Rulebreaker: New Cadillac ATS is GM’s Most Radical Car Since the Volt

“We broke a lot of our own rules,” says Dave Masch, chief engineer of the highly anticipated 2013 Cadillac ATS, Cadillac’s new 3 Series fighter. He’s a GM lifer, and that term carries a lot of baggage — GM lifers are supposedly dull, plodding, buttoned-down company men who worship system and process over product. They follow the rules that gave us the Olds Alero, Chevy Aveo, Pontiac Aztek, and dozens of other forgettable pieces of automotive dross. But here was Masch showing me around the new baby Caddy and pointing out all the stuff GM’s product development rulebook would never have allowed. And he was loving every minute.
The ATS might look relatively conventional — the exterior and interior are predictable evolutions of the current Cadillac design language — but in truth this is arguably the most radical new car from GM since the Volt. As you will have read in “Trend,” this Caddy is basically the size of an E46 3 Series BMW, and weighs about as much as a new BMW 135i. That doesn’t sound like rocket science, but getting the ATS built with those attributes intact required a fundamental mindset shift within GM’s product development teams.
The decision to optimize the new Cadillac’s exterior design and chassis engineering around 18-inch wheels is a case in point. Bigger wheels and tires look cool, but are heavy. By taking them off the table at the beginning of the development program, not only could the ATS designers finesse the styling to suit, but Masch’s engineers didn’t have to overengineer suspension components to cope with the extra unsprung mass. Instead, they were able to focus on their core deliverable: making the ATS feel as light and agile and fun to drive as an E46 3 Series. Besides, as Masch points out, even on 18-inch rubber, the car still has the same rim-to-road ratio as a Corvette ZR-1.
But Masch’s team went further than the obvious stuff like right-sizing the new Cadillac’s wheel/tire combination. “Our mantra was ‘every part, everybody, every gram,’” he says. And to do that, they tore up large sections of the GM product development rulebook, the one Bob Lutz colorfully rails against in his book “Car Guys vs. Beancounters”:  “…we engineered for an extreme situation…and alienated literally thousands of customers…on a daily basis.”