[Keith Seymore]

There are two types of activities that take place at a proving ground: development and validation.

Validation is probably what you are thinking of when you think of the testing. This is where you have rigid test procedures, verifying that the vehicle meets specific regulatory and customer requirements before being sold to the public. There is a team of engineers (usually young, entry level positions*) and drivers who would spend all day doing high speed testing on the circle track, or 8 hours of low speed city traffic, or driveway entry and egress, or emissions testing, or whatever.

Development is where you play around all day. These assignments are usually project based, either improving on an initial/existing design or addressing a specific customer complaint. Often there is no test procedure and the engineer has to create the process of how to evaluate the changes and what the pass/fail criteria should be. Normally this is where the old timers reside.

I did full vehicle development on the C/K trucks (pickups, Blazers and Suburbans) and then, at the DPG, driveline and brake development. Some memorable projects were various brake pulls and pedal feel issues, throttle calibrations, driveline vibrations and noises including launch shudders and rear axle noise and the like, both on the road and in a chassis roll dynamometer cell, and captaining off property road trips to Death Valley or Pikes Peak and other western locales.

I think I was pretty good at fixing stuff but my weakness was in determining what was “good enough”. Having grown up around tri-power Pontiacs with rock crusher transmissions I might have had a greater tolerance for various moans, groans and whines than the typical engineering manager.

I remember one time my boss took me out for a ride in a manual trans truck. Shifting through the gears and pointing out the gear whine he said “hear that? You gotta fix that.”

“Fix it?” I said. “I like it!”

K



*most of these entry level engineering positions were what we would call “5th level” or “6th level” jobs. Because I started in the assembly plant I came into engineering directly as a 7th level engineer, giving me a level or two head start on my peers. All according to plan: 8th level was the “carrot” which is when you were assigned a company owned vehicle. I got my 8th in October of 1991. Everything went pretty much according to plan until "The Unpleasantness of 2008".