GM touts green, driverless cars

General Motor's (GM) chief executive Rick Wagoner told delegates at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas yesterday that driverless cars capable of limiting congestion and carbon emissions will be a reality within a decade or less.

Delivering the first CES keynote by an automotive producer, Wagoner said that advances in the automatic control of vehicles are bearing fruit, and unveiled a prototype Chevy Tahoe being developed by his company.

Such automated driving systems will also communicate with each other, according to Wagoner, so that if one has to break sharply the cars behind will slow down automatically, helping to limit traffic congestion.

He said that GM planned to test driverless cars by 2015 and have them in production by 2018.

Wagoner also unveiled the Chevy Provoq, GM's latest green concept car which uses a hydrogen fuel cell, a solar cell roof and lithium batteries for power. The zero emission car can do 0-60 in 8.5 seconds and run for 300 miles on a tank of hydrogen, the company claims.

Speaking to Reuters' news agency, Cadillac general manager Jim Taylor said that the Provoq and GM's plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt, which the company plans to launch in 2010, would help the company challenge Toyota's dominance of the burgeoning green car market.

In related news, Ford is reportedly poised to unveil its new EcoBoost engine at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit later this month.

The company claims the new direct injection engine, which works by injecting fuel into each cylinder in small precise amounts, can deliver up to 20 per cent improvements in fuel economy and a 15 per cent reduction in carbon emissions compared to conventional internal combustion engines.