, movies and live shows which made it seem so much more than we'd previously been made aware of.

The biggest aspect of the Yez which has not been made public just yet are plans to include it in the networked vehicle concept, just as the EN-V is envisioned — this means it will have sensors and GPS functionality and will be capable of running in autonomous mode, of platooning with other cars, of driving you home if you've had too much to drink, or driving your children to school, or your elderly grandmother to the shops, or going and picking up the babysitter so you can have a night on the town. It has clearly been envisioned as an autonomous vehicle from the outset, just like the EN-V. It is all part of the ecosystem being envisioned for China by its biggest car companies — which are majority owned by the Chinese Government.

It means it won't have accidents, and . . . watch the site for the General Motors China EN-V video which we're producing — it should be up by the end of July and it's an absolute ripper and it fully explains General Motors vision for a networked future on the roads and it'll give a great deal more idea of the functionality of the EN-V and indeed, the Yez, as they all come from the same company.

The company that will likely one day soon, be the biggest automaker in the world.

SAIC

Provided by Gizmag.com—ideas, innovation, invention

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.