Bill, that comment was quite obviously tongue-in-cheek. I know you were on the C5 project, so I expected to step on your toes with that statement. But I refuse to apologize for it because the interior of the C5 is quite simply indefensibly bad. It's inferior to cars that cost a fraction of what the C5 did. It's inferior to other GM cars from that same time period. Don't get me wrong. I LOVE my C5, and I respect it for what it is. Which is to say one of the best cost to performance ratios ever built. But the interior is fantastically bad. And to defend it defines blindness.

 

When I first sat in my Z some 10 years ago I was impressed with the interior. I felt like I was sitting in an airforce jet fighter cockpit and couldn't wait to engage someone. Plush is for a different type of car, not a vette. It was light years ahead of my 76, and much better than the trucks/vans I normally drive for work. Back on point, a harmonic balancer pulley walking off is not a common.

 

I'm not looking for plush. It's more a lack of fit and finish and attention to detail. Like the things I mentioned already ... the radio bezel popping off, the huge gaps between the panels, the floppy eared sun visors, the poor quality seats that cut themselves apart, etc. etc. You can still have a well assembled interior while being relatively spartan.

 

it certainly " IS" defensible:
Where light weight, and staying within budget are the number one priorities in the interior design. MAKE IT LIght!... we changed things to save ounces, went from plastic to fiber board, we have the ability to make a great interior. We could have put 300 lbs seats with thick leather, strong heavy frames and padding and metal components. we could have easily added 500 lbs to the interior and 3,000 dollars in cost to manufacture just in the interior. but those costs and weight were not a priority... As Ive said 100 times, we put the money in performance not in creature comforts so we could stay within budget, and light enough to escape the guzzler tax. If we made it the quality that some demand, in all areas of the project, most of us could have never afforded it. We could have made carbon fiber seats and a lot of carbon in the interior and titanium components, but again, it would have put the car out of the designed budget.
People who constantly talk about the poor quality of interior components , don't really understand how a car is manufactured.
We look at the demographic ( who we would want to buy this car ) Age , financial ability etc.
we then design a cost to manufacture around that demographic ( the Budget )
IN the case of a Corvette another priority is the weight. Dave wanted us under the Guzzler tax and he wanted a 200,000 mile bench marked engine. This first in the industry
With most other cars, weight is a factor but weight is far down the list of priorities.
IN a Corvette weight is critical. We made many revisions from original design to keep the car light. One example is the Z06 windshield. it cost more to manufacture a thinner windshield to save a few pounds, but the weight was more important than the cost. FYI all of these things are controlled by project managers who keep their projects on time and within budget. Weight reductions are given a high priority because a revision takes time to change. So juggling time and money and weight can be a challenge.
Between the sound proofing and the interior seat quality, the difference in weight between a luxury car and a C5 could be as much as 500 lbs. and we are only talking 2 seats in the luxury car and about 300 lbs in soundproofing.
The moral of this story is , be thankful that some of the components are light weight and cheap, otherwise our 50,000 dollarAmerican icon could have easily been a 4,000 lb. 65,000 offering,16 years ago

 

Lets just take those sun visors. Did you ever take one apart? notice that they are very light!, notice that they are made of very thin Balsa type wood. Do you think we have the ability to make a better visor? those visors cost to manufacture was 50% less than a Cadillac, and half the weight. Anyone involved in any project on the C5 was given a high priority if the revision changed an original design with a weight reduction. talking about fit and finish. AS I stated before, the tighter you make the tolerances, the more it cost to make them. 12 years ago, I stated if this car came off the line in Stuttgart Germany and had a Porsche badge on it, it would have cost 100K.

 

This must be a LS6/Z06 thing, because I've never used a box wrench on my LS1.

 

I don't know about that. Have you sat in any Pontiac-branded product from that time period? They are were terrible! They got better in the very end but then GM killed the brand.

 

While the weight argument certainly carries a lot weight (no pun intended) there are many places where that excuse simply doesn't cut the mustard, Bill. The radio bezel for instance as well as the panel gaps. I understand stacked tolerances. I too am an engineer. But saving weight doesn't explain away the need to make such sloppy tolerances. Unless your claim is simply a lack of experience with unfamiliar materials? The C6 seems to have a much better interior.

Saving weight also doesn't explain the logic of trying to support the mass of an adult male with a foam pad laid over half a dozen parallel wires that started to slice through it the day it rolled out of BG. Nor does it explain wrapping leather over a piece of steel with 90° edge that also started slicing through that on the car's birthday. These are things I personally addressed in my C5 without adding any weight. All I added was thought.

Again, I love my C5. And I'm glad there were smart people like you working on it. But it has its shortcomings, and many of those are found in the passenger cabin IMHO.

 

My wife drives an '04 GPGT. It has more miles (97k) than my '02 coupe. The seats are excellent ... much better bolsters than my C5. The panels all fit together. Nothing is popping out of the dash.

 

The C5 is far from perfect, I never said it was.. but when the boss says make it lighter. and the budget manager says the cost to manufacture the bezel has to be low enough to keep us within budget. You design with in the parameters of the demand. and BTW, if the Bezel is installed properly , with load being placed on the 2 crews and two bolts at the base of the consol. you can indeed make it fit without gaps.. if anything, its a short coming on the Line at BG. All the parts mathematically fit, within the design tolerances. Also some designs are compromised by the launch date. When any second tier manufacturer has a cut off date for revisions, problems found within the design can not be changed. Its all about time. We were making product, had molds built ( 100,000 dollars ) where we had no time to build new molds, and had to figure out how to use the components in a sub straight that no longer had the same dimensions. It happens all the time. Field debugging is something everyone uses now to make a good product better, and it comes from feedback in the field...we just don't have the time before launch to make everything perfect. I always find it interesting when people don't grasp the concept of imperfection, and focus in on all that is wrong with anything, rather than all that is right.. e.g.. my job sucks, I don't make enough money, my marriage sucks, My corvette has crappy sound, and poor seats. I look at the c5 for all that it is, not all that it isn't. ON the other hand I recognize its short comings and don't really put people down for pointing them out.. they just don't understand how hard it is to bring a new design to market with a tight budget and time restraints.

 

If that's the impression you got my from my posts, then you're not reading them fully.

 

No my comments was not about you... or your comments, I know exactly where you are coming from and that's fine with me.. I'm speaking in general. People bitch about their job when other just hope to find a job... some people bitch about their wife , and others only wish to have a wife lover companion and someone to share their life. Some people bitch because they only make 100K and others can raise a family on half of that.

 

That was the generation I was saying of where they fixed a lot of the issues. The prior generation, the 97-03 which I was thinking of, did not have much going for it other than it was very fast in a straight line with the supercharged 3800.

 

I hear ya. And FWIW I agree that if it was the Porsche Corvette, zee Germans might have been able to sell the car with the same performance specs for 104k instead of 52k.