posted 04-03-2005 02:25 PM         

If there has been one vehicle that has left audiences mesmerized at this year’s auto shows so far, it has to be the Jeep® Hurricane.

The concept vehicle burst onto the stage at the Detroit auto show in January, came to an abrupt halt in front of a couple of thousand onlookers and then sat in one place spinning in circles to the left and then to the right without leaving the spot. The Hurricane, which has since been -featured on a variety of national and local television shows and is the talk of a number of Jeep vehicle-enthusiast Web sites, is a testament to Chrysler Group ingenuity.

The vehicle, which looks like a small monster truck, features not one, but two 5.7-liter V-8 HEMI® engines—one in the front and the other in the rear—that can produce nearly 700 horsepower, which is more horses than say four or five -average cars combined. The vehicle also features four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering, which allows the Hurricane the ability to spin in one spot or to practically move sideways.

Doug Quigley (right), Senior Manager—Concept Vehicle Engineering, led the team of Stephen Lim (left) and Aaron Pizzuti (center) that developed the Jeep® Hurricane with its unique and extreme capabilities.

Right after the 2004 Detroit auto show, Chrysler Group President and CEO Dieter Zetsche pulled a couple of designers and engineers aside and told the team he wanted them to build the “ultimate” Jeep vehicle for the 2005 Detroit auto show. Designers and engineers are generally given more than a year to design and build a concept vehicle for various auto shows. Zetsche’s request gave them less than a year to produce a working model of not just any vehicle, but of an extreme vehicle.

Doug Quigley, Senior Manager—Concept Vehicle Engineering, pulled a team together that included his boss, Bob Smyczynski; engineer Stephen Lim; and designer Aaron Pizzuti. The group began brainstorming immediately and then began listing all the things they wanted the vehicle to do.

If anything served as an inspiration for the Hurricane it would have been the lunar rover, the dune buggy-like vehicle that astronauts used to travel the rugged terrain of the moon back in the early 1970s, Quigley said. The group also decided that the vehicle would have to match or exceed all the requirements of the Trail Rated™ rating system for off-road vehicles.

“The big thing here was that it would be a fully functioning vehicle,” Quigley said. “It had to be able to go anywhere off-road and plow through just about everything with ease.”

Quigley said the group delivered their ideas to Zetsche by mid-February last year, and he approved the project. They called the vehicle the GP 247 because it had two 4.7-liter V-8 engines, and the term GP linked back to the “general purpose” designation of the original Jeep vehicle in 1940.

Working with two fabricating specialists in California, Metalcrafters Inc. and MillenWorks, the team produced their first working vehicle last summer. To test the vehicle’s capabilities, the team took the Hurricane out into a rugged mountainous area north of Los Angeles and put it to the test. It worked.

“I knew it would work the moment we started up both engines while it was still on jack stands and then went through all of the steering options,” designer Pizzuti said. “We put tires on it, let it down and then drove it around the inside of the garage. It worked, and man, that makes you feel good.”

The Hurricane features a turn radius of absolutely zero, thanks to its “skid steer” capability and “toe steer” that gives it the ability to turn both front and rear tires inward. In addition, the vehicle features two modes of automated four-wheel steering. The first is a traditional steering with the rear tires turning in the opposite direction of the front to reduce the turning circle. The second mode allows the vehicle to turn all four wheels in the same direction for nimble “crab steering,” allowing the vehicle to move almost sideways without changing the direction the vehicle is pointing.

To get the Hurricane’s two engines and two transmissions to work required the driveshafts from the two HEMI engines to meet in the middle of the vehicle in what the engineers call the “central case.” The “central case” basically is a big transfer case, which can be controlled to provide the desired driving mode. Several patent applications are pending in connection with the central case and the vehicle’s steering controls.

Because the driveshafts are turning in opposite directions the engineers came up with a series of special gears in the central case that ultimately end up with both engines powering a single driveshaft in one direction. At this point, the single driveshaft delivers power to a “transfer case” on each side of the vehicle. From each of these transfer cases there is a driveshaft going to the front wheel and one to the rear wheel on each side of the vehicle.

“It’s a Jeep brand vehicle and a true expression of what the brand is all about,” Pizzuti said of the Hurricane. “It serves as an icon of being able to go anywhere and do anything, and it isn’t just another cookie-cutter design.”

Power is delivered to all four wheels of the Jeep® Hurricane through a central transfer case, and then through split axles on each side of the vehicle.

The two HEMI® engines, one in the front and one in the rear, help deliver nearly 700 horsepower to all four wheels, each of which can be turned inward or outward.