Click on the photo for a high-res gallery of photos from the Ford SMT Lab

Between the Washington, D.C. and Chicago Auto Shows, AutoblogGreen got invited to visit Ford's Sustainable Mobility Test Lab in Dearborn, MI. The SMT lab is the birth place of all the advanced alternative fuel vehicles that Ford is creating in an effort help reduce the automobile's effect on the environment. I met up with Mujeeb Ijaz, who is the manager of Fuel Cell Engineering in the Research and Advanced Engineering department at Ford. Mujeeb gave me a tour around the garage area and rundown on some of the stuff they are working on before we went out for a drive.

In addition to a couple of Focus FCVs, the garage we were in contained two Explorers and the HySeries Drive Edge that was unveiled at the DC Auto Show. The first Explorer we looked at was primarily a packaging and engineering mule. In the world of automotive development, a mule is development vehicle that's based on an existing vehicle and has development parts from new vehicles to test purposes. Many of the spy photos you see published that look like current vehicles that have mutated bodywork are mules. The Explorer mule was being used to test fuel cell and hydrogen storage packaging alternatives. The interior is gutted except for the front seats. The hydrogen storage tank is mounted longitudinally down the center of the vehicle and the fuel cell sits on top of the front electric motor under the hood.



There's lots more - pictures, video and text - after the jump

Click on the image for a huge gallery of high-res images from the reveal and the studio

I'm not sure where to start with the new Ford Airstream concept. This vehicle - a sort of cross between a conversion van, a space capsule and a mirror – was unveiled yesterday at the Detroit Auto Show. This totally tricked-out vehicle concept is powered by a HySeries Drive powertrain (a version of this is also in the Edge prototype that will be unveiled later this month in D.C.). The HySeries Drive is battery-powered, with plug-in capability and has a hydrogen fuel cell as an on-board charger. Ford estimates a combined city/highway gasoline equivalent fuel economy rating of 41 mpg. On all-electric power, the Airstream concept can go 25 miles. Add some hydrogen (ahh, if only it were so easy), and you can go another 280 miles. The fuel cell, made by Ballard, turns on automatically when the battery charge dips below 40 percent. With the on-board charger (110/220 VAC), the battery pack can be refilled at home. Ford says the HySeries Drive is 50 percent smaller and less complex than conventional fuel cell system and should have more than double the lifetime.

The Airstream concept designers added 12 ceremonial rivets to the Airstream concept. Even with our new high-resolution galleries, you couldn't see all of them in the pictures we have so far (eight are near the Ford and Airstream logos on the front and back, and the last four are the centers of the wheels).

The Airstream concept is full of high-tech gadgets, like a 360-degree screen that come down from the ceiling and is viewable from all the seats in the car. Ford says, "Passengers can use the screen to watch DVDs, view the feed from the special camera that's custom-made for the concept vehicle and play vintage video games. Also, the 360-degree screen helps create different moods with ambient settings including a modern lava lamp, virtual fire and ice crystals."

If we had one of these things now, the first thing we're do is figure out is how to operate the passenger seat blogging tools. Yes, there is built-in blogging from the Airstream concept via a Sharp dual-view screen in the center of the instrument panel. Both the driver and front-seat occupant can also see views from the onboard camera. AutoblogGreen has arranged to take the Ford Airstream out for a test ride in the future. Be on the lookout for that, and we'll let you know what it's like to drive one of these things. If everything's hooked up, we'll try to upload a post or two from the vehicle.

Click through the jump for another picture and sorts of information directly from Ford.

[Source: Ford]