GM Team Competes for Moon Buggy Contract – Kelley Blue Book
General Motors has a lot of new cars in development. A sleek electric compact luxury SUV. A compact pickup to rival the Ford Maverick. A $300,000 super-luxury sedan meant to help Cadillac recover the lost glory of its golden era when it rivaled Rolls Royce.
But my favorite is the one we know they’ll never let a Kelley Blue Book journalist test. It’s a standard-cab, short-bed pickup with unpoppable wire wheels that can drive autonomously to haul cargo without a human inside. You might need that on the moon.
GM is still in the race to build the next moon rover.
One Automaker Among the Final Three
Last week, NASA announced three finalists for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle, part of the Artemis program meant to return astronauts to the moon by 2030.
The GM/Lockheed entry was one of three that won the right to proceed to the next design phase, along with teams from Intuitive Machines and Venturi Astrolab. NASA will choose one to build a prototype a year from now.
The Research Will Likely Pay off on Earth
GM’s place in the running is fitting. The company built the only vehicle ever to carry humans on the moon, the 1969 GM/Boeing Lunar Roving Vehicle.
Even if GM should lose, the effort to research its successor likely won’t be wasted. GM’s proposal uses airless tires like the design GM and Michelin hope to sell on Earth by 2024. Perhaps more importantly, the GM vehicle is electric and extremely lightweight.
Today’s EVs are extremely heavy – a problem for safety. That weight also limits their range. Every effort to research lighter EVs could lead to longer-range EVs or EVs that use smaller batteries and, thus, fewer mined elements.
Weight doesn’t work well in space flight. Every pound you need to lift out of Earth’s gravity requires more fuel, which means scientists can’t lift something else that is useful.
All the work GM does learning to lighten the LTV should help lighten future EVs here on Earth.
And car lovers would have loved to see another GM logo on the moon.
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