DETROIT–General Motors has entered the record books yet again. It is the first automobile maker to send a truck into earth’s orbit.
Early Christmas Eve, GM launched a 2010 Chevy Avalanche—with a boat in tow—from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. According to our source close to the project, it was a move to convey a message of the car’s dependability and to test the Avalanche’s towing capacity under extreme weather conditions. Tom Wickham, a Communications Manager for six GM manufacturing plants, tweeted “the truck only needed one full tank of gas to make the trek from the earth into orbit. Now that’s some good gas mileage!”
As soon as the news broke, the president of Toyota Motors, the company behind the Prius, was quoted as saying “Oh crap!” while eating dinner with his family for Toyota’s annual Christmas Party last week. “The fact that we sent one of our trucks into orbit should show our buyers that our brand can hold its own under the toughest conditions,” says Susan Docherty, VP of Sales and Marketing for GM. “If this doesn’t prove to people that we have the toughest cars on earth, then nothing will.”
A team of scientists will be monitoring the truck for the next three weeks, but the final test will come January 6th, when the truck is expected to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere without burning up into a million pieces.
