Quote:
Originally Posted by Martinjlm
I totally agree with everything you said except the bold. My biggest pet peeve with the Alpha platform (pick a brand) is the trunk opening. I was assigned a CTF vehicle for the ATS launch. THE first Alpha product. After a week of driving it, I was talking to the chief engineer about who knows what and mentioned to him how much I hated the trunk opening. He went into great detail to explain to me that making any change to the body in white structure of that opening would either reduce the torsional rigidity and therefore compromise handling or require additional bracing elsewhere which could fix the handling, but add mass.
Long story short, the trunk opening is a result of meeting the performance and mass targets. Changing it would have required missing one or the other. As you point out in the rest of your post, GM was in “fulfill the passion” mode. The enemy was 3-Series, and no prisoners would be taken. Camaro, of course, inherited the same trunk opening for the same reasons, since now it was baked into the architecture. On the plus side, my weeks with that 2.0T ATS is what made me decide I was gonna buy a 6th Gen Camaro.
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Now that is interesting. I guess that makes sense, I guess I just thought with how good GM performance has been in the last 15 years they would have been able how to figure out how to get some of that performance back. l