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All members of the General Motors family: Chevrolet Colorado ZR2, the US Army’s infantry shuttle from GM Defense, and truck racer Chad Hall’s competitor ZR2. Photo courtesy of GM Defense.
At the US Army’s AUSA 2021, GM Defense demonstrated two prototype variants of the infantry shuttle (ISV): the heavy artillery aircraft carrier concept and the all-electric military concept. Both are examples of how GM Defense can use the common foundation of Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 trucks for ISVs and create new specialized vehicles.
In a Q&A with Paul Beaker, chief engineer and director of GM's Defense Advanced Product Development Department, we discussed how the company chose its technology and shared design concepts, manufacturing processes and components with GM to provide solutions for its defense and government customers .
Breaking Defense: How does GM Defense decide which advanced GM technologies to use to support defense and government applications?
Paul Beaker, General Motors Defense Senior Product Development Chief Engineer and Director.
Beaker: We believe that GM Defense’s competitive advantage is to use our parent company’s commercial technologies and adjust them to meet military requirements so that we can expand to any level of production.
At GM Defense, we always pay attention to our customers. In everything we do, this focus is always the top priority. Ensuring that we can understand the requirements of our customers to provide excellent products is inherent to our culture and employees.
We make full use of customer participation, such as immersive events, industry days and conferences such as AUSA 2021, to understand our customers and shape our products to meet their needs. These important touch points enable us to better understand the pain points of our customers and propose solutions based on commercial off-the-shelf technologies, adjusted mature technologies or customized products.
Infantry Squad Vehicle is a great example of how we listened and adjusted our products during the soldier touchpoint to create the number one ranked vehicle during testing. For ISVs, we used the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 architecture to launch 90% of commercial off-the-shelf vehicles.
We chose Chevy Colorado because of its size and off-road performance. We can provide the Army with what they need in terms of size—the ISV can transport 9 soldiers—and the weight of the vehicle. It is light enough to be hoisted by a Black Hawk helicopter, and compact enough to be loaded into Chinook. Therefore, Chevrolet Colorado is a good example of how we can make adjustments from a business perspective. Thanks in part to our ability to utilize commercial components, we were able to deliver the first ISV to our US Army customers in just 120 days after awarding the contract.
Breaking Defense: How did you strengthen the platform. In addition to the propulsion system, what else does the platform include?
Beaker: We adopted a basic body frame rolling chassis, and then took advantage of the work done by GM Motorsports. We finally carried out 11 chassis upgrades from the off-road racing product portfolio and integrated them into the Chevrolet Colorado chassis to enhance its off-road capabilities.
The entire suspension and transmission system upgrades include Multimatic dynamic suspension spool valve shock absorbers, ball spline half shafts, jounce shock absorbers and large-angle ball joints.
The chassis settings were adjusted and verified by our Chevrolet high-performance off-road engineer and legendary truck racer Chad Hall. It has more than 10,000 miles of off-road racing and a GM desert proving ground.
Breaking Defense: How does GM Defense’s approach differ from those of other tactical vehicle manufacturers, as they have also been building platforms for decades. Why is your platform different or better than theirs?
Beaker: A few things. First, we have a platform. We know what it can do, we know its capabilities, and we know the engineering behind it. Therefore, it is easy for us to enter and deal with other parts of the vehicle integration because we are very familiar with it. Because we can use existing platforms, we can move quickly. As I mentioned, we were able to deliver the first ISV to our Army customers 120 days after awarding the contract.
We also developed an all-electric military concept vehicle from concept to completion within 90 days, and developed the ISV heavy artillery aircraft carrier within 8 weeks from concept to completion. We go fast. These are examples of how we can quickly provide customers with potential solutions through the use of business-derived models.
In the ISV example, because we are using a commercial platform, some of the components are produced in the millions each year, and some are in the hundreds of thousands. Through bulk purchases, we can obtain lower costs and pass on that value to our customers. And if we use specific tools for specific designs, and only produce hundreds of parts each year, the cost will be higher. In addition, the need to enter the dedicated engineering of these small batches of parts means that when you amortize that cost, they will be more expensive. This is where the advantage of using commercial off-the-shelf platforms lies.
Breaking Defense: How does GM Defense incorporate modularity and agility into its construction, and why is this important? When I think about modularity, I usually associate it with improved sensors and other mission systems. For example, when we talk about ISV platforms, what are agility and modularity?
Beaker: Let me start with the commercial side of General Motors. On the GM side, when we start any new plan, we will not consider a specific, purpose-built vehicle. We often consider a series of vehicles and how to build a platform that can adapt to the different needs of different customers, but still use the basic foundation to build.
Because we use this approach, we can share components, which obviously improves our efficiency not only in the design and engineering stages, but also in the manufacturing and maintenance stages. An example of General Motors is our full-size pickups: Chevrolet Silverado 1500, 2500 and 3500 series pickups, as well as Suburban and Tahoe.
Although they all look different, have different purposes and different customers, they all come from a family of vehicles that share a common design philosophy. They share manufacturing processes and share components.
We deal with ISVs in the same way. We don’t think it is a single-purpose vehicle that can accommodate nine people. We see it as a franchise, designed to provide services for missions around the world-whether it is equipped with a tethered drone, configured to transport the wounded, or equipped as a mobile communication center.
As I mentioned, we showed the ISV heavy artillery aircraft carrier concept car and our all-electric military concept car at this year's AUSA. Both cars are based on the Chevrolet Colorado platform and are similar to the traditional ISV nine-person personnel carrier. With this solid foundation, we can build an ISV family for different purposes and different tasks while sharing the basic foundation.
Breaking Defense: Earlier you mentioned General Motors Sports. Tell me more about the resources beyond traditional engineering that you can obtain from the commercial side of your business, and how you can use GM technology and manufacturing.
Beaker: I mentioned the 11 chassis upgrades in the racing product portfolio. These upgrades allow us to obtain an extreme level of off-road capability by improving suspension travel, damping capabilities, vehicle motion control, and underbody impact resistance.
Then we also have the ability to take advantage of GM's US$35 billion investment in electrification and autonomous technology. Obviously, we can apply these to mobile solutions, but we also have the ability to adopt these advanced battery technologies and use them to support airport apron operations, silent surveillance missions, and even power remote command bases.
In addition, we have the ability to utilize commercial security features for military applications, such as 360-degree cameras, automatic emergency braking, lane keeping assist, and telematics that can be used for vehicle prediction for predictive maintenance.
Breaking Defense: How does GM Defense incorporate customer feedback into its design?
Beaker: Listening to customers is in our genes; this is just what GM must do in business to maintain our position as a world-class automobile company. The competition is fierce. If we don’t listen to our customers and don’t give them what they want, they will move on. This customer mentality is the foundation of GM Defense.
Our engineers also have the agility and the ability to make changes quickly in their culture. I think that is not necessarily the case in other defense companies. This sets us apart and makes us unconventional in the defense industry.
A concrete example comes from an ISV in the prototype stage. We listened to the feedback from the soldiers and made adjustments and design changes based on these feedbacks. Because of this, ISV became the number one vehicle in the soldier contact stage.
We continue this method today. We have used some ISV concepts as test platforms, and you have seen some of them on AUSA. We are also working for others, and we are using these to get valuable feedback from the user community. We will take advantage of this and strengthen our future products and ensure that warfighters have the right capabilities to complete their tasks.
Topic: Fully Electric Military Concept Vehicle, General Motors Defense, General Motors Defense Focus 2021, Infantry Squad Vehicle ISV, provided by General Motors Defense, sponsored content, tactical vehicles
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