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New V6 engines are only the start at Cadillac

Cadillac debuted its new family of V6 engines Friday, but that's not all General Motors' luxury brand has in store for the coming years. The six-cylinder powerplants will certainly help Cadillac in the near term, but they're just two of the many parts of the company's future strategy. GM has invested $12 billion in Cadillac to help the brand grow over the next five years, and the company will launch eight new products between now and 2020. That all starts with the launch of the CT6 flagship later this year – a fullsize luxury sedan we'll see for the first time in New York on March 31. The CT6 will introduce several new features and technologies to the Cadillac range, and with its launch also begins the slow restructuring of Cadillac's model-naming system. The new nomenclature means CT and XT badges for cars and utilities, respectively. Cadillac says that of the eight new vehicles it plans to launch by 2020, five of them will be first-time offerings in market segments where the brand currently does not play. But it's not just about new products – new powertrains are an important part of the Cadillac story, too. After the new V6 engines – a naturally aspirated 3.6-liter and a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter engine – launch later this year in the 2016 ATS, CTS and CT6, the company says it has a strategy for V8 power – possibly a twin-turbo application – as well as future electrification. Cadillac also says it's working on adding four- and six-cylinder diesel powertrains, though it's unclear which vehicles will make use of those engines. This new six-cylinder engine family is indeed important, with Cadillac's chief engineer, David Leone, calling it the "most advanced V6 in the industry." With 335 horsepower, the 3.6-liter engine is the highest output, naturally aspirated V6 powerplant Cadillac has done – and that's SAE-certified, and on regular fuel. Beyond that, the 3.0-liter mill (pictured at right) marks the first application of GM's active fuel management system on a twin-turbocharged engine. This means that when full power isn't necessary, the TTV6 can run as a 2.0-liter V4 in order to save fuel. New transmissions are also part of the V6 engine story. GM's all-new eight-speed Hydra-Matic 8L45 gearbox will be paired to the 3.6-liter V6, and the 3.0-liter TTV6 will use the company's existing 8L90 transmission that is already found in the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups (with the 6.2-liter engine).

MIT puts V2V technology on its 2015 Top Ten list

Of all the technologies swimming around the automotive world, it is vehicle-to-vehicle communication that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has fished out as one of its Ten Breakthrough Technologies of 2015. It joined emerging tech like brain organoids, supercharged photosynthesis, and Project Loon on the list, and got the nod over autonomous driving because, as the MIT Technology Review wrote, V2V communication "is likely to have a far bigger and more immediate effect on road safety." How so? Because actual cars transmitting data like their location, speed, steering angle, and state of braking to one another at least ten times per second provides a greater degree of awareness than sensor readings and algorithms. The US Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have been working for years on standards and a regulatory schedule for introducing V2V to the marketplace, and Cadillac plans to incorporate V2V into at least one of its vehicles by 2017. Since we've begun the year with a number of stories of cars being hacked into, that got us wondering about the security of V2V communications. In a recent piece by our own Pete Bigelow on what motorists should know about getting their cars hacked into, he wrote that although cyber break-ins are extremely difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to do remotely, V2V is "one more conceivable avenue a hacker could use to impact multiple cars at a given time." So we spoke to Wilmington, Massachusetts-based Security Innovation about it. The automotive consultancy company has been working with the DOT since 2003 on V2V technology and the issues around it - namely security and privacy - and its chief scientist, William Whyte, is the technical editor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1609.2 standard outlining its security protocols. Those protocols are expected to be finalized by the DOT toward the end of this year and then come into effect in 2016, and the company's Aerolink product is the security solution Cadillac will use. Whyte said, "If you hack into a car, V2V is the hardest place to start," and Pete Samson, the general manager of Security Innovation's automotive team, said "There are ten or 12 alternate attack surfaces" around the car that would make much easier targets.

GM moving international sales HQ to Singapore from Shanghai

General Motors has announced that it will be moving its international headquarters from Shanghai to Singapore, a move that will see 120 employees working from the city-state by the time business opens in 2014. Meanwhile, 250 to 300 of the employees at the Shanghai office will remain in China, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The shuffle is part of a bigger reorganization that will see GM isolate its operations in the People's Republic from its broader international efforts. This sort of divide-and-conquer strategy will allow GM to still react to emerging markets while, according to the WSJ, providing a dedicated management team for the Chinese market. The team in Singapore will be responsible for operations in Africa, southeast Asia, Australia, India, South Korea and the Middle East, on top of managing Chevrolet and Cadillac in Europe, according to a statement from GM.
The shift to Singapore "will help us to create a renewed identity for CIO (Consolidated International Operations) and lead GM's umbrella strategy for the region," said GM Executive Vice President of CIO, Stefan Jacoby.