http://www.esquire.com/features/cars/cadillac-ats-specs-1012
How to Build an American Car

The new Cadillac ATS may be the most important domestic car since the Model T. It was built from dirt and steel by thousands of people over four years. It was engineered to beat the best foreign cars. But its sound, its feel, its guts are wholly American. It also happens to be Esquire's 2012 Car of the Year.

By Justin Heckert

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Cadillac Ats Chassis
Andrew Tingle

The car is born in the summer, in an old auto town, in a gray factory on a rainy morning in Michigan. The first piece is a hood. Stamped in a press. One flat, shiny piece of aluminum.

Before it was a hood, it was pure bauxite, twenty feet beneath the ground. A bulldozer worked the earth to get it, a million miles from Michigan, in Brazil or Suriname or Jamaica. The bauxite, which looks like dirt, all brown and lumpy, was shipped in a container to the United States, to a giant Alcoa refinery in Texas, where chemicals transformed it into aluminum oxide. Then on to South Carolina, where electricity transformed it into giant slabs, two feet thick and thirty feet long by seven feet wide.

The Alcoa Davenport rolling mill in Iowa, right on the banks of the Mississippi River, is more than a mile long. It covers two towns, Bettendorf and Riverdale. In the mill, the aluminum was fed into a furnace and softened by the heat. Then pressed flat by a rolling system — picture a kitchen and two rolling pins, one atop the other, a piece of dough being stretched between them. The plant in Davenport has something called an EagleCam, which feeds to the Alcoa Web site. Two bald eagles — Liberty and Justice — live on the plant property, under the gaze of a lens, in a seven-foot nest in a tree by the river. Pride of Davenport, outside the building where aluminum is cast into a fire.

The aluminum is trucked to Flint, and Jim Fornash drives more than fifty miles to work with it, to do this job, to inspect one small piece of a car. He has thirty-three years at GM. He has worked on the assembly line, in the trucks, with the robots. He has done almost every job. He was laid off once, during the bankruptcy, and he went on unemployment and was rehired four months later, to check for defects on the surface of the hood. He is using a sandpaper scuff pad. The aluminum reflects dully in his protective glasses as his hands move up and down, to the left and right, and in a circle, and his eyes follow along with his hands. He has been instructed to draw a ring around the defects with a magic marker.

Two of the biggest AA presses in the country are creaking, groaning, stamping aluminum, pressing it into its final shape just a few feet from where Fornash stands. The presses are three stories high and could be mistaken for large trailer homes, with a single row of windows along the sides so that plant workers can see the machinery inside, an intricate tangle of hoses and mechanical arms and giant plates in which the aluminum fits. The tops of the presses are tall enough to almost touch the unfinished ceiling of the plant. They cost $45 million each, and they are anchored in five feet of concrete, so the machinery inside them, its movement, doesn't break the frames. The machines, when they're working, when they're pressing, vibrate and hum. The robotic arms inside the presses lift the hood at each stage, flipping it over, as it's stamped five times within the press. The hum, if you're standing too close, can rattle the heart.

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Andrew Tingle
The andon board at LGR displays information about each workstation.

A man named Ed Armstrong punches a button that says AUTO CYCLE START. A big green button. The press slowly comes to life. The aluminum goes in as a blank, comes out the other side as a hood.

Fornash takes it from a conveyer belt, rubs the hood with the scuff pad. When he's finished, he looks at the aluminum beneath a special light. The light makes the hood look ghostly, it's so clean.

It will become part of the new Cadillac ATS, a car built over four years in paper sketches and on secluded test tracks, constructed under factory lights and in the ether — "in math," on computer software. Its nickname was Alpha, the beginning.

It is a new American car.

He goes to the plant with his old man at the same time every morning, twenty miles to put fenders on the front of a car. He's at his father's cattle farm by 5:30, eighty acres in the middle of nowhere, idling inside his half-ton Silverado under the slight red stain of the Michigan sky. He's never late, because his father threatens to leave without him. They arrive together at the plant, past a security gate and the white facades of the assembly buildings and three long brown stacks of a power plant puffing steam in the dawn. He's just shy of his twenty-third birthday.

He's much shorter than his father, with an unkempt head of blond hair and a thin blond beard. His dad has a mustache, with thick chops. They sit in the plant cafeteria and eat leftovers from home and sandwiches at the round tables. His dad keeps an eye on him while he's working. He dodges the sparks and becomes immune to the sound of machinery, the rattle of overhead chains. He wears protective glasses and pulls long Kevlar sleeves up over his forearms, hooked to his thumbs, so that the metal can't cut his skin.

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Andrew Tingle
An early version of Ray's Rumble.

When Chris Martin was a senior in high school, he sat through classes inside the same room that were part of the Lansing Area Manufacturing Partnership, half of his schooling in preparation to one day build a car. His father, Mike, has spent ten years with the Lansing Grand River assembly plant, or LGR, sixteen years with GM, survived the bankruptcy. His grandfather worked thirty years as a millwright for GM, built the Cutlass; his great-grandfather worked for Oldsmobile in Lansing, back when plant rooms stunk and the floors were slick with oil.

Once, vividly, a few years ago, a cousin pulled up at the farm in a foreign car and tried to show it off. He walked up, nearly spit: "I don't care to see it!" His father, too, with boiling blood: "Don't park that here!"

The car he's building will be the only American luxury compact sport sedan. Ford doesn't have one. Neither does Chrysler. The last Cadillac this size came out more than a quarter century ago, when the brand was still synonymous with luxury and performance. Before, Cadillacs seemed so big. And their drivers seemed so old. GM's building the ATS to compete with the BMW 3 Series, the Mercedes-Benz C-Class, the Audi A4.

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Andrew Tingle
The Journey team constructing driver composites using Post-it notes.

The fender in Chris's hands — he never saw what went into it. The stories behind it. How long it took to get there. He doesn't know as he cinches the fender and moves on to the next that the parts were studied over the course of four years, were first literally ripped from the competition in a warehouse in Warren, Michigan — German fenders, doors, engines — so that engineers could learn about shapes and dimensions, their weight, to figure out how they worked; he doesn't know about the meetings at Cadillac, the decision to declare for the entry-level luxury market and gear the company's brand toward a younger clientele; about the disagreements over engine size and weight; the effort involved in getting GM to spend what it took on the engineering; the challenges of creating a car. Chris never saw that. He was hired specifically to work on this car. The ATS he sees is a silhouette, a skeleton of silver referred to as the Body in White. But it's his car even at that stage, each one that rolls off the line an extension of himself, his family, the hands of a thousand men and women who touched it before him.

Outstretched, the end of Rick Kewley's pinkie to the tip of his thumb measures ten inches. He uses this measurement when he's at Lowe's looking for hardware, and he has been aware of that distance ever since his fingers stopped growing. He has a story about his hands. It's short and sweet. When he was a boy, his father would place his hand and his son's side by side, as a way to check how much the adolescent Kewley had grown. At some point a long time ago, Rick's hands became larger than his father's. Now Rick's son, by the same measuring method, already has hands slightly larger than his.

Rick loves wheels more than any other part of a car. He was a former amateur race-car driver and an Army brat who had a lot of cars, the first one a '72 Corvette. He has worked for GM since leaving the Army. He studied wheels, sat in a ton of foreign cars, and over time something happened when he touched a car: He began to really know what it felt like to drive and was able to describe that sensation, his expertise trusted.

A steering wheel is one of the most important parts of a car, and when it's right it has to do several things ... like steer. But in the words of the man who designed it, it also has to "afford both a small person and big person a pleasant driving experience." It has to allow the driver to see whatever numbers are on the dash. It has to hold an air bag. It has to look good. It has to feel right. It's a pain in the ass.

The chief engineer on the ATS, Dave Masch, coined a question about the wheel: Does it feel good to Rick? That was really the only question that mattered. There were at least two dozen people working on the team designing and building the wheel, just like there was a team for pretty much every other part, and Rick attributes credit to all of his coworkers — but when it came down to feel, it came down to Rick.

The wheel needed to be a driver's wheel. It had to be "fun to drive," the car's guiding slogan. The early prototypes were all wrong, the wheel was too thick. There were several clay versions, and they didn't feel right to Kewley. He would grip the clay and could tell. Then he'd work directly with a designer to change the dimensions. At the time, the wheel was a digital image in a pair of 3-D goggles in a room in Warren called the Cave, with 3-D leather and 3-D stitching. The ATS wheel has eight buttons, four each on its right and left spokes. A black toggle knob sits in between those buttons. The knob can, among other functions, start cruise control and change the station on SiriusXM radio. The ATS wheel has what Rick describes as a good resting place for the thumb when the hands are in the nine and three positions, used by active drivers. The wheel is more of a circle than an oval. Subjectively, Rick thinks the wheel is about a nine out of ten. It barely vibrates during the drive.

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Below Chassis Cadillac Ats
Andrew Tingle

It takes a long time to build an engine. Four Years. The rule Bob Lutz laid down from the beginning was only four cylinders. As GM's vice chairman at the time, Lutz oversaw the ATS's early development, as he did that of the next-generation, 2014 Corvette. But unlike the Vette, which was all about muscle and power, he knew the ATS would have to remain light if it was going to meet its performance goals while staying on the right side of upcoming gas-mileage regulations. This was basically the opposite of every other Cadillac before it, which put power at a premium and paid for it in bulk and weight.

The rear-wheel-drive ATS 2.5-liter turbo and 2.0-liter engines are entirely new and designed in Pontiac. The block; the cylinder head; the intake and exhaust manifolds; all the rotating and reciprocating parts: the crank shaft, the connecting rods, the pistons. The 2.0 gets 272 hp and averages 27 miles per gallon on highways and city streets. The engine starts on a blank sheet of paper as a series of numbers; then as a series of equations for aspect ratios; then as a combustion chamber and a single-cylinder engine, which is revved and tested endlessly. Finally, it becomes a four-cylinder engine, ready to rattle inside a mule car.

Mule cars are development cars, parts built inside and beneath the body of a preexisting model. But the thing about the ATS is that there was no preexisting compact model to use. The only thing Cadillac had remotely that size, the midsize CTS, was eight and a half inches longer. The engineers hacked up a CTS frame until they got what looked like a clown car, trying to get the structure as close as they could get, as well as its center of gravity and roll attributes. The ATS mule rattled around like a sick animal: Its dummy lights were on, its parts jiggled out of place, its wires were exposed, the original CTS dash was in the center stack, the steering wheel and seats didn't quite fit right. It was just so rough, it was multicolored, the delivery of the turbo was very odd, the torque delivery sporadic, it made a noise, it was like a dog walking around without an eye, on a broken leg. Hunggh-ah, hunggh-ah.

For a year, engineers and test drivers drove it around the Milford Proving Grounds changing the parts. The tires. The pistons. The chassis. The brakes. At points, the mule phase slowed the project. But it had to. It had to be right.

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Andrew Tingle
A recently pressed inner-hood panel in Flint.

Taki Karras is sitting in a design conference room in Warren, scrolling through some old ideas, some of his drawings. None of them really look much like the finished car. The wheels are big and take up the entire wells. The curves are more dramatic, more pronounced. The car looks too futuristic and lower to the ground. In most of the pictures, his early ATS has no door handles.

"When I first joined, I was in awe of this place," he says. His parents are from Greece. His father owned a grocery store in Dayton, Ohio, called Karras Market, on Wilmington Pike. There was a magazine rack at the store. Taki couldn't reach the top row, which was stocked with auto magazines, so he used to ask people in the store for them, used to point. He would draw sketches of cars in the break room of the grocery store, Lamborghinis, Lotuses, cars people only dream of. One summer, when he was eleven, he was on a flight home from Greece with his family, and he was holding a toy Ferrari. A woman sitting next to him asked, "Do you want me to draw that for you?" She was an artist. She spent the flight staring at the toy Ferrari and working at her seat on the pull-down tray. When the flight was almost over, she handed him the finished picture as a gift.

For the ATS, "Our orders were to draw a 3 Series sedan-type vehicle, light, agile, sport-inspired," he says.

He was told to have a boldness to the designs. The car had to appeal to a lot of people. While he was working on it, Taki decided to try and make it look avant-garde. He drew views from below the windows and down the sides, with nothing to go on but the boldness and the stuff from his childhood. He focused on the surface. He was criticized in the studio. Your drawings have no door cuts on them. "I was trying to treat it more like a piece of sculpture rather than figuring out really how to make it look like a real car." The front end was the hardest thing to try and capture.

All of the illustrators hung their sketches on a wall in the design room to be critiqued, and those pictures were often chosen, singled out, on the basis of emotional response. Does it have tension? the designers were asked. Does it have life? Does it have gesture? He kept sketching, sketching, sketching. Two months. "It's a competition, let's be honest," he says. He wanted his signature on the car.

One of his pictures, a side view looking forward, was chosen for an actual scale model, metal and foam covered in clay, molded by human hands and digital sculptors. The clay was draped with tinfoil to let light hit the angles, to show how the body of the real car will look, will gleam. The model was put on a motorized turntable at the Warren Tech Center's patio, a secret outside viewing area where it would be studied, the patio shaded by rows of Siberian elms so that no one else can look over the trees as the turntable spins in the light.

The Cadillac user experience is the big screen in the center console of the car. It is all black and shiny and smooth, and was designed soon after the iPhone came out. You touch it as you would an iPhone, expanding maps with your fingers. You open it, too, with a wave of the fingers in front of a sensor. Three hundred fifty people worked to create the CUE. To refine the parts, glass screen, sensors, and sound. To come up with the font: Eurostile. They studied BMW's iDrive system and Mercedes' Comand, seeking to outdo them. To take features that were hard to use and make them better, more intuitive.

As part of research to create the code within it, Cody Hansen and Matt Highstrom hopscotched the country. Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco. Cody was just out of Northwestern and Matt was in his early thirties. Their mission was to meet strangers in a parking lot or at home, get in their car, and take notes. The project had a name: Journey.

When they showed up to meet people, pleasantries were exchanged and Matt and Cody revealed they were from a car company but did not reveal which one. They would wear something unassuming but slightly professional, like khakis. Matt and Cody were two members of a six-member team whose job it was to sit in the passenger seat of someone's car to understand how the people were using their wireless connection, if they were texting, if they were sending e-mails, to see how the navigation system worked out for them while they were driving.

"We would ask for more detail on a particular thing," says Matt. "If I saw someone type out an address and it didn't recognize it, then I'd ask, 'What are you trying to do?' "

Cody met a man with a parrot. This was in San Francisco. The man with the parrot drove an old Infiniti. As he was driving, he turned to Cody, who was silently watching him, taking notes on a digital sketchbook. The man looked at a regular button on the side of his stick shift. He pointed to the button. "This is my Turbo button!" he said, and turned again toward the road. After their ride, Cody went into the man with the parrot's apartment. They were sitting on a couch amid the clutter, facing each other. The man with the parrot was talking about his fiancιe. How she liked to sunbathe in the nude. The parrot took a giant shit on his shoulder and he just kept talking.

Matt and Cody and the other members of the team met people who yelled at their kids. Who texted while driving. Who talked on the phone so much that members of team Journey wanted to stop taking notes and smack them. One woman asked the man next to her at a stoplight if he wanted to go on a date.

After the interviews, the team would reconvene in a hotel room in whatever city they were in, and they'd go over all the interviews, put sticky notes on the walls. The sticky notes formed composites of typical American drivers: "Linda Carter," the on-the-go working mom; "Spencer Green," the tech-savvy guy who's barely driving, he's so busy doing everything else; "Drew Vestoso," a ladies' man who drove an Audi S4 with a custom red-leather interior. Drew had folding mirrors and his fold-up armrest was "convenient" for "things," perhaps of a sexual nature. He was a hypothetical buyer, someone who would want to show off his Cadillac.

People they interviewed hated typing into different fields of their navigation systems, so the CUE has one page that lets you type the whole address on its eight-inch LCD screen. People complained about not knowing how much time it would set them back if they missed an exit, so the CUE plans to address that complaint. People jammed their fingers incessantly into their screens, because when you touch a touch screen it never really feels like you're doing anything. When you touch the screen of the CUE, the screen sends a pulse to the end of your finger. But it doesn't make a sound.

Kyle Stanforth could hear things better than other people. He remembers his mother being in the Sunday church choir when he was a kid, and his ears were good enough that he could pick her voice out of thirty others during a hymn.

The ATS had to sound like a Cadillac. That was a company mandate. And his job. "What does a Cadillac ATS sound like?" he asks. "Refined power," he answers. Not too loud, not too soft. Kyle drove Audi A4's and Benzes, tested them, and none of them hit a specific sound that he liked. The sound he wanted for the ATS is best described as "speak when spoken to," meaning it didn't make a lot of noise until he nosed his foot against the pedal and got it to purr. A Chevy, by comparison, is rougher and huskier than a Cadillac.

The anechoic chamber is a room in which the ceiling and the walls are treated so that the sound threshold is impossibly low, lower than in any other type of room. You can hear a pin drop in the anechoic chamber. You can measure that noise and the other noises of the car's engine. "We can be in there with the car, with everything closed up," he says. "We'll go outside the room and have the car running and have microphones in it, and we'll be operating the car remotely, so you can't hear human breathing. We're trying to eliminate noise."

A good example of this is when you're just driving down the highway, cruising. You really don't want to have too much awareness that the engine's powerful, because if you're cruising, part of the comfort is the absence of engine noise. But when you want to pass someone, when you want to mash the accelerator, you want to hear that thrum, that Oh, yeah ... the kind of sound that hits a nerve in your brain. "If you smash the pedal and it sounds like loose marbles, you haven't done it right," Stanforth says.

First is the power-train dyno. That's when the engine and transmission are put into the chamber with a bunch of microphones and accelerometers. If something vibrates enough, it's going to make a noise. They expect people to drive the car hard, and so they have to test the engine at that level, they have to push it.

The ATS sound test began with surveys. First impressions. Then there was a synthesized version of what the car would sound like while it was being driven, and the team would stand there with headphones and listen, making comments and suggestions. It had to be refined, but the car couldn't sound like a reserved, cold German machine. It was an American car. More growl, it couldn't be tinny. Finally to the point where the executive chief engineer of the car, Dave Leone, the Simon Cowell of the process — the guy with the strongest opinion and most influence — said, "Yeah, if you make it sound like this, we'll win."

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Cadillac Ats Chassis On Orange Arms

The vibrating seat was Ray's idea. Massage the ass, prevent a wreck.

Ray Kiefer is an academic, not a car guy, with a Ph.D. in cognitive process from Wayne State University, in Detroit, and though he works for GM, he cares less about cars and more about studying how people behave inside them. Way too much information inside a car, anyway, and Ray's seat is a response to it — the beeping, the buzzing, the chirping, stuff that either everyone hates or no one pays any attention to, the modern car a machine of distraction and the modern driver struggling to pay attention even to the road. He'd been working on the seat for years, at first called a Haptic Seat and then a Safety Alert Seat.

Ray, in his button-down shirt tucked into blue jeans, describing the idea of the vibrating seat to a conference room full of General Motors suits, made little sense. They had to sit in it so that they could let it wiggle beneath them, let its tiny motors come alive, experience the sensation that would earn his seat the nickname "Ray's Rumble," a second-long bvvvfffttt up the left or right butt cheek.

After the suits took turns, "they understood," he says. "It's actually an elegant, discreet way to present the information. And it works."

The Ray's Rumble motors — some provided by a company that makes massage chairs — buzz whenever the car is drifting out of its lane, either on the left side of the seat or the right. The driver will straighten the car but never know about Ray, that he studied pager motors inside old seats to try to figure out where the vibration worked best. That the fifty-one-year-old was inspired by how the hearing-impaired utilize tactile modality. That the vibrations rippled the pant seats of GM higher-ups and maybe cut a smile through the boardroom. Or that Ray actually patented his Rumble, U. S. Patent Number 7,245,231.

Michelle Killen picked the paint, the first thing anyone sees on a car. Colors divide everyone, of course. Nowhere was this more evident than during meetings to discuss the colors of the ATS. Thirty people in a room, four years ago, arguing paint with Michelle. "I noticed how people reacted to the names of the paint," she says. "The prototype paints had very serious names, like subterranean. Shades of blue, red, gold, gray. In our meetings, people would basically try and do everything in their power so the color wouldn't make it on the vehicle if they hated it." So she came up with better names. Names to ease the hate. Names that no one but her coworkers were intended to hear: Golden Globe; Tin Roof, Rusted; Ladies and Magentamen. Names that evoked a memory. And when her boss had to start saying "Tin Roof, Rusted" twenty times during the slog of a presentation, he didn't want to fight; he wanted to sing. Everyone wanted to sing. "At that point, it became inspiring," she says.

Blue was the first ATS color she ever worked on, and it has a real name on the Cadillac Web site: Opulent Blue. Seriously, though, her color: basically, Michelle Killen Blue. That color did not come from one dress or one amazing couch or one picture that she could point to and say that it was the color. She picked out colors from dresses that were in style, but she did not want to base her color on one dress, because one shade of blue would never be perfect, would never have enough of what she calls backbone. A beautiful blue that was in for spring might be out for fall.

She was a lighting designer for eight years. She learned a lot about how different lights can change the color of cars, about understanding moods — moods that you can create with different types of lighting. She worked with paint suppliers at PPG, DuPont, BASF, and with chemists in their labs to develop the colors. She wanted her blue to show a lot of chroma, which means she wanted it to be brighter than BMW's blue, to show a kind of motionless performance. Chroma refers to how much luster a color has, how intense it is. Color space and pigments determine chroma. She tells the paint supplier: I want it brighter. They mix more pigments of the color, and send the color back. This happens several times during the process. When it's ready, the color is sprayed from something called a bell by a paint robot in Lansing. The bell is like a high-tech shower nozzle that spins really quickly, atomizes the paint, and sprays Opulent Blue on the car.

The vice-president of global design called her one afternoon. He had seen a preproduction Opulent Blue ATS being tested on Interstate 696, near Warren. "I'm really glad I listened to you," he said.

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Installing windshields.

The robots are listening. The robots are awake. The robots are moving. The robots are turning toward each other and pausing. The robots are big yellow arms at Trim 4 on the assembly line. One arm lifts the glass rear window of the ATS and holds it in the air, even spins it around. The other robot, smaller and to the right of the bigger one, applies urethane to the window's edge. They are both called Fanuc Robots, made by a company headquartered in Rochester Hills, Michigan. The piece of tooling on the end of the bigger arm is a suction cup; the piece applying the urethane is called an end-effector. The robots are fit to handle both models produced at Lansing Grand River, the CTS and the ATS. The robots are in nearly every GM plant. They have been at LGR since 2001. The humans and robots work together; the human workers and the robot workers coexist.

If you face the robots and watch them for a while, it is hard not to get hypnotized by their repetition, by the accuracy of their movement, by the simple mechanization with which they do their job. It is hard not to like them or just kind of be in awe of them. In fact, if you were standing there being handed the back window of the ATS by one of these robots, you would have to trust it, because the window is a huge piece of glass, and so you could probably, over time, imagine the robot having a kind of soul.

The yellow robot arms turn very quickly and very precisely. The robots hand the windshield forward on the line. The robots are awakened in the morning, and one imagines them curling up and going to sleep at night.

The cows wake up, too, on farms across America. The future seats, wrapped over those patented, ass-tickling motors. GM buys its leather from Eagle Ottawa, in Auburn Hills, Michigan, a global supplier of leather for cars. The cowhides come from places without barbed-wire fences, so the cows can't cut rake across the wire and puncture their skin.

Thomas Prevost, a designer for the ATS, heard from a hide supplier that if automobile companies were not using leather to furnish their rides, every year those remaining cowhides would form a stack as high as the Empire State Building . Prevost, a Frenchman, pronounces Cadillac "Kah-dee-yak." He helped design the interior of the car, the carpet, the leather, and the grain. The carpet was new. It was a thicker "loop" carpet, just for the ATS, a year of work. And at fourteen ounces, two ounces thicker than the tuft carpet in other Cadillacs. But compromises had to be made. The loop carpet was too heavy, even by two lousy ounces. So were the doors' interior supports. The car had to be light. So the loop carpet was scratched, perhaps to be used in a car of the future. A new, lighter, natural-fiber material was created for the door support.

The name of the seat leather is Soleil Keisel.

In the GM trim shop, there are very powerful sewing machines. One in particular, made by the company Juki, has the ability to produce different types of seams. Parts of the interior of the ATS are sewn with brand-new stitching Prevost nicknamed Converj. The stitches look like a line of V's running up the dash, the door armrest, and center console. In order for the machine to sew through four layers of material, the mechanisms inside the sewing machine are made of nearly unbreakable tiny metal parts. To sew the V's, the V being a historical part, a shape, of the Cadillac brand identity.

The V's had to be just right.

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Cadillac Ats Workers
Andrew Tingle

But it's hard to get right. It really is. It's hard to build cars for a certain way for more than a hundred years, big, swaggering cars for older men, cars called "luxo-boats" by Cadillac employees, and then totally change direction and build something smaller. It's hard to sell suppliers on the change — to get them to think smaller, slimmer, to cut the weight of the parts; to convince them that changing the way GM does parts for the car will not be a mistake; to not follow the same in-house company-focused metrics, like reusing a percentage of the parts from a prior car; to get the designers who wanted nineteen-inch wheels to think seventeen; to convince the number crunchers that in order to win the marketplace, the car had to be demonstrably superior — and not just on the outside.

There's a secret walled park in Milford, Michigan, a kind of legendary place called the Proving Grounds. On a plot of asphalt called the Black Lake, about the size of sixty football fields put together, birds dive out of the sky onto the ground because they think the road is water. There are rutted obstacle courses full of potholes and bumps and a runway of porcelain tile sprayed with water, to see how the car behaves in the rain.

But there is one part of the Proving Grounds that is tougher than the others: The Ride and Handling loop is a merciless piece of road. It hasn't changed much in a half century. Every new Cadillac must go through the loop. To test how well it handles, how well it behaves, how well it drives under the most ridiculous conditions. It is a loop that has broken many cars before it. And when a car breaks, when it doesn't handle well enough, when it rides too rough or doesn't perform like it should, the car is sent back to its engineers to be changed, to be strengthened, to be reinforced so that it can pass muster the next time. This loop — getting a good evaluation on this loop — is one reason that Cadillacs have historically always been so heavy.

The ATS was the first Cadillac in the brand's history that couldn't simply beat the loop with heft. Here was a car that forced the engineers to come up with new technical solutions for the loop. The day the ATS emerged from the loop still intact, still light and nimble, having survived not with brute stockiness but with smarter engineering, was the day that Cadillac conquered the Proving Grounds.

The car began as a calculated engineering challenge, but it evolved. It growls. Its seat vibrates. Its shape is angular, aggressive, sharp. It is not distant or quiet. It is warm. American.

It is born when its parts come together, thousands of parts from here and all over the world. With shocks from Ohio. Electronic components, like radar, from Japan. The interior door panels and instrument panels from Mexico. The Brembo brakes from Italy, assembled in Michigan. The tires from South Carolina. And the hood from Flint, delivered in a truck to Lansing.

It's 8:00 A.M. on the assembly line at Lansing Grand River, at a point on the line called Trim 3, after the car is painted and before its wheels are attached. Address post 37-L, beneath high ceilings crosshatched by exposed pipe. A woman named Stacey Styes is standing on a wooden platform called a skillet. The skillet is square and big enough to hold the body of a car, and attached to a conveyor belt beneath it, which moves the skillet and Stacey down the line. Wearing sneakers and cutoff jean shorts, she's leaning against the trunk of the painted body of an ATS. Long, curly hoses hang from the ceiling around her. The body of the car has no doors and no wheels. Her arms are exposed by a sleeveless T-shirt, and they are toned. She has two tattoos on her right arm: one she describes as a half-naked "pinup girl," and the other is of three flowers, representing her three daughters and, by extension, this place where she works on the assembly line. That is, she worked on the line, building the CTS, until just before each of her daughters was born. Stacey used to be a waitress at a bar called the Gavel, in Charlotte, Michigan. She landed this job twelve years ago because some GM employees kept coming in and drinking beer at the restaurant. One day they asked her if she'd be interested in working at a plant. She works on the ATS, and one of her jobs is installing the CHMSL, that Cadillac-specific sliver of a taillight at the top of the trunk.

The plant is moving around her, and standing near the line it is impossible not to feel that movement, impossible not to see and hear the plant breathe. The sounds are visceral. The pieces are moving. The doors are moving by themselves, marching on a door carrier to meet up with the bodies at a later spot down the line. The cars are moving, of course, slowly to each station, going up the conveyor in trim and coming down for chassis. The conveyor chains are moving, clacking, omnipresent overhead. The wooden skillets are moving. The giant orange arms with padding, called car carriers, are latched on to cars like claws, carrying them down the line. Lights are flashing and songs are playing and men and women are riding atop machines called tuggers, pulling parts behind them over the concrete floor of the plant. The bicycle wheels are moving, riding near the yellow painted lines, the quickest way for workers in the plant to get from A to B. Stacey and her coworkers have less than one minute to complete a specific task on the line. If she runs into a problem, she pulls a cord and stops the line. The cord is connected to a board visible on the ceiling of the plant called the andon board, which looks like something from the stock exchange. When the cord is pulled, a song specific to each station is played to alert team leaders where the cord has been pulled. Songs were chosen by workers on the line and sound like elementary-school flutophones. The Dallas theme. "Greensleeves." The Michigan State University fight song. "Puff, the Magic Dragon."

http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/X1/esq-cobalt-blue-cadillac-ats-1012-lg.jpg
Andrew Tingle
The ATS in Opulent Blue. It's priced toward first-time luxury-car buyers at $33,990. For more on why the ATS was selected Esquire's 2012 Car of the Year, and to see our annual car awards, turn to page 96.

One day in late July, the machines stopped at LGR. The noise was gone. The chains were still, the robots were asleep, the tuggers were parked in a corner, car frames hung close together in the background of the plant like toys in the window of a shop. It was the end of the first shift. A car, Crystal Red with an all-black interior, drove into the final assembly beneath a bank of special lights, where workers on each side of the car, men and women, opened the doors, pulled back the seats, checked the glass, fiddled with the overhead mirror, checked the CUE, kicked the tires, opened the trunk and tested its lights, looked at the CHMSL, gripped the wheel, inspected the leather — studied the whole thing like a mother letting a child go into the world. For the very first time.

And then it drove away.

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Very cool article. Good find. I like how personal it gets to show the steps.