General Motors has been speeding down the track like a train with a purpose. What is GM’s purpose? To pay out all of their outstanding loans and invest for a better tomorrow. General Motors Chairman and Chief Executive confirmed today that General Motors has made payment on the $5.4 billion loan (2 billion of the loan was already paid) to the U.S. government, $700M of which was interest. Ouch. This payment was made five years ahead of schedule and illustrates GM’s progress since declaring bankruptcy last July. General Motors has also been able to repay loans to the Canadian and Ontario governments totaling $1.1 billion (in addition to the $400 million already paid). How’s that for progress?
General Motors is putting up some roots in South Korea after the US automaker officially opened its Seoul Advanced Design Studio today. The new design studio, which is located at the up-scale district of Gangnam, will house GM’s interior and exterior styling for all of the brand’s mini and small car designs all over the world.
All in all, the new design studio in Seoul will house over 30 of GM’s designers, in addition to the numerous other employees under GM’s payroll.
Ed Welburn, GM’s Vice President of Global Design, noted that the selection of Gangnam as the location for the brand’s new design studio was attributed to the city’s trendy lifestyle. “Our car designers get inspiration from life and Gangnam is a place where people worship design, style and fashion,” he said. “Our Korean designers will sample perfection every day surrounded by some of the top brands and fashion houses in the world and this ideal location will nurture their creative souls."
Among the GM vehicles that have already been designed by the team that will now be based in Seoul includes the Chevrolet Cruze, the Spark and the new Aveo RS.
You gotta love those crash test dummies. Not only do they play an integral part in ensuring that the vehicles we drive are up to par with today’s safety standards, but contrary to what the name suggests, these crash test dummies are anything but stupid.
General Motors has a bunch of these state-of-the-art proxy humans in their Anthropomorphic Test Device Laboratory, and as they so generously show us in this latest VoltAge video, modern crash test dummies now come with their own recording device that is about the size of a cellphone. What this does is removes the burdensome old practice of having these devices put on the test car’s exterior, resulting in a complicated wiring system.
Apart from that, these modern test dummies are also more sensitive to their predecessors, which is a good thing because it allows company’s like GM to gather more pertinent data that could end up being used to determine a vehicle’s safety standards.
Over the course of a number of months we’ve been bombarded by Chevrolet with photos, videos, and even a detailed description of the Chevy Volt.
By the sheer amount of time and money being invested on this car, you would think that it should, at the very least, already be in the production stages, right?
Well, as it turns out, developing such a car takes longer than any of us ever expected. Yet, despite the slow-rolling of the Volt, Chevy has remained pretty steadfast in their commitment to making the Volt a reality and their latest piece of good news seems to be a step in the right direction.
According to Chevrolet, the first pre-production Volt recently rolled out of the company’s production facility in Hamtramck, Michigan.
Just so we don’t get ahead of ourselves, we have to point out that the car is a pre-production model, which is pretty much a glorified test car to determine whether the Volt is up to par to the enormously high standards General Motors has given it. But even if it is a ‘pre-production’ model, the mere fact that something finally rolled out of the assembly line leads us to believe that the Volt could very well end up out on the road one day.
You’ll never mistake a professional sports athlete for having a good head on the world of art, let alone make the art themselves.
Retired England cricket captain Michael Vaughan wants you to know that it does happen and he’d be all too happy to show you that he’s exhibit number 1.
After retiring from playing cricket, Vaughan has found a new way to spend his post-playing days by becoming a self-proclaimed art-baller, which, if you don’t know, constitutes to hitting paint-soaked cricket balls at blank canvases until he finds an ‘image’ that he’s happy with.
General Motors seems to have taken a liking on Vaughan’s work that they commissioned him to make an art-ball-inspired Chevrolet Cruze. From what we’ve read, the entire project took about eight hours to make and used up about five gallons of paint. Vaughan even takes time to describe the whole process on how he became interested in art-ball and also gives us a close look at the man in cricket-swinging action.
