2007 Detroit: Ford Airstream Concept Unveiling Video

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Watch the unveiling of the Ford Airstream concept at the 2007 Detroit Auto Show with commentary by F...

Transcript

00:00 [Music]

00:15 At the 2007 North American International Auto Show, Ford helped Airstream celebrate 75 years

00:20 in business with an Airstream concept.

00:22 We caught up with Freeman Thomas, one of the chief designers on the project, to take a

00:26 look around.

00:28 This is part of America's journey, and that's why the code name of this vehicle was called

00:32 American Journey.

00:34 Part of it also was to travel with this vehicle across our great nation and to be able to

00:39 park and be able to enjoy the great, you know, have a front seat view, a vista view of our

00:44 national parks or the Pacific Ocean or, you know, what have you.

00:48 Let's hop in and take a look at some of the neat features.

00:50 I mean, start off telling me about this interesting 360 degree plasma display here.

00:55 Well, this is a unique development.

00:57 We said, okay, now we have this space and we can do a lot of different things with it.

01:01 But what we want to do is do a virtual lava lamp or have a virtual fire or have a virtual

01:06 kind of a aquarium.

01:08 You can also play games on this.

01:10 Pong and Asteroids, right?

01:11 Some good retro games.

01:13 Yeah, yeah.

01:14 And, but the thing is, it's almost hypnotic.

01:16 So when you're back here and you're listening to your music and you're just relaxing in

01:20 this space.

01:21 And also, you know, I want to show you the back door system.

01:24 It's a three part system.

01:25 It's got a normal hatch system and then it has these kind of barn doors that slide open.

01:29 It gives you complete access in and out of the vehicle.

01:32 The minivan wars of the nineties told us you got to have a door on both sides.

01:36 We've only got one door here.

01:37 You've got some other concepts for this type of space also, right?

01:40 Yeah.

01:41 What we've done is instead of having one small sliding door or two small sliding doors, we

01:46 said let's open up the whole side of the vehicle.

01:48 So we have incredible access to it, but also it's really a wonderful window.

01:53 The windows were inspired from Bert Rutan's space plane.

01:57 And it's really about looking out into your environment, not looking through pragmatic

02:02 windows.

02:03 We really think that the minivan is dead.

02:06 And what this vehicle is really showing is the future of the crossover vehicle.

02:10 It's showing that we need to have aspiration to what we drive, that we have value.

02:15 It's not a pragmatic, you know, appliance, but rather it's a lifestyle.

02:21 As cool as the styling and the interior of the Airstream are, underneath the floor is

02:25 an even more interesting technical story.

02:27 Ford is showing a hydrogen fuel cell plug-in hybrid.

02:31 So what we have here is a large 5,000 PSI hydrogen tank running down the middle with

02:37 a fuel cell on one side and a lithium ion battery pack on the other.

02:40 The idea is that you would plug in the battery pack at home overnight, and that would give

02:44 you about a 25 mile range before it gets down to 40% of its charge, at which point the fuel

02:49 cell kicks in and recharges some more so that you get another 200 miles.

02:54 So your 4.5 kilograms of hydrogen give you 225 miles of range.

02:58 [Music]

03:05 you

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