Pontiac's bright light creating the Solstice: the executives at General Motors have been talking about building "gotta have" products for the past few years. The Pontiac Solstice is among the few that actually deserves that appellation

Automotive Design & Production, Sept, 2005 by Gary S. Vasilash

CAN A SINGLE LOW-VOLUME CAR HELP GENERATE LEVELS OF ENTHUSIASM FOR A BRAND? APPARENTLY, THE ANSWER IS "YES."

When asked what he thinks the Pontiac Solstice will do for Pontiac, John Larson, Pontiac division general manager, answers without reservation, "Worlds." Before the first car rolled out of the Wilmington, DE, assembly plant, the division had 9,000 orders. While Larson admits that some of those people might not follow through, the level of enthusiasm that he's witnessed for the vehicle (during the press introduction in Portland, Oregon, one of the "first 1,000" people to place an order for the car spotted a photo on a blog, analyzed the background, determined where the hotel was, and set out to see the cars and to meet people who have been raised to demigod status in that world, like Small Car vehicle line executive Lori Queen), he's not concerned that they'll be able to sell what they build. And while he's not specific about the number of vehicles that they'll be building annually in the plant--low-volume production that will be shared with Saturn when it comes out with its Sky roadster in the first quarter of '06--he provides a ballpark of 15,000 to 20,000 units, but notes that they'll always try to have one less Solstice than there is demand for, a strategy that was used by Mazda for its Miata two-seater ... speaking of which, Larson points out that the 9,000 orders is nearly the number of Miatas sold last year (9,356). While there was some pre-production public speculation that the program was being delayed, Larson points out that they'd always promised that the vehicle would be coming in the Summer of '05, and that the first 1,000* went out the first week of August. "We're on the cusp of great things at Pontiac."

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WHY YOU CAN'T ALWAYS BELIEVE EVEN ACCURATE REPORTS ABOUT PRODUCTION PROBLEMS BEING, WELL, PROBLEMS.

About those widely reported hiccoughs for the Solstice, the problems with the front fascia, the top, etc. Lori Queen explains that if the Solstice had been a high-volume, high-risk vehicle (like, say, the Chevrolet Cobalt, a program that she was working on at the same time as the Solstice), then those problems would have been, well, problematic. But in the case of the Solstice, this was a matter of expectation, not enormous concern. That is, the development of the program was one where they went from the math data to production tools. There were no intermediate prototype tools--or vehicles built (so-called "integration vehicles")--as would be the norm in a vehicle program. Part of this was an issue of cost, as this was to be not only a low-volume program, but a low-cost program, as well, with the car starting at less than $20,000 ("Ten years ago, a vehicle with fewer than 30,000 units would be a premium program," Queen remarks). And it was a matter of timing, too (it was a 27-month program), and tooling builds take plenty of time. "We pulled tools ahead and assumed that there would be fit or processing problems," Queen says, which is certainly a non-traditional approach to vehicle development. In fact, the entire program--which she not entirely facetiously describes as "no volume, no money, no time"--was one where non-traditional approaches were the norm, not the exception. Normally, she explains, there would be three iterations:

* Pre-prototypes

* Integration vehicles

* Production tools

This was not so with Solstice. ("Boeing doesn't double tools," she remarks of how the aircraft manufacturer develops new products.) "We pulled the tools ahead and assumed that there would be fit or processing problems," Queen says. That's why there were those reports of problems. It may have surprised some people, but not the Solstice development team.

While the present mantra at GM (as well as well vehicle manufacturers) is about the importance of math modeling and about "going straight to math," Queen (who is not only an engineer, but whose husband, Jim Queen, is GM's vice president, Global Engineering, so she knows more than a little something about engineers), points out, "If engineers think they have another chance, they don't take the math seriously." In other words, if it is known that there will be another opportunity to make a change to something as the program goes through another stage (e.g., pre-prototype to integration vehicles), then there is a tendency to figure that they'll get it right at the next step. "Engineers triage what to do everyday," she remarks. So what's key is getting things done. But faced with the fact of going to production tools, the opportunity for putting things off simply isn't there. She acknowledges that during the development they made some people uncomfortable as they followed a course that took the traditional critical path approach and threw it out the window.

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What they've done is to create a new approach. It is one that she says can be used for other programs going forward. The aforementioned problems were anticipated--not necessarily the precise problems, but that there would be problems was expected. It was a matter of building, testing, then tweaking until they got it right. Certainly, given that they were working on a low-volume program--Queen says that it is exceedingly unlikely that they'd ever take this approach for a Cobalt-like program, where you're betting the store on success--and that because they were starting with a clean-sheet (i.e., developing the Kappa architecture, so it wasn't a matter of trying to modify things that existed), the Solstice program methodology is in the GM book of how to do things better, faster and cheaper.