While its operational executives are busy wrangling money from Congress and keeping their company afloat, GM's VP of Research & Development, Larry Burns, is continuing work towards reinventing the automobile.

After 100 years of the combustion engine, Burns says its time for a change. In the embedded video below, Burns discusses the future of the automobile and the path being paved to get there.  

"If we were going to reinvent the automobile today, instead of 100 years ago, knowing what we know about the issues associate with our product, and about the technologies that exist today, what would we do?" asked Burns.

The answer was to embark on designing an electro-chemical engine - a fuel cell - run by hydrogen. And Burns does a nice job in the video describing the various prototype cars GM is putting out.

Much more interesting in the presentation was the discussion of the hurdles and strategies involved in making a hydrogen fuel cell a reality, those being a need for 12,000 hydrogen fueling stations nationwide and a means of generating hydrogen for fuel use.

According to Burns, those 12,000 hydrogen fuel cell stations would cost $1 million each, or $12 billion total - a large number until compared with the hundreds of billions of federal bailout money being spent every month at present. In reality, $12 billion seems a small price to pay for removing ourselves from an oil economy and untangling our Middle East interests. And given we have the ability to produce hydrogen via coal, natural gas, wind, and solar power, decisions about how to generate the hydrogen can be left to the communities producing the energy source.

Now, while not common knowledge, this information is hardly groundbreaking. What might be groundbreaking is the potential to use our futuristic fuel cell vehicles to power our homes.

"I'm very intrigued by the fact that our cars and trucks sit idle 90 percent of the time...They are usually parked within 100 feet of the people that own them," said Burns. "Now if you take the power generating capabilities of the automobile and compare that to the national grid, it turns out that the power in four percent of the automobiles equals that of the electric grid of the U.S. That's a huge mobile power-generating capability. And hydrogen fuel cells actually give us that opportunity to use our cars and trucks when they are parked to generate electricity for the grid."

Maybe the new American dream is a big house and two-car garage powered by the vehicles in it.