Payne: Building 144 simulator is where GM hones its vehicle tech

Posted by Talbot Payne on August 9, 2021

Milford — Since 1924, dozens of buildings have popped up across the General Motors Milford Proving Grounds’ sprawling, 4,000-acre complex — the auto industry’s first dedicated testing facility. They are known simply by their numbers: Building 1, 2, 40, 94 and so on. They house the tools and personnel to keep the General on the cutting edge of the auto wars.

Building 144 is the latest and most advanced.

Perched atop a hill at the south end of the sprawling campus, the white, beige and glass building looks out over MPG’s challenging, 17-turn, 2.9-mile test track. Like a rocket sitting on a Kennedy Space Center pad, Building 144 is accessed via a long, covered walkway.

The Driver in the Loop simulator at GM's Building 144 at Milford

Inside, a large, state-of-the-art simulator has taken General Motors Co. products to new heights. Rocket ships like the sublime, mid-engine Corvette C8 and ferocious Cadillac CT4 and CT5-V Blackwings — some of the first products developed here.

“When we have a brand like Cadillac that has the dual personality of performance and luxury, this facility helps take that integration to another level,” Blaine Heavener, global vehicle performance manager for Cadillac, told a small group of journalists, including The Detroit News’ auto critic, during a rare look inside. Heavener spoke as his colleague, engineer and race-licensed driver Tom Schinderle, hammered the Caddy — virtually — around the test track in the “Driver in the Loop” rig.

Schinderle sat in the cockpit of the simulator’s “buck,” which pivoted and danced on its electro-mechanical legs while an enormous, wraparound screen projected his path around the formidable track.

Such simulators are rare around the world. Costing tens of millions of dollars, they are commonly used by professional Formula One race teams to hone their cars and drivers. IndyCar and IMSA teams use a similar rig in Charlotte, North Carolina. Other manufacturers like Mercedes, BMW, Porsche and Audi — competitors to Corvette and Cadillac — have their own.

“A facility like this requires vision,” said Cadillac Executive Chief Engineer Brandon Vivian, who was part of the team that began development on Building 144 back in 2011. “To get to the level of vehicle sophistication we wanted, we had to go faster.” The facility opened to GM engineers in 2017.

“The computational speed of parallel processors enabled us to get here,” the veteran engineer continued, his arm sweeping in the direction of a bank of computers that occupy their own glassed-in room adjacent to the simulator buck. “Twenty years ago, this would have required a supercomputer.”

The Driver in the Loop simulator inside Building 144 simulates hot laps around Milford's test track.

Combined with the real-world testing on Milford’s test track — fondly called the “Lutz Ring” after former GM product guru Bob Lutz, who pushed for its construction at the turn of the 21st century — Building 144 helps integrate mechanical and electronic technologies that are transforming vehicle handling as well as interiors and autonomous driving.

Those technologies include Magnetic Ride 4.0 (MR4, for short), sophisticated shock absorbers that allow a vehicle’s suspension to react in milliseconds to changes in body roll, pitch and traction. Combined with updates in chassis materials, stabilizer bars, e-limited slip differentials, adhesives and other vehicle wizardry, the simulator helps integrate developments without engineers needing to constantly build prototypes and put in on-track man-hours.

“The simulator allows us to focus on all the variables,” Heavener said. “This facility helps us do design reiterations while keeping everything else constant.”

Added global structural vibration engineer Mark Stebbins: “It means we’re not spending millions of dollars on prototyping. It short-cuts the process by a year or more.”

That time is crucial in four-year, vehicle-to-market product cycles.

Cadillac, a brand founded in 1902 on technological precision as well as posh luxury, has been pushing the envelope for more than a century. Building 144’s obsession with precision has its roots in the work of GM engineer Maurice Olley who, in the early 20th century, pioneered ways to objectively assess a driver’s interaction with the vehicle.

Olley helped develop a vehicle language using terms like understeer and overseer that became a permanent part of the auto lexicon. Today, Cadillac engineers have coined the term “isolated precision” to reflect the integration of ride, handling and comfort.

GM has long augmented its production development with auto racing in order to help push components to their limits at the highest speeds possible. The company continues to use motorsport for development — witness the successful IMSA Cadillac DPi and Corvette C8.R programs that have been winning races across North America this year.

But the electronic toys at engineers’ disposal have given production cars like the CT5-V Blackwing much more bandwidth than even their racing kin. To keep costs down to encourage competition, modern racing strictly limits technical innovation.

“The technological integration we’re doing on the Blackwings is technically not legal in racing,” Heavener said with a smile. “This is a level of sophistication that dwarfs what we are doing in racing.”

The 688-horse Cadillac CT5-V Blackwing was developed with help from the state-of-the-art Building 144 at Milford Proving Grounds.

The CT5-V Blackwing’s obscene performance numbers attest to the sophistication of this rear-wheel-drive, 2-ton luxury sedan: 688 horsepower, 200 mph top speed, 3.7-second 0-60 acceleration, track-clawing grip.

The simulator benefits non-performance vehicles as well — vehicles like the smooth-riding, truck-based Cadillac Escalade that uses MR4. Made by Ansible, one of five simulator suppliers, the simulator allows vehicle assessment across multiple track environments — enabling 12-month testing that’s inconceivable on the nearby test track (which was down for repaving during The News’ visit).

The Ansible rig is not alone in Building 144. It is surrounded by other “hardware in the loop” virtual vehicle dynamics labs that test steering racks, brakes — even a full-production vehicle rig called the 8-Post that helps drivers assess ride and handling.

They complement a network of engineering labs stretching across the Milford campus back to GM’s Warren Tech Center as well as Milford’s 140 miles of test roads. The variables seem infinite as engineers also update the simulators for tire compounds crucial to marrying suspension components to the road.

Test driver Schinderle, an experienced sprint car racer, has put in hundreds of miles on simulators as well as on asphalt. Though Cadillac lags the sheer number of models that luxury giants like BMW and Mercedes produce, Building 144 has helped to accelerate a brand lineup that is now the freshest of any luxury marque.

“The Blackwings,” says Cadillac global vice president Rory Harvey, “are the icing on the cake.”

As Cadillac sprints towards an all-electric lineup by the end of the decade, engineer Vivian adds that “there is a lot more to come.”

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