C'est tres interessant, non? Speaking to the Chinese with a French accent.(News)

Byline: Kevin A. Wilson

** Looks French, doesn't it? Like something designed by people who grew up playing in streets full of Citroen 2CVs and Renault 4s and defined that as normal. Don't worry, though, the Michelin Hy-Light won't be competing with Smart for microcar-loving Americans' hearts next year.

"We have no intention of going into the business of making cars at all,'' says Edouard Michelin, explaining his company's creation of the Hy-Light concept car. "But we do have some ideas we'd like to put forward.''

To explore those ideas, we set out on a little ride-and-drive of this concept car at the Shanghai F1 circuit and its surrounding roads, some of which will serve as a proving ground for China's auto manufacturers in the near future.

Hy-Light is an alloy-bodied, lightweight hydrogen fuel-cell electric hybrid that stores excess electricity in a pair of super-capaci- tors onboard for extra power when you need it. Like the small capacitors that fire your camera's flash, these can deliver a burst of energy quicker than can batteries, giving the little four-seat, 1900-pound car a mid-range accelerative punch that feels much stronger than its maker's claim of 0 to 60 mph in 12 seconds.

Many cars at Bibendum are such slugs that a 12-second car feels fast by comparison. But once the Hy-Light is up to 30 mph or so, flooring the accelerator is a neck-snapper, and you can get 14 to 20 seconds of that before the capacitors need recharging-kind of like a Champ Car push-to-pass button for the clean, green set. It also corners at 1.0 g, so preservation of momentum is not a problem. It maxes out at 130 km/h (80 mph), a speed cap imposed to preserve driving range rather than by physical restraints.

Michelin's commercial inter-est is at all four corners, where Hy-Light employs the Michelin Active Wheel displayed at this fall's Paris show. Each front wheel unit incorporates a drive motor, and all four ...