GM’s newest partnership is so crazy it just might work.

General Motors (GM) has suddenly become the zaniest company in the world. As new CEO Fritz Henderson preps the 100-year-old firm for a Mexican quickie bankruptcy, the General rolls into the New York Auto Show with a Skunk Works electric vehicle-code-named Project P.U.M.A (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility)-developed in secret with ... wait for it ... Dean Kamen.

Ah, Dean Kamen. Mad scientist/inventor, one-man Silicon Valley for engineering, and Segway imagineer operating from his idiosyncratic New Hampshire bat cave redoubt. Who can forget the messianic hype that preceded the unveiling of his original Segway Personal Transporter, back in 2001? Never had the vast promise of futuristic technology to improve our lives seemed, so, well, dorky.

In other words, Kamen is an easy target. Too easy, in fact, because his overall ideology is less about specific contraptions and more about a complex, transformative vision of human progress. Despite the prevailing view that it's the poster child for antiquated industrial thinking, GM has quietly nurtured a bit of the same spirit. The entire company knows it blew it with the EV1-but it still built the innovative electric car. And even as GM endured a slow bleed toward bankruptcy, it's hung in there with its Volt plug-in hybrid. Remember that in the 1990s and early 2000s, GM lived large on truck and SUV profits. But with those days quite possibly gone for good, it's actively seeking ways to refashion its destiny.

P.U.M.A is a good example. In the advanced mobility community, there have been stirrings for a few years now that Kamen was up to something. It makes perfect sense that the something was a multi-passenger extension of the Segway, based on the same gyroscopic two-wheeled balancing technology but capable of traveling greater distances at greater speeds. P.U.M.A can do 35 miles at 35 mph before it exhausts its battery. In Segway-world, this means that it can achieve the perfect day-trip excursion: a trip from Paris, evidently the ideal Segway Transporter environment, to Versailles. Of course, there are no emissions, so the P.U.M.A has green cred galore.

P.U.M.A looks like a self-propelled rickshaw, and while the prototype that was unveiled today has an open-sided appearance, the production model will be enclosed. It's easy to make fun of (just like the Segway Transporter, despite the fact that the Transporter is still around and currently available in two models), but the strangeness factor is ratcheted up by the involvement of GM. It's unclear what GM brought to the table, and even less obvious how GM and Segway might eventually share profits, if there ever are any. More likely GM saw an opportunity to gain some media buzz and claim some high ground for its various networked-vehicle technologies, which point toward an era when cars will be able to effectively drive themselves. Additionally, GM has always been weak with cosmopolitan types who get frothy over Smart cars and other downsized, small-carbon-footprint forms of automobility. (It's worth noting that GM has flirted with Segway in the past, through concept-car development and its Opel European brand.) In Obama's America, GM needs to work on its blue-state PR.

Based on GM's New York Auto Show press release, it sounds like GM's contribution to the project was collision-avoidance technology, which allows P.U.M.A. to "sense" its surroundings. In many respects, P.U.M.A is a prototype for the autonomous, intelligent vehicles that were comprehensively envisioned in the 2002 film Minority Report. One can also picture GM contributing manufacturing capacity to a future P.U.M.A fleet, as well as assisting Segway in dealing with whatever safety and regulatory hurdles the vehicle may face.