Yeah, International/Navistar went into bankrupcy at around this time. They did have a prototype for a "Scout III" though but it never made it into production:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...4/scoutiii.htm

However the Scout was a really crude vehcile (I've owned two), barely above a Wrangler in appointments. The SUV Boom was never really about these kinds of off-roaders, more wagons for suburban moms.

 

really so how does it move while its recharging?. obviously one of two things happen the ice just provides enough electricity to run the electric motors(doesnt seem practical a lots of wasted energy) or it provides enough energy to recharge the motors and run the car at the same time.

 

As of now, there are no plans to recycle lithium batteries. Presumably they'll need to be drained of the electrolyte (some rather nasty organic solvents are used to dissolve the lithium salts), and then the rest of the cell might just get tossed. This assumes that the chemistry doesn't contain cobalt (current consumer cells use a significant amount of cobalt, but it's viewed as being prohibitively expensive for automotive applications).

NiMH batteries are indeed recycled today, but supposedly the recovered nickel ends up going to the stainless steel industry.

Er, that's about half-right. From what GM has publicly shown, the ICE will kick in once the pack reaches 30% state-of-charge (SOC). At this point, the electricity from the generation will get split - some will end up going to the traction motor, and some will flow into the pack during periods of light acceleration to bring it back up to 40% SOC (alternatively, during heavy acceleration, the pack will supply power to the traction motor, as the generation alone isn't sufficient to provide the necessary peak accelerations required by certain drive cycles). This is what's referred to as "charge sustaining" mode, and there will be some fairly heavy (and frequent) charging and discharging of the pack in this mode of operation.

So, indeed, the ICE isn't mechanically connected to the drive wheels, but it's not just there to act as a generator. Complex stuff, indeed, and I'm somewhat glad that I don't have to calibrate the system

 

Fact remains, that if they would've been making Pick-Ups, TravelAlls(like Suburbans) and Scouts, they would've had a fairly large market share, as they're vehicles were popular, (and becoming popular) tough and strong...only thing hurt them was the "NIPPON" steel that was rusty before assembly, and a lot of it was used, stored outside and rust painted over.
Scout (II) remains a very competitive rock crawling platform today, tough simple and reliable.

I find it laughable that everytime someone hints of foul play, they're immediately quack and tin hat wearing "conspiracy theorists"...
Shredding cars, I guess, is a normal everyday occurance, as well as NOT selling them...oh well.

(...tilts tin hat..) I guess noone better mention how we've been told for 20 years that Hydrogen is 10-12 years off...