Top gun drivers pushing metal, mettle at GM proving ground
DETROIT – Frank Taverna knew he should have stopped the test.
It was summer of 1992 and Taverna was at General Motors Milford Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, testing tires on a Chevy S-10 pickup – tires he already knew were not going to “cut the mustard.”
“I should have just flunked them,” he said in hindsight. But Taverna, then a 32-year-old ride-and-handling development engineer at GM had it in his head, “you do every test. Finish the test regimen.”
So when he got to a challenging lane change in the test, he took a severe turn, pushing the tires to the extreme. Sure enough, a tire failed, the rim caught the pavement, the pickup was airborne, flipping over and over and over. The first rollover blew out Taverna’s window, on the second rollover, his helmet made contact with the pavement, then the truck finally landed on all four wheels. It had transformed into “a ball of metal,” Taverna said.
“It was pretty wild ... terrifying,” Taverna said. Earlier this month, Taverna drove past the exact spot the accident happened. He saved the helmet he was wearing that day, which has permanent road burns etched in it. It’s a reminder that without it, “I would have been dead.”
Taverna is now GM’S senior manager of traffic safety at Milford Proving Ground and Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Arizona. GM’S winter proving ground is in Kincheloe, Michigan.
One of the first rules Taverna implemented in 2006, when he got the job, was that any engineer doing a highspeed test is required to wear a helmet. It used to be optional.
Taverna also helped design the driver training and other safety protocols that are in place at the proving ground, where GM does extreme testing daily of hundreds of vehicles across miles of test tracks. One crucial safety protocol came out of his accident as well. Back in the early 1990s, there were no cellphones, so after Taverna climbed out of the wreckage, he walked to the nearest
emergency phone and called his wife. But security arrived at the accident scene to find a crumpled-up truck with no person near it and they panicked. Taverna almost lost his job for not alerting security first.
“That’s one of the reasons we hammer it in people’s head that your first call has to be to security and you absolutely cannot leave the scene of an accident,” Taverna said, adding that most testing has “a standby person. For high-speed stuff of 150 mph or over, our standby is an EMT with an ambulance so someone can respond immediately.”
GM’S vehicle testing is grueling, on both drivers and vehicles. These engineers are the top guns of driving – what they do is dangerous, there are accidents (some injuries are serious enough to have required airlifts to hospitals) and there have been eight fatalities over Milford’s decadeslong history.
But the risk the engineers take yields learning that lead to technologically advanced
and safer cars coming off the assembly lines and onto customers’ driveways. In part two of this series, we look at what it takes to be a professional test car driver.
Setting the standard
GM Milford Proving Ground will turn 100 years old in 2025. It started as 1,200 acres of what had been three farms when GM bought the land in 1923. It has grown to 4,000 acres with 174 buildings and 147 miles of test roads.
The road surfaces of GM’S tracks vary from dirt roads, to hills, to bumpy concrete with purpose-made potholes, to six lanes of banked concrete on a 5-mile circle track, to a straightaway with no speed limit, to the speedway-ready 3mile Milford Road Course and the wellknown Black Lake, a slab of black asphalt that in the sunlight gives the illusion that it is water. It is the size of 59 football fields and is one of the largest vehicle dynamics pads in the world, Taverna said.
One of the smaller test tracks that is no less intriguing is GM’S Belgian block. As one drives along an access road and glances down an incline, there is an ancient-looking, narrow, red brick road straight out of Europe. The Belgian Block track is a 2-mile-long replica of the real brick road that ran from Antwerp to Brussels, which was discovered during World War I by U.S. soldiers, Taverna said.
“We use it for suspension and durability testing,” Taverna said, adding that because the bricks are hand-laid and hand-grouted, “it’s very expensive to repair.”
The 130 miles of guardrails that line nearly every road on the proving ground reflect what you see along any major interstate. That’s because they were first developed at Milford Proving Ground.
GM designed the guardrail so it would absorb an impact and pull a car along the rail. Many previous designs would deflect the impact and bounce the vehicle into traffic, Taverna said.
Also designed at Milford Proving Ground and adopted by the United States and some of parts of Europe are: slope, runoff, setbacks of trees, onramps, bridge barriers, parapets, breakaway poles and median barriers, he said.
On a Thursday in November, Taverna stops the black pickup he’s driving near a straight, long track that almost looks like a runway. There, he said, was where GM had its first fatality on the proving ground. It was in 1930 and GM was testing a Cadillac V-16 Roadster convertible at 112 mph when the tires blew out, resulting in the deaths of two engineers. That incident, he said, inspired the Srating in the speed rating on tires. S-rated tires have 112 mph as the designated maximum speed they can go safely while continuously running.
Like air traffic control
To even drive on any proving ground is a privilege not given to just anyone. That’s because one wrong turn could take you off an access road and onto a
test track.
Alan Amici was a product development engineer in late 1980s through the early 2000s for Chrysler. Today, he is CEO of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But he remembers fondly his days working at Chrysler-chelsea Proving Grounds in Chelsea, just west of Ann Arbor.
“You had to go through training and pass a test and get a proving ground driver’s license. Part of it was knowing where the tracks were ... knowing who was on the oval at what time, it was like an air traffic controller where they had to know where all the drivers were at all times to avoid an incident,” Amici said. “And you do have wildlife on these grounds, so they were very careful about striking a deer or turkey. So, if they were sighted, you called it in.”
Amici said he did not do high-speed testing, but rather “splash trough testing” to assess whether water was permeating the engine compartment and affecting the electronics.
“You try to test the limits of what the car is capable of so that the customer doesn’t have to deal with it,” Amici said of any proving ground’s mission.
GM’S driving levels and who has them
At GM, its global driving privileges program consists of six levels. To advance up each level requires making a business case to prove an employee’s job requires GM to invest the money, time and training for each level, Taverna said. He is a Level 5 because no business case could be made to train him for Level 6, he said.
Here are the six levels of driving privileges:
h Level 1: The employee can drive on the access roads between buildings. It’s very similar to how you drive on public roads and mainly consists of knowing the grounds and staying off test tracks.
h Level 2: The employee can drive on the test roads. It is accident avoidance training, making rapid lane changes, steering around obstacles and managing a car going into a skid. It is the same training police officers get. Employees can drive up to 100 mph in a straight line on test tracks.
h Level 3: This is aggressive driving training. The employee learns to take a turn at a high-enough speed to make the tires squeal. It is a pass/fail test through a 1-mile-long line of cones, getting the car to a speed where the tires squeal through the turns and completing it in a certain amount of time without losing control of the vehicle. Most of GM’S chassis engineers and those who do stability control, brake systems or powertrain work need Level 3 training.
h Levels 4, 5 and 6: Required for people who do any kind of high-speed, race car-like driving. At GM, there are about 81,000 salaried employees globally, Taverna said, and only about 200 are levels 4, 5 and 6 with fewer than 100 at Level 5 and 6.
There are also a series of training and tests to be able to drive off-road or to drive a trailer. To become a top performance driver with GM, Taverna likens it to teaching someone to dance: There are some who are naturals. Then, there are some, “we can train them for awhile and they can get good at it. Some people, they just simply don’t have the skill.”
About 3,000 of the 4,900 people who work at the proving ground have passed Level 1 and can drive on the campus. There are some top executives, such as GM President Mark Reuss, who is Level 6. Taverna is personally training CEO Mary Barra, who is advancing to the upper levels. Likewise, CFO Paul Jacobson has advanced to a high tier and “when time allows,” he will complete all the levels, Taverna said.
“In this industry, everybody can do a better job at whatever they do if they know a little about cars and trucks,” Taverna said. “So we have leaders at all levels that have some of this kind of training.”
Ways to lose driving privileges
There are also ways to lose driving privileges on the proving ground.
GM’S road patrol security officers are armed with radar guns and they will ticket speeders or others who disobey various road rules. GM has a judicial system comprised of the traffic safety group that includes Taverna. That group determines the points the violator is penalized. Usually a minor violation, such as speeding 10 mph over the limit, would be three points. But going through a stop sign or leaving the scene are considered major violations, so they are six-point penalties. If someone gets 12 points, they lose their driving privileges, which could put an end to their career at GM.
“If you’re a development engineer who needs to drive to do your job, you could lose your job or get transferred to a
job that doesn’t require you to drive if there’s a job available for you to transfer to,” Taverna said. “We take it pretty seriously. No one wants someone to lose their career. But it shows how seriously we take safety.”
Taverna said he sees about 250 violations a year, but on average only one person a year racks up 12 points to lose driving privileges.
In terms of accidents, GM has a good safety record, Taverna said. It measures safety as accidents per million miles. Taverna said GM’S accident rate is half that of the national average on the public road system and “we feel that’s really good because we’re doing test driving and so people are doing more risky stuff at higher speeds with vehicles that are not fully developed yet.”
Most of the accidents are minor, but there have been some serious ones and even fatalities.
“We’ve had rollovers, that can happen,” Taverna said. “It’s been a pretty long time since we’ve had a serious injury. I’ve witnessed two life flights go out of this place. Luckily, neither was a fatality, but you have to be hurt pretty bad for them to send a helicopter.”
Need ‘a sandpaper butt’
It’s a warm, sunny day as a GM engineer takes a red Corvette around the Milford Road Course as a Detroit Free Press reporter and photographer stood along the guardrail watching. GM requested that no photographs be taken of any vehicles on the test tracks that day.
The Milford Road Course was the brainchild of former GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz in the early 2000s. It is a racetrack designed after parts of the famously challenging Nurburgring in Germany and Laguna Seca track in California. It’s a 3-mile course that consists of 17 turns, leaving no room for error or lapse in concentration. GM tests its Corvette Z06, the Cadillac Blackwing sports sedans and the Camaro muscle car on this track.
On this November day, the engineer in the Corvette took the sharp turns fast, then zoomed around a bowl-like curve in the center of the course to come around a loop just feet from the guardrail going about 165 mph to 185 mph in a hair-raising blur of red and heartpounding rumble of power.
Larry Webster, the senior vice president of media at Hagerty, an automotive lifestyle brand that specializes in insurance of classic cars, has spent a lot of time at the Milford Proving Ground over his years as an auto journalist. In 2013, he experienced the Milford Road Course firsthand for an article he was doing for Road and Track and it was one of the more thrilling rides of his life.
“You gotta be brave to go around this as fast you can, there are walls right at the edge of the track, there are a lot of high-speed turns and there are places where the car gets light, goes up over a rise, to test the extremes of the car’s suspension,” Webster said. “It’s intimidating.”
For a GM professional driver, it takes about two minutes to complete a lap.
The engineers start with a full tank of gasoline and test the vehicle until it runs out, which typically takes about 40 to 45 minutes of fast and furious driving. It is a test that not only requires top-notch driving skills, but an ability to subjectively evaluate the ride and handling, Taverna said.
“You’re not just driving like a race car driver, you’re actually driving and evaluating the vehicle at the same time. And there’s an art to that. In the old days, they used to call it that you had ‘a sandpaper butt,’ ” Taverna said. “You could drive down the road and discern the difference of the car as it hits certain bumps and certain road events. Rideand-handling engineers ... they’re evaluating very minute changes in the tires and the suspension system.”
Taverna said it is a challenge to find people with the driving skills and the ability to do the mental evaluation and engineering at the same time. And, let’s face it, going that fast is not for the faint of heart. GM requires a driver pass a physical exam every other year for levels 4, 5 and 6.
“It’s a job that can be daunting or intimidating for some folks, so you have to get past that,” Taverna said. “When you’re driving out there, when you’re done, you’re drenched in sweat because you’re concentrating that hard, very much like a race car driver. You’re driving the vehicle right to its limit and evaluating the powertrain, the suspension and all the other systems of the vehicle.”
Look, no hands!
Back inside the pickup, Taverna heads to GM’S circle track. The 5-mile bowl has six lanes, the top lane has a 30% bank angle, which is the same as the Daytona Speedway. Five of the six lanes are designated for running continuous speeds for a long time with the top lane having a minimum speed limit of 100 mph.
“That’s where we simulate someone driving at say the Autobahn in Germany, where you go 100 mph for two hours,” Taverna said.
He quickly moves the truck from the first lane to the fourth lane to settle in at 90 mph, but explains that the banked angles allow for vehicles in each lane to find a speed where physics take over and steer the car. To prove it, he swings in the top lane and hits the accelerator and the pickup is now at about 105 mph. He takes his hands off the wheel and the car, with the help of gravity, steers itself around the track.
“We very often have more than 10 vehicles out here at a time, doing what they need to do and they rarely see each other,” Taverna said. “The only time is if we’re going to be doing 150 mph or over, then we close the track and there’s only one vehicle on the track.”
GM does have a sort of road version of air traffic control at many of its tracks to allow for multiple tests at once. But if you think the fastest cars are confined to the Circle Track or Milford Road Course, think again. There is a track that has no speed limit at all at the Milford Proving Ground: The North-south Straightaway, a 3-mile-long, three-lane wide track with a center guardrail and a high-speed bank turn at each end.
“The fastest vehicle we tested out there has gone 220 mph,” Taverna said, though he declined to name that vehicle. “But we could do faster.”
That’s because GM is increasingly doing more product development virtually using simulators, which allows for high-speed testing on a simulator well before building an actual prototype to take onto a track. Once that happens, the simulated testing can assure a safer test drive.