GM Stories: The Curse of Camo

I remember it like it was yesterday: I was maybe 13 or 14, tearing through the latest issue of Motor Trend, Car and Driver, or Road and Track, looking at all the cool cars that were coming out or that those magazines were testing. Inevitably, one thing caught my eye, and that was the cars that were in the future, the ones that the car companies hid with lots of camoflauge and fake rubber. the pages I was looking at back then were very similar to the one above from a recent issue of Motor Trend. They looked so cool. Anything could be under there. A gorgeous front end with a mean hood scoop. Sleek looking front lights, and an engine that could take you to the moon and back in two seconds. Anything could be there, but you had to wait until next year when the car companies released the new cars they had been testing. I always thought it would be amazing to drive one of those camo cars. Well, I was half right!

Fast forward to the late 1990s: Mesa, Arizona. My car for the day was to be a protoype Pontiac Aztek. If you find yourself saying, "what?" don't be surprised. They were not very noteworthy cars, except for maybe their looks, which weren't highly praised. Here's what one looked like:

 Except, of course, it didn't look anything like this. The entire car, with the exception of the windows and tires of course, was covered in a black, rubber-like material, with built in extensions at certain points to fool the automotive press into thinking that the shape was different than it was going to be. For instance on the Aztek above, I remember there being huge foam pads on the sides of the hood, to make the fenders seem larger, and another set of huge foam pads surrounding the rear window, to make the car look more box-like.

At this point, a camoflaged car doesn't sound so bad, right? You are driving a car, out in public, that is hidden from everyone, and only a few people know what it looks like. The trouble came inside the car itself. One thing I need to explain before I go further is that test cars are made for one of two reasons: to either test one component or a small group of components, or to test the whole car. More often than not, the camoflaged cars, called mules in the industry, were being tested for one component, so that is all the engineers were worried about. The Aztek I had that day had components in it cobbled from other cars, and this was pretty common back then. Your steering wheel might be from a Pontiac. Your instruments might be from a Chevrolet. Your radio might be from an Oldsmobile. Your seat might be from a  GMC truck. The engineers took whatever they had at hand often times to fulfill whatever need they had. Again, not so bad, but oftentimes, the radio wouldn't work, or the A/C would blow hot air, or a thousand other things that could go wrong with using a bunch of parts not meant to be used together. And this wasn't just in the Aztek. I remember driving a mule Saturn Vue, which looks like this without camo:

and it was honestly one of the worst cars I ever drove. Nothing worked on it, not the air conditioning, not the radio, not half of the components inside the car. In fact, it was so bad that it broke down on me during testing, but that's why they test them in the first place!

Let's get back to the Aztek, though. The best part of driving the Aztek was the washing, though. For some reason, even though the entire car was covered in camo, the engineers in charge wanted the body washed once every two days or a week. So the driver had to take the Aztek in to the car wash facility (we actually had two car washes at the GM Desert Proving Grounds in Mesa. One was an auto wash like you'd find at a gas station, and the other was a hand washing bay.) The Aztek had to be washed in the hand wash facility, and to ensure secrecy, the doors on both the entry and exit of the handwash facility had to be closed. Not so great during the summer, but I digress! Then all of the camoflauge had to be stripped away. This is the equivalent of taking down a big tent, and then putting it back up again, there were clips that clipped to the fender, velcro that held down other parts, and buckles that held still other parts. When all of that was done, and the car stood essentially naked, it was washed front to back, top to bottom. Keep in mind, the car was never seen in public like this, so no one but the engineers, mechanics, and the poor driver washing it, ever saw it without its camoflage on. Then the car was dried off, and, you guessed it, all the camoflage put back on. The entire process took about two hours to do, and the car could not leave the wash bay until all the camoflage was put back on. Needless to say, not most drivers favorite thing.

I ended up driving many camoflaged cars and trucks during my time at The GM Desert Proving Grounds. Some were betas like the Aztek described above. Others were closer to being done, and were much nicer in fit and finish. But I will never forget those cobbled together cars. Whether they were Cadillac prototypes, Saturn mules, or Pontiac proof vehicles, they all shared a lot of camoflage, broken interior components, and the feel that some of them were destined to break down at any moment.

But I do have to say that driving something that no one else was meant to see was pretty cool. The washing of the car, the having to cover the car during all breaks, even on the proving grounds, and the other procedures were a bit of a pain. But just like most things at the proving grounds were, the coolness factor overrode the mundance aspects of doing what we had to do on a daily basis. Until next time...