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While a new generation took to the iPod and Blackberry as quickly as their great grandparents had the first automobiles, energy and the environment continued to make headlines as a new century dawned.

Facing new challenges on all fronts, General Motors intensified its focus on innovation to meet changing customer preferences and economic and societal demands.

Under a global strategy of energy diversity, the GM family of brands offered customers everywhere a broad choice of propulsion systems, ranging from more fuel-efficient gasoline engines to renewable biofuels and hybrids.

At the same time, GM was a leader in fuel cell research and development, building and testing prototype vehicles around the world that consumed no petroleum and emitted nothing to the atmosphere but clean water.

Milestones included the Precept concept car, the first drivable vehicle to achieve the fuel efficiency equivalent of 80 miles per gallon of gasoline; the HydroGen1 fuel cell vehicle, which set 11 separate endurance records; the AUTOnomy concept vehicle, the first vehicle to combine fuel cell propulsion with "direct-by-wire" technology to allow steering, braking, and other vehicle systems to be controlled electronically rather than mechanically; and the Chevrolet Volt concept, incorporating new design and materials technologies as well as a radically new rechargeable drive system allowing the vehicle to run on either electricity, gasoline, E85, or biodiesel fuel.

GM also introduced the industry’s first hybrid pickup truck, the first hybrid propulsion system for urban buses, and the largest fleet of FlexFuel vehicles, capable of running on either gasoline or E85 fuel, a mixture of eighty-five percent renewable ethanol and fifteen percent gasoline.

With the goal of removing the automobile itself from the energy and environmental equation, innovation and change remained at the core of the GM team’s identity, just as they had a hundred years before.

Video Courtesy of General Motors Archive

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