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GM President Mark Reuss blogs about spending time at the industry’s first dedicated testing facility, sharing GM MILFORD PROVING GROUND MEMORIES on its 100^th anniversary!

I’ve often said that some of my best days at work are spent at our plants, watching our vehicles assembled. It’s an immediate, visceral thrill to see our products come to life.

Another place I love to spend workdays happens to be another place where our vehicles come to life…the General Motors Milford Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, where our products are refined and validated. It’s also where I started my GM career as a summer student working on valve train noise and vibration in our V6 engines.

This year, MPG is celebrating its 100^th birthday – it opened September 25, 1924 – and it has played a part in the development of just about every GM vehicle produced since.

If the assembly plants are the front lines, Milford is where the battle plans are drawn up – then tested, repeatedly, both virtually and in real-world situations. Every aspect of every vehicle is put through the paces, under the most extreme conditions. Hot, cold, wet, dry, uphill, downhill, uneven pavement, off-road, high-speed oval, tight road course, skid pad…we can even simulate driving on the moon.For me and everyone else born with the car lover’s gene, it feels like a playground. But every time I go there, I’m instantly reminded why: our customers. Test-driving our vehicles in development means you become the eyes and ears of the customer, understanding what they want out of each vehicle, often before they even know they want it. I get great pleasure sharing GM MILFORD PROVING GROUND MEMORIES.That goes for every kind of vehicle, whether it’s a high-performance car like the Corvette Z06 or a mainstream SUV like the Chevy Equinox. The same development work goes into all of them, often even more in the Equinox and similar vehicles because of the packaging – you must provide the utility that customers want while making it fun to drive. That’s just as thrilling for me as testing a Corvette, frankly, knowing that such a high-volume vehicle will be going to our dealerships and then into the hands of so many of our customers.Most Friday afternoons I meet at Milford with executives and engineers from the vehicle teams for something we call “the knothole rides,” where we put a vehicle through a peer group validating its excellence at each stage of development.

We started doing the knothole rides almost 20 years ago. Typically, we’ll focus each session on a specific model, and we’ll have 7 or 8 development vehicles, the primary competitors of the vehicle we’re evaluating, and the previous generation, if applicable. We’ll have a cross-functional group of experts including the vehicle chief engineer, along with quality, manufacturing, and development engineers.The mission is to see each vehicle at each stage of development, along with the competition each time, so we can see the target to beat in the segment. That’s hugely important – we’ll even start a new vehicle program with a “knothole target ride” at the very outset, before we even begin development of our vehicle.

We’ll spend the afternoon behind the wheel, and in all of the seats, evaluating everything the car does from all angles, and really looking hard at vehicle integration and performance. I can’t overstate the impact of this process or put a number on the tangible improvements we’ve made as a result.For example, we delayed the Corvette Z06 ever so slightly just because we wanted to get the sound exactly right. It had to be our Corvette Z06 sound — not an old one, not a foreign exotic competitor, but our own. The car was too quiet. We used the MPG inclines to hold the RPM constant and listened to the car both inside and out while standing at the base of the hill. I’ll never forget it.

That’s what these days are about, getting things right…things like putting more countermeasures into our new Traverse, Acadia, and Enclave, or dialing in the right “set” in our suspensions for some of our new electric models. For high-performance vehicles we use the road course.  And we’ll also go off-property to use the preproduction vehicles the way customers use them, on city streets, dirt roads, and freeway drives using Super Cruise. Like that Z06… yes, we got the track performance we wanted, but could it handle the aging infrastructure of Michigan roads and still be comfortable and pleasing on a daily basis?

These are the questions we answer with knothole rides. If we see the competition moving and improving, these days help us ensure we’re still winning, through development into production. It’s all about validation that we will win for our customers in the marketplace. No matter what the car is, no matter what segment, this experience is invaluable. And, perhaps selfishly, I’ll add that it’s an incredibly fun way for me to end the week!

I love the knothole rides and the other time I get to spend at Milford. The facility is a huge competitive advantage for us and has been for 100 years. When you think about all the vehicles that have been tested and developed there over those years, the talented and dedicated men and women who worked on them, and the millions of customers who benefited from their work, it’s astonishing. I couldn’t be more grateful for MPG and I’m excited to see what its second century brings.

PHOTOS: General Motors; Martyn L. Schorr

Milford, located in Milford, MI on 4,000 acres, is longest continuously operating proving grounds in the world. For more information about General Motors & GM MILFORD PROVING GROUND MEMORIES, please visit, https://www.gm.com/company/facilities/milford-proving-ground