Carl F. Thelin

 ON TO DETROIT

            Even before I graduated in the spring of 1953, I had applied to work as an engineer on automatic transmissions at General Motors in Detroit. Detroit was in the midst of one of the occasional economic downturns, so I got no offer. After International Harvester rejected me and GM made an offer when the car business emerged into the 1955 boom. My wife, Ramona, and I moved to Detroit, where I joined the General Motors Engineering Staff (GMES) – which is the central engineering center for all of GM, located in a beautiful landscaped campus in Warren, Michigan. The GMTC is a huge park-like complex, a mile wide by a mile and a half long north to south. It is dotted with artificial lakes and water fountains. The buildings are unique, each with distinctive brilliant colored glazed brick walls. It was sort of an industrial Disneyland and it was the “West Point” of the auto industry. Construction ended in 1953 and GM had their dedication ceremonies with great fanfare in 1955 after I arrived.

            STRUCTURE AND SUSPENSION

            Recall that I told International Harvester. I thought that my interests and aptitude tests would entitle me to work with automatic transmissions. I expected to work in the transmission development section of the GMES. No, GM assigned me to the Structure and Suspension Department (S&S). In those days, the structure of an automobile was the heavy frame upon which the body, engineered by another group, was mounted. More importantly, S&S designed experimental chassis with novel ideas. The infamous air spring, used on GM car in the late 1950s, was one idea which seemed to have failed until Mercedes Benz resurrected it 20 years later. Another important advance for GM was work on ball-joint independent front suspensions, and independent rear suspensions. These things did interest me. I suppose the personnel department knew me better than I did. Over a period of ten years, I worked my way up to being a design group leader with an office of my own. I showed a great aptitude with steering layouts; and front and rear suspension design.

            In 1955 the head of all GM was Harlow Curtiss, who was Time magazine’s Man of the Year. He was unique. He was both President and Chairman of the Board of Directors. His fame was immense. He was great organizer and salesman. Although not an engineer, we engineers loved Harlow because he was full of ideas, and made GM so successful that it could afford to do anything. President Curtiss was a close friend of General of the US Air Force, Curtis (one s) LeMay. Sometime in 1959, the S&S Department, which was the most innovative of those at the Engineering Staff, received its wildest assignment – even crazier than our front wheel drive cars. The General assumed that the GM engineers could make a superior bob sled for the Air Force team for the 1960 Winter Olympics. All the bosses in our department had a hand in that one. I was the pencil pusher to get the drawings and parts made. I was disappointed not to go to Lake Placid to see the two-man and four-man sleds run. Whoa – those super sleds were disqualified because the Air Force sleds were unbeatable. We had designed an independent suspension and used a genuine steering gear (out of a Corvair) with genuine steering linkage, like a car. That was big stuff. An Italian-designed sled, used by everyone else, had a suspension that so rigid that the sled bounced off the ice half the time. Worse, the driver did the steering by bending the front ice runners with a rope at each end of a cross-bar, just like a kid’s snow sled.

            TORONADO

            My best assignment was the XP-784. It was a five year design and experiment effort which culminated in the adaptation, by the Oldsmobile Division, as the huge front wheel drive coupe called the Toronado. I was a generalist working on front and rear suspensions and steering systems, so I could easily handle the new task of designing the GM effort to move ahead.

            All Detroit was amazed by the 1959 BMC Austin Mini, which was a ground breaking car. It had a four-cylinder engine mounted laterally in front. The transmission was embedded in the crankcase. The radiator was located in the left wheel well. This package drove the front wheels. The tiny car had a large passenger compartment. Until then, front wheel drive cars had the engine and transmission aligned fore and aft with the differential stuffed in there somewhere. That made for a long hood and a long wheel base for a small car. The Mini was efficient. We had to see if we could do better. My bosses assigned me to develop a copy of the Mini with GM components, using a 1 liter (61 cubic inch) displacement engine like the Mini, and a cobbled up manual transmission. That car was crude and greatly underpowered with the added weight of GM components. Next, I designed a better model using a 1 ½ liter (90 cubic inches) engine. It still had a very crude floor shifted manual transmission. The people downstairs in the Transmission Development Department had not worked on manual gear boxes since before WW II. They did not know how to make nice manual shift gear boxes like the rest of the world.

            GM planned to have Oldsmobile introduce the XP-784 as the front wheel drive version of the 1966 beautiful Buick Riviera. The Cadillac division became interested. They thought the XP-784 would be the car to challenge the Lincoln four door convertible. The new car, to be named the El Dorado, would even offer a new all aluminum single overhead-cam V-12 engine. Eventually Cadillac chickened out and went on with their big V-8, in their hot selling El Dorado Coupe. It would be a real competitor to the Ford Thunderbird, they thought. Maybe not. Buick was doing just fine with the glamorous Riviera with an almost-conventional chassis. They opted to use the sleek new E-body made for the Toronado and El Dorado, but not the front drive chassis.

            During the ten years at the GMES, I frequently requested transfer to the GM Proving Grounds in Milford, Michigan, where the two-man office of Lou Lundstrom, head of automotive safety was located. By the time I began working on the XP-784, I was already the Chairman of the Safety Committee of the city of St. Clair Shores, the lakefront suburb where my family lived. I had even gone to the state capitol in Lansing to testify on behalf of compulsory motor vehicle inspection, such as those which our committee conducted voluntarily in our city. GM management was not happy with that. I should have learned that the auto bosses had a strong NIH factor – they were allergic to ideas Not Invented Here. The NIH factor is certainly one reason why, of all the auto companies, General Motors most strongly resisted the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. GM fought hard to avoid making air bags standard safety equipment or even making them an extra cost option. That is ironic because at the time GM was fighting the idea, they had already invested over $75 million in research of air bags, and had even produced a small number of high priced C-body cars with air bags. The General Motors C body was the basic body shared by the big Oldsmobile 98, the Buick Electra and the Cadillacs. What a fake-out that was for the governement. The dealers got almost negative support for promotion. They could not sell many except at discount, so that GM could say to Uncle Sam “We tried. We lost money. Leave us alone” I will tell you more stories like that elsewhere.

            Later, working on the XP-784 with the huge V-8 engine and a Hydramatic transmission stuffed under the hood, I ran into a problem. Up to then, all GM cars had the large power steering gear box located behind the left front axle to the left of the engine. The XP car had a bulky V-8 attached to and above the transmission, which filled the space usually reserved for the steering gear. I had to move the steering gear way forward, ahead of the entire front suspension, close behind the bumper. That required a long articulated steering shaft that ran from the steering gear box, back over the front axle, into the passenger compartment and up to the steering wheel.

            Chevrolet had already developed the Corvair. It went on sale in September 1959. That car had its engine in the rear. The trunk was in front, under the hood, and the gasoline tank was under that trunk, too, just ahead of the driver’s feet. The tiny aluminum non-power steering gear box was about two inches behind the left corner of the bumper. A one-piece continuation of the steering shaft ran all the way up and back to the center of the steering wheel. Initially, there were no universal joints or anything else to prevent that shaft from being a javelin aimed at the driver’s chest. Early CxSI people came to know it as exactly that. With that background, I was disturbed that the Oldsmobile power steering gear box was going to be so far in front of XP-784 power plant. Our car had an even longer steering shaft than the Corvair. It was equipped with two U-joints so it was a crooked spear. I wrote a memo to the department head, Mr. Polhemus in which I expressed my concern about the danger inherent in the forward location of the steering gear, preferring to have more time to find space to put it back behind the wheels. Wow! Pol called me into his office. He glared at me and asked “Did you send copies of this to anyone else?” “No. just to you.” “Good – otherwise I’d have to fire you. Don’t ever put anything in writing that says GM has made a dangerous design – ever! Kid, you don’t know that we already thought of that. GM is about to release a telescoping feature to put in the steering column so that the shaft will collapse if the front is crushed. OK – that solves the problem. So – you do not need to help our enemies that already are suing us for that column in the Corvair.”

            I liked the car that my friend Chuck Steger was designing more than I liked my XP-784. He used the body of an Opel Capitan, added an aluminum V-8 from the Oldsmobile F-85 and a nice smooth automatic from the same car. That was a sweetheart of a car – able to hold six passengers in close quarters. Had GM decided to produce that compact car in 1965, it would have been the 1980 Chevrolet X-body Citation 15 years ahead of time. General Motors thought that it would have been too great a marketing risk to replace the Chevy Impala with such a novel car.

            Instead, GM chose to take the risk with a niche car. Why do we need to make a car 18 feet long with seats for only four people? The XP-784 car was fully 80 inches wide, but had only two bucket seats front and rear. It was the style of a pimpmobile – like the Thunderbird. I worked on variations of that XP-784 until I left the department.