Being one of the long-time champions in Camaro5 of weight reduction on the Camaro, I'm extremely happy to see this being a focus from the top down at GM. I'm also wondering how they're going to implement this. That would take the current SS at a factory stated weight of 3860 down to 3281 which is great but at what cost? That's a LOT of weight to remove.
I documented everything I did in my project thread
http://www.camaro5.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45165
and I was able to reduce the car about 190 lbs without gutting it. It wasn't cheap to do so. Removing 579 lbs which is what a 15% reduction would be seems rather extreme. I'm all for it but I'd be perfectly happy with a 5-10% reduction if it was the right kind of weight. Even a 5% reduction would take it to 3667 which is great; I'm at 3690 on mine and with the increase in power the car really moves, and it moves quick.
If they focused on removing unsprung and unsprung rotating weight, that would be a more modest reduction but would have a much greater effect on performance than just removing dead weight. For example I could remove 100 lbs out of the interior and the car
might seem a tad quicker, but if I removed 100 lbs by taking 25 lbs of unsprung weight from each wheel/corner? The difference would be startling. If the money spent on carbon fiber panels etc. to remove 100 lbs of dead weight were instead spent on lighter wheels, brake rotors, driveshaft, etc. to remove 100 lbs, you'd be shocked at how much different the car would be compared to just having lighter body panels.
I think 5-8% is realistic without seriously increasing the price of the car, with 5% being very realistic. However since he said 2016 that means they're working on it right now in order to get a car finished, certified and ready to be produced in time for 2016. If he's talking model year, that means these cars would go on sale in 2015...just 2 years from now. That seems rather ambitious and I just hope it doesn't increase the base cost of an SS to $40k and 1LE, Z/28, ZL1's go up from there.
(Yes I know they haven't said anything about a Z/28 but it's ridiculous to think they're going to let such a legendary model just sit in the dust bins of history.)