Experience with
Aerotech helped shape Volt
BY CHRISSIE THOMPSON
FREE PRESS AUTO WRITER
Something snapped
in Ed Welburn this summer.
Welburn, who heads
General Motors’ 1,500-person worldwide design staff, had never
driven his breakout design: a 1980s Oldsmobile research car
called the Aerotech, which later set speed and endurance
records. His career took off after he completed the car, leaving
no time to drive old, experimental vehicles.
But this summer, he
walked into a studio in Warren, where designers had posted
photos of
aerodynamic vehicles for inspiration. There was Aerotech,
and it was like, ‘OK, that’s it. I’ve got to drive the car,’”
Welburn said.
The 59-year-old GM
lifer got his chance Friday at GM’s proving grounds in Milford.
He didn’t match the more than 257 m.p.h. A.J. Foyt reached in
1987, which is still the world’s closed-course speed record. A
Corvette pace car limited his top speed to 62 m.p.h. But that
was still fast enough to evoke his exclamation — “Boy, I’ll tell
you, that is a crazy car!” — that crackled over the radio as he
made a sharp turn.
Aerotech has always
been about more than speed for Welburn. He says designing the
car gave him a respect for aerodynamics that resurfaced in the
Volt and has become crucial as GM seeks to boost mileage of
upcoming
cars. And the Aerotech project established engineers as
Welburn’s allies, helping him smooth over some of the common
tension between the artists and the scientists that work on GM’s
cars.
Welburn
learned lesson early
"It's going to have
an Indy car chassis, 1,000
horsepower, and A.J. Foyt's going to drive it. How'd you
like to work on it?"
Welburn was working
on the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in 1985 when Len Casillo,
design boss for Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac, made that pitch
for the Aerotech.
Designers typically
produce several sketches for a car, but Casillo picked the first
idea Welburn, then in his mid-thirties, brought him. The wind
tunnel work wasn't as easy. General Motors' ambitions for the
Aerotech meant it had to have the least amount of drag possible.
The final product had less than half the drag of a typical Indy
race car.
That success
positioned Welburn to lead GM's renewed design focus on
eliminating drag for
better fuel economy. It also meant Welburn, in his first
Aerotech drive on Friday, could watch autumn leaves flow
effortlessly over the Aerotech while he roared down
straight-aways at GM's Milford proving grounds.
The Aerotech has no
spoiler or air flaps -- just an aerodynamic shape born out of
countless adjustments in the wind tunnel. That shape and 1,000
horses combined to give A.J. Foyt record closed-course speeds. A
few years later, in 1992, a four-liter Aurora V8 engine went
into a slightly altered version of the Aerotech, getting 300
horsepower at 6,000 r.p.m. and setting two speed endurance
records: an average 170.761 m.p.h. for 10,000 kilometers (6,214
miles) and 158.386 m.p.h. for 25,000 kilometers (15,534 miles).
The Aurora version
is the car Welburn drove Friday, retrieved from its home at the
GM Heritage Center in Sterling Heights. He hung back from the
pace car GM made him follow, catching up from time to time to
hear the engine's roar. Even at the proving grounds, the car
turned heads, with a construction crew stopping to stare as
Welburn passed.
I wanted to drive
it a lot faster, but ... " Welburn's voice trailed off as he
pointed sheepishly at the pace car driver."
'In the
wind tunnel'
Welburn's 38-year
career at GM has in one sense come full circle. While he has
risen from the young Oldsmobile designer to GM's vice president
of global design, GM is once again emphasizing aerodynamics in
an attempt to
increase fuel economy ahead of stricter government standards
and an anticipated rise in gas prices. That plays to Welburn's
training on the Aerotech.
"To this day,
everything that we're working on, I want to know how the
vehicle's doing in the wind tunnel," he said.
Take the Chevrolet
Volt, due for release in November. When GM put the original
concept vehicle in the wind tunnel, the aerodynamics were so
poor that the vehicle would only have had a 34-mile electric
range, compared with the targeted 40, said Bob Lutz, the
now-retired GM vice chairman.
"It was so bad that
the drag coefficient was better if we put it in backwards," Lutz
said.
So Welburn called
in Max Schenkel, GM's technical fellow for aerodynamics, who had
worked with Welburn on the Aerotech.
"With the Volt, we
had to learn how to trick the air into thinking that it was a
long shape by shaping the tail," Welburn said, noting the
spoiler and the hard edges at the rear corners.
Now, all of
Welburn's design staff is undergoing aerodynamics training led
by Schenkel. Welburn's comfort with working with engineering is
unusual, Schenkel said.
"There's always a
certain amount of tension: 'I designed this thing, and now you
want to change it,' " he said.
Welburn also plays
to his designers' competitive streaks
To motivate his
staff, he often assigns two teams to compete on a vehicle -- a
strategy that produced the current, strong-selling Chevrolet
Camaro and Cadillac SRX. But his experience on Aerotech, where
his on-the-side sketches caught the eye of a design boss and
turned into a dream assignment, informs a different philosophy,
one that spawned the Cadillac CTS coupe:
"I think that every
design team should have a little side project," Welburn said.
Read more:
Aerodynamics comes around again at GM | freep.com | Detroit Free
Press
http://www.freep.com/article/20100926/BUSINESS01/9260542/Aerodynamics-comes-around-again-at-GM#ixzz10oiowSo0 |
