General Motors Is The Greatest Automotive Engineering Company In The World. There, I Said It

I was recently told that some folks think The Autopian has it out for General Motors — that we write too many stories about GM failures, and that we therefore have some kind of beef with the company. That couldn’t be any further from the truth; in fact, to combat this silly notion, it’s time for me to write a quick blog about something I’ve been saying for many years: GM is the greatest automotive engineering company on earth. Better than Koenigsegg. Better than Rimac. Better than Tesla. Better than the Germans. The problem is, it’s oftentimes held back by executives and product planners. Here’s what I mean.

It’s really not hard to engineer a great expensive car. Worst case, you can hire out a third party like Lotus or Multimatic or Magna or Continental, and they can put together a sharp-handling product for you. What’s much, much more challenging is engineering a good inexpensive car, which is why it’s hard for me to consider anyone but GM to be the GOAT of the car-engineering world.

The most obvious examples are the various generations of Corvette, especially the latest ones. We’ve probably all read the recent stories about how the $200,000, 1,250 horsepower Corvette ZR1X lapped the Nürburgring in just 6 minutes and 49.275 seconds — nearly 3 seconds quicker than the $320,000 Ford Mustang GTD.

No matter what price class — whether it’s the base $70,000 car or the $200,000 top dog — the Corvette decimates the competition. This has been the story of the Corvette…pretty much since the beginning — go up against a much more expensive competitor (oftentimes from Italy or Germany) and whoop its ass around the race track.

For as long as I can remember, the Corvette has been leaving performance car reviewers with their jaws on the floor. Remember when Top Gear compared the C6 with the Ferrari 575? “This car really is like Robbie Williams. Who could have guessed that behind the ‘Take that’ nonsense, there was a proper musician trying to get out,” Jeremy Clarkson said, referencing the singer Robbie Williams, who broke off from his boy bad to become a true legend. “The Z06 is $60,000 pounds and the Ferrari 575… is 160,000 pounds. And if a martian came to earth, he’d have the devil’s own job explaining why,” he continued.

Then Top Gear gave the car to The Stig, and watched as the American budget-supercar decimated the 575, and even beat out the Ferrari F430, Lamborghini Murcielago, and Pagani Zonda!:

Then, when the C7 came out, Top Gear put it up its base trim, the Stringray, against a Cayman GTS, which put up a time of 1:21.6 on the Top Gear test track, while the Corvette matched the Porsche Carrera GT at 1:19.8.

Yes, you read that right. The base Corvette, which started at around $58,000, put up the same lap time as a $440,000 Porsche with over 150 horsepower more! Sure, the Porsche was 10 years older, but that’s still absurdly impressive.

We can just go down the line with numerous examples of GM dominating far more expensive cars. Perhaps the most mind-blowing, to me, was the Chevy Camaro ZL1.

There’s supposed to be a big gap between a company’s supercar and its muscle car. The supercar, like Dodge’s Viper or Ford’s GT, was the track weapon, while the muscle car, the Challenger or Mustang (respectively), was the straight-line sledgehammer. This was the case with the Camaro and Mustang, too, but then came the ZL1.

I don’t think people realize how mind-blowing the ZL1 was; Road & Track declared it “The Greatest Track Car GM Has Ever Made.” How? That’s a two-ton car! But sure enough; if you look at the the Jalopnik article “Here Is A List Of Cars That The 2017 Camaro ZL1 Beat Around The Nürburgring” from my former colleague Michael Ballaban, you’ll see that 7 minutes 29.6 seconds beats these:

Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 Superleggera

Koenigsegg CCX

Ford Shelby GT350R

Porsche 911 GT2

Mercedes-AMG GT S

McLaren 650S Spider

Jaguar XJ220

Caterham R500 Superlight

Trabant

(That last one is RICH).

In 2017 the Camaro ZL1 1LE achieved an even quicker time of 7 minutes 16.04 seconds, absolutely crushing the M4 GTS, Ferrari 488GTB, and Nissan GT-R, and ending up neck-and-neck with the Lexus LFA. All from a standard Camaro chassis!

There are tons of examples of engineering marvels, as well as just some cool, soulful cars GM has built over the years that were just awesome. Here are a few:

Chevy Avalanche:

Midgates are becoming more of a “thing” since EVs entered the mainstream marketplace, but it was Chevy that popularized the concept with the Avalanche, a truly absurd truck with a single piece body instead of a separate cab and bed, storage bins in the bedsides, coil springs in the back (!), and of course that foldable second row that joined the midgate in turning the bed into an 8-footer. It’s a fantastic truck, and beautifully engineered.

GM EV1:

The GM EV-1 was, in some ways, the first mainstream modern (ish) electric car. I’ll quote myself here:

Just to give a little context for those of you not familiar with the EV1: It was an unbelievably advanced electric car built by General motors between 1996 and 1999, and leased to about 1,100 folks, many of whom were celebrities on the west coast.

[…]

…You’ll see technologies that were unheard of in the 1990s. The 0.19 drag coefficient still beats that of any Tesla; the cast aluminum strut towers (here’s GM’s patent) were innovative back then, and you could argue might have inspired Tesla’s GigaCastings; low rolling resistance tires were really barely a thing a the time; the heat pump that is so important to modern EVs getting decent range in the winter was super advanced, as well, and wasn’t found in even much more modern electric vehicles like the early Tesla Model 3. Add the aluminum space frame construction, hidden antenna, and optics-headlights and GM had something truly state-of-the-art.

It was truly revolutionary, but GM killed it, and though their reasoning was sound (it was expensive), the way the company did it created a PR disaster.

The vehicle was so beloved that, when GM pulled the plug on the egregiously expensive program that, one could argue, was perhaps a bit early given where battery tech was at the time (“I said, ‘Roger, just keep in mind what we have here. We’ve got about a gallon of gasoline worth of energy in those 870 pounds of batteries, and we effectively re- fuel it with a syringe’” is an amazing quote from former president of energy and engine management, Don Runkle, referencing former GM CEO Roger Smith (via Automotive News)), hundreds of people took to the streets

The Hy-Wire:

Check out that GM’s Hy-Wire; here’s what Jason had to say about it:

While hydrogen fuel cells really haven’t caught on, you know what did? GM’s revolutionary skateboard chassis design for EVs. Replace those hydrogen tanks with batteries and you effectively have the platform that all modern EVs – from Volkswagen to Rivian to Ford to Hyundai to Tesla to whomever – use today. And guess what GM did with it?

Jack. Jack feces.

Still, it was innovative.

Cadillac CTS-V Wagon:

556 Horsepower through a six-speed manual transmission, in wagon form? There was nothing cooler in the early 2010s. ‘Nuff said.

The Entire Saturn Brand:

Admittedly, some of Saturn was marketing/product planning/customer service, though the engineering side of things deserves some credit, too. The plastic exterior panels were brilliant, and the affordable, safe chassis tech made for a great value.

The Silverado:

I currently daily-drive a 1989 Chevy K1500 GMT400, with a 350 V8, four-wheel drive, a five-speed transmission, and a 14-bolt rear axle. It gets 14 MPG, but it’s simply a sensational truck, and so is the current Silverado, which blew me away after having driven the last-gen (whose interior I found uncompetitive).

Chevy’s engineers don’t know know how to build trucks; they know how to build the greatest trucks of all time, like the GMT400.

Chevy Volt:

The Chevy Volt wasn’t commercially successful, but it was a well-engineered vehicle featuring a semi-EREV hybrid system that was, at the time, truly innovative. Here’s my breakdown of how it works:

It was a good car, and it was well engineered. A T-shaped battery pack sitting under the rear bench and along the spine of the car was filled with liquid-cooled prismatic lithium-ion battery cells. A charge-port located on the driver’s side fender filled up those cells:

The battery then sends juice to an inverter to convert electricity from DC to AC to power the 111kw (~150 hp) electric motor, which feeds a planetary gear set that’s part of the “Voltec electric drive system.”

This drive unit is exceptionally complex, and actually features a 74 horsepower (55 kW) generator that acts as a secondary electric motor to propel the vehicle.

Here’s a slightly more translucent one version of the above shot:

Here’s a breakdown of how it all works:

GM’s EV Strategy

The Chevy Bolt is no Tesla Model 3, but it was a highly competitive, low-cost EV that offered good range to the layperson on a budget. It did have some “thermal event” issues, which definitely don’t help prove this article’s point, but with the highs come the lows.

And right now, I’d say GM is seeing a high when it comes to its overall EV strategy. Among “Legacy” automakers, it appears to be doing the best, as Matt wrote late last year:

GM’s stated goal this year was to reach profitability in 2024. When that was announced the assumption was that GM’s EV sales would be way higher than they are now, but it sounds like GM is going to pull it off at some point in Q4.

This is a big deal. General Motors has been making electric cars for years and has invested in a platform, Ultium, that can be produced at a large enough scale that the company can start to squeeze out some sort of profit.

With the exception of Tesla, no large non-Chinese automaker I can think of is truly profitable when it comes to electric cars. The investments are too high, the market too competitive, and the scale just isn’t there yet. By doing everything on one platform GM has gotten a little closer.

[…]

Technology is important, and GM’s Ultium isn’t particularly groundbreaking, but having the most efficient platform in the world in terms of range is less important for a company than having one that’s efficient in terms of production. After a lot of work, GM is getting there, helped in large part by its sub-$30k (after incentives) Chevy Equinox EV.

35 grand for an EV with a range over 300 miles? Not bad. To avoid losing your shorts on EVs like everyone else? That’s more than just not bad; that’s amazing.

There Are Tons Of Other Examples

I don’t know that I’d call the current Chevy Trax an engineering Marvel, but it’s a phenomenal value, as Thomas explained in “The Surprisingly Nice 2024 Chevrolet Trax Is $21,495 Of Fundamental Goodness.” (Like I said: It’s a lot harder to build a good car that’s cheap than it is to build a great car that’s expensive).

Then there’s the Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing, the world-beating Escalade, the GMC Envoy XUT (convertible SUV!), the weird convertible pickup Chevy SSR, and that’s just in the last few years. Go back in time, and you’ll find innovation after innovation.

I regret having even started this list, because to be truly exhaustive, it would probably add another 1000 words to this article. But you get the idea.

Mercedes’s Take: Oh, but don’t worry, David, because I’ll add more for you!

General Motors was once a transportation powerhouse that Chrysler and Ford simply could not even come close to matching. David has told you why GM’s automotive engineering is some of the greatest on the planet, and that’s true. But rewind your clocks back several decades, and the GM Mark of Excellence could also be found on market-dominating buses, best-selling diesel engines, and the most popular diesel-electric locomotives.

General Motors got into buses through its acquisition of the Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company in 1925. Yellow Coach was the bus arm of the Yellow Cab Company, which was run by John D. Hertz, yes, of the Hertz rental car company fame! Yellow Coach would later forge one of the greatest advancements in bus design: the monocoque structure. Until about the 1930s, buses were mostly body-on-frame designs. These buses, which usually rode on existing truck chassis, rode high off of the ground and featured rough rides. The 1936 Model 719 highway bus was a revolution, as it featured a transversely-mounted diesel engine in the rear and an aluminum monocoque. Yellow probably didn’t know it back then, but this would become the blueprint for most coach buses and transit buses ever since.

General Motors believed in Yellow so much that it fully absorbed the company into the GMC Truck and Coach Division. GMC would go on to create history’s greatest and most dominating American buses in the New Look and the RTS-II transit buses, as well as highway icons like the Scenicruiser and the “Buffalo” bus. Just how good were GM’s buses? From the period of 1930 to the 1970s, General Motors was America’s number one seller of buses. America’s cities and bus fleets scooped up GM models by the tens of thousands, effectively forcing competition like Flxible and Eagle to fight for second place at best.

It was a similar story when it came to the might of GM in diesel development and locomotive development. In 1930, General Motors purchased the Electro Motive Corporation and the Winton Engine Company. General Motors had invested tons of resources into perfecting the diesel engine and filled its halls with some of the most brilliant engineers of the era. This division, which would be later called the General Motors Electro-Motive Division (EMD), would build some of the most iconic and most powerful diesel-electric locomotives that the world has ever seen.

By 1953, GM’s EMD held an impressive 73 percent of America’s locomotive market. In a distant second place was the American Locomotive Company (Alco), which held a mere 15 percent of the market. Even when General Electric became a major locomotive competitor and moved into second place in the 1960s, GM EMD still managed to control 70 percent of the market.

Meanwhile, GM’s investment in diesel also paid off in the form of the Detroit Diesel Engine Division. GM’s Detroit Diesel two-cycle diesels dominated America’s highways for decades in everything from fire engines to legendary Class 8 semi-trucks. One of the best-selling Class 8 engines of all time is the Detroit Diesel Series 60, a straight-six known for its good power, repairability, and longevity that could easily pull loads for well over a million miles. GM also used to build big trucks like the innovative ‘Cracker Box’ that I recently wrote about, and the GMC TopKick that formed the base of U-Haul’s largest trucks and the base of countless school buses for decades.

Sadly, General Motors has given up on all of these paths. General Motors sold off its bus operations in 1987, sold off the Electro-Motive Division in 2005, and GM relinquished majority control of Detroit Diesel in 1988 before later pulling entirely out.

 

Jason’s Take: Despite what people seem to say, I respect the hell out of GM. They’re the only company to build a car that drove beyond Earth!

I know it seems like I’m always picking on some embarrassing GM act of half-assery or absurd penny-pinching, or just general crappiness, but the truth is when they have to, GM can out-engineer almost any entity on the planet. When NASA needed a car, a literal, human-driven automobile that was capable of being driven on the Moon, it was GM that stepped up and designed the first motorized ground vehicle in all of human history ever to drive off the surface of the Earth.

The more you think about it, the more incredible it is: no one had ever done this before, and very little of GM’s previous automotive experience would really apply. Not even things like rubber tires could be used; thermal issues demanded that an entirely new method of making tires had to be found. They had to start from scratch, figuring out how to make a viable, useful vehicle that could operate in incredible temperature extremes, a near vacuum, on rough surfaces, since you really can’t get more off-road than the freaking moon, and had to be able to fold up like origami.

Seriously, look at this:

That folding system is an engineering marvel on its own!

The Lunar Rover GM developed was an absolute triumph, and the three that were built for Apollos 15, 16, and 17 all worked without a hitch. Sure, I may make fun of how Vegas would rust on the showroom floor, but that doesn’t change the fact that GM engineered a car that was shot into space and then drove on the moon the first try.

Oh, and since we’re talking about GM triumphs, I feel like we have to mention turbocharging, right? Especially because it involves my favorite GM car, the Corvair.

The first mass-market turbocharged cars were from GM, way back in 1962, the Oldsmobile Jetfire and the Corvair Monza. Just to put things in perspective, a 1965 Corvair Monza’s turbocharged flat-six air-cooled engine made 180 hp; compare that to another small sporty coupé or convertible that made 180 hp and you’d be looking at a 1998 Audi TT – 33 years later. Sure, maybe GM didn’t explore turbocharging as much as they could, but they were way, way ahead of everyone else.

With That Out Of The Way, We’re Going To Keep Telling Fascinating GM (And Other Automaker) Fail Stories

GM is fully capable of stepping on its own ass by taking shortcuts and starting things that it doesn’t fully see through; in fact, Jason wrote about this in “Here Are Five Times GM Developed Some Pioneering And Important Innovation Only To Fumble It And Have To Catch Up Later Like A Chump.”

This ruffled some feathers, as have a number of our GM Hit or Miss and Unholy Fails articles like these:

The 2004 Chevrolet Malibu Is The Worst Of 2000s GM Distilled Into One Car: GM Hit Or Miss

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GM Learned Nothing From The Cimarron By Selling A $76,000 Chevy Volt With A Cadillac Badge: Unholy Fails

See more

Here’s How The Cadillac Catera Got Lost In Translation: GM Hit Or Miss

See more

The truth is that most of our GM stories have been positive, so there’s definitely a bit of hypersensitivity. Just thought I’d write this article to let you all know that, in my mind, GM is the GOAT of automotive engineering. Product planning/bean counting? No, the new Blazer is a huge disappointment and leaving money on the table for the Bronco and Wrangler, the diesel Equinox was the dumbest idea ever, the Buick Cascada was doomed the day it hit our shores, Mary Barra saying she was going to skip hybrids because EVs are inevitable was silly, and I could go on and on the number of foolish moves GM has made throughout the years.

But they weren’t the moves of the engineers. When it comes to engineering, GM is — at least in my view — at the top of the automotive food chain. And has been for some time.