General Motors Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson drives a classic 1960 Chevrolet Corvette down Woodward Avenue with Vice Chairman Steve Girsky riding in the passenger seat. No smoky burnouts for these Wall Street bean counters.
Woodward Avenue notorious of late for the world’s largest gathering of hot rodders and classic car enthusiasts has a long fabled history that mirrors the rise of the Detroit based automobile industry.
Woodward was the first concrete highway in the world in 1909. Three years later, the first electric traffic light was installed on the road that runs from downtown Detroit to downtown Pontiac, both desperately poor cities now reflecting a global industrial shift.
However, in the hay day of the Detroit Three, who really were the Big Three in the 1950s and 1960s, General Motors used Woodward Avenue not only as a rolling marketing clinic to see what kids were driving, but also as a model for a durability test still in use.
GM sent engineers to Woodward Avenue as early as 1967 to simulate some of the forces placed on manual transmissions as muscle cars laid down rubber for miles on end. The Woodward test procedure combines elements of the worst-case shifting style street racers, including repeated high-torque launches and high-rev shifts.
“We’ve been evolving the Woodward test to make sure our transmissions live through repeated performance-style shifting,” said Brad Bur, GM assistant chief engineer for manual transmissions, which are increasingly rare but still available on the Chevrolet Corvette, Camaro and Cadillac CTS.
“Of course we encourage safe driving, but we know burnouts and quick shifting are the reality. We have to design and engineer our transmissions to succeed in every possible scenario, including the street.”
Transmission components such as clutches and gears have been improved over the years through tests like the Woodward test, which is responsible for a nearly 600% increase in flawless transmission shift cycles, according to Bur.
“This is one of the ways we are able to offer one of the best powertrain warranties in the business,” said Bur. “We use this test on all our performance manual transmissions like those found in the Chevrolet Corvette and Camaro.”
Woodward Avenue is home of the Dream Cruise this weekend, a vintage car cruise that dates to the cruising heydays of the 1950s and 1960s. It takes place along Woodward Avenue in Detroit and its northern suburbs. The Dream Cruise routinely gathers hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, participants and spectators to celebrate the automotive heritage of the Motor City.
