Moon Off-Roading In The Wild GM Electric Car That Makes Hummer EV Look Normal

“One of the other firsts that we’ve done here at General Motors is we put the first lunar rover on the Moon,” said Brent Deep, chief developmental engineer for the joint program between GM and Lockheed Martin. “We’re proud to be able to supply the first rover […] It’s very humbling for me to be a part of [the rover’s history], and to look at what [the Lunar Roving Vehicle engineers] did back in the Sixties to develop that rover for a really unknown environment.”

Fast-forward to today, GM and Lockheed Martin are gunning for the big contract with NASA to build the Lunar Terrain Vehicle. Unlike the partnership between the General and Boeing, which was more to determine if driving on the Moon was even possible, the new partnership takes the knowledge gained from the LRV as part of the foundation in building a ride for the long-term. After all, the main mission of the Artemis program is to establish a base of operations on the Moon’s South Pole, the first step in the push to colonization of the Solar System and beyond, with Mars as the next step.

Of course, it’s going to take a lot to get there from here. Luckily for GM and Lockheed Martin, the key piece of the puzzle is already being drip-fed into showrooms. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here; we’ve got a simulator to check out first.