In June, the U.S. Army Contracting Command–Detroit Arsenal awarded the production contract to build, field, and sustain the Army’s new Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV) to General Motors Defense (GM Defense), a subsidiary of General Motors. Under the $214.3 million ISV award, GM Defense will manufacture 649 vehicles with options for as many as 2,065. This is the first major award for GM Defense since its inception in October 2017.
Designed to provide rapid ground mobility, the expeditionary ISV is a light and agile all-terrain troop carrier intended to transport a nine-soldier infantry squad. It is based on GM’s 2020 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2 midsize truck architecture and leverages 90 percent commercial off-the-shelf parts, including Chevrolet Performance off-road race parts.
In this Q&A, GM Defense President and General Manager David Albritton discusses how the company is using advanced technologies from the commercial world to support military missions.
Breaking Defense: What’s the story of GM Defense and what do you see as its mission?
David Albritton: We’re in the nascent stages of growing this business, and we’re very honored that the U.S. Army chose us to provide this next-generation platform. GM Defense is literally a reincarnation of a previous company also called GM Defense that existed in the 1950s that GM sold to General Dynamics in 2003. The new GM Defense stood up in 2017 as a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors to take advantage of the technological advancements that GM has developed in the commercial automotive market and to re-imagine those applications across DoD and our allies.
GM is one of the largest automotive companies in the world so people might assume that we’d focus on just ground vehicles. But we have exquisite capabilities from our commercial markets such as power propulsion, mobility, autonomy, and safety that we believe can provide the military with unique capabilities.
GM Defense President and General Manager David Albritton.
Breaking Defense: Let’s talk about safety first.
Albritton: Keeping servicemembers safe in vehicular platforms as they move around is job Number One for all the services. For example, the Rollover Protection System that we’ve integrated onto the 5,000-pound ISV is an innovative way to keep soldiers safe.
We believe that many of the safety technologies you see today in GM vehicles can and should be incorporated into some of these military platforms. One simple technology is anti-lock brakes. For larger or even smaller platforms that don’t have this technology, jamming on the brakes can create a safety hazard. We believe that baking something like that into requirements increases the safety quotient for the drivers and passengers.
Just look at some of the technologies already incorporated onto commercial vehicles such as surround-view cameras and rear-mirror camera systems. From a safety perspective, they can all be part of the mission set for modern military vehicles and would be excellent additions to increase the safety quotient for users.
And then there’s soldier comfort. It’s important to have a good seat so that soldiers can perform optimally on a long mission and a way to very simply ingress and egress so that they’re ready to conduct the mission upon arrival. These are things that we think about in the commercial market every day, and we’ve found ways to take advantage of these capabilities at volume in the commercial market. These are part and parcel to operating as General Motors, and we believe they will be of interest to the military over time.
Breaking Defense: Let’s move on to power propulsion, the improvement of which is important for the military as active protection systems and other power-hungry systems are incorporated onto legacy platforms.
Albritton: What we’re doing to advance lithium ion battery technology is leaps and bounds from where traditional power and propulsion solutions have been. Between the Chevy Volt and the Chevy Bolt EV that we launched in 2016, we’ve produced more than 250,000 electric vehicles and have a long and storied history of producing next-generation technology for power propulsion.
We are currently advancing that technology into our third generation Ultium batteries, which have a power density safety factor that are much improved even over the second generation. Ultium batteries are unique in the industry because the large-format, pouch-style cells can be stacked vertically or horizontally inside the battery pack. This allows engineers to optimize battery energy storage and layout for each vehicle design. Ultium energy options range from 50 to 200 kWh, which could enable a GM-estimated range up to 400 miles or more on a full charge with 0 to 60 mph acceleration as low as 3 seconds.
Breaking Defense: What’s your vision for vehicle integration for future platforms?
Albritton: We design and deliver our vehicles as fully integrated systems. The modern automobile has more than 30,000 parts that come together and then roll down the road as an integrated system. Military vehicles don’t necessarily come together that way. You’ve got one provider that makes the base vehicle, and then you’ve got a variety of intricate systems that come together to produce an overall mission package.
One of the advantages that we bring is thinking holistically in terms of full integration of a vehicle. That’s exactly what we did to meet the Army’s requirements for the ISV. We took a commercially available midsize truck, a Chevy Colorado, which is the same platform as the GMC Canyon, modified that existing platform and leveraged many of the commercial systems and parts available to us to meet the requirements established by the Army in a fully integrated way.
We can work with the military services on base design engineering and long-term thinking about mission effectiveness and lifecycle support because that’s what we do in commercial markets.
Breaking Defense: Does that include cybersecurity?
Albritton: Absolutely. With next-generation vehicles, there is a lot of interest in autonomous, semi-autonomous, and multi-piloted types of vehicles. Anytime you take the human being out of the loop, you are increasing the risk profile of that platform because from a cybersecurity perspective you’re relying on a computer that can be hacked rather than a human operator. Right now there are no hard requirements for these next-generation vehicles for cybersecurity protections to be baked in.
We do that every day. Our OnStar system has been operating for more than 25 years with more than 20 million vehicles operating daily in our connected ecosystem. It’s inherent in our system to protect our customers and their data from potential cyber threats at the platform level. That’s another capability that we’d like to try to introduce into military platforms over time.
We’re not only active in cybersecurity at the enterprise level but also at the vehicle level. For the last year, General Motors has had a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army CCDC Ground Vehicle Systems Center (GVSC), which aims to strengthen GM’s and the Army’s automotive cybersecurity expertise.
This marks the first automotive cybersecurity partnership of its kind between GVSC and a full-line vehicle manufacturer. Cybersecurity experts from both parties are sharing best practices, methodologies, tools, and approaches focused on conducting penetration testing and cybersecurity risk analysis. In addition to improving cybersecurity processes, both organizations aim to share key learnings with the Society of Automotive Engineers for the development of common standards.
Breaking Defense: Any final thoughts?
Albritton: If you look at the Army’s investments in new types of vehicles, you can see that they are on the cusp of something that’s going to be game changing for them. There is going to be a lot of opportunity for companies to bring them all kinds of new ideas. With the types of capabilities that GM is offering in the commercial space, we’re excited about the opportunity to potentially participate in that market and offer some critical capabilities that could be an advantage for U.S. and allied warfighters. We’re very proud of that.
