General Motors has announced that it is indefinitely suspending the operations of its High-Performance Vehicle team, the group of chassis and powertrain gurus responsible for taking plebeian GM products and transforming them into tire-shredding monsters. In the hands of the HPVO team, the rental-queen Chevrolet Cobalt became the shockingly capable Cobalt SS and the refined Cadillac CTS was mutated into the burly, bad-ass CTS-V. The shutdown will not affect those vehicles, we were assured. They—and other HPVO offerings, such as the Cadillac STS-V and Chevrolet HHR SS—will complete their planned life cycles.
Future development has been halted, however. GM is reassigning its HPVO engineers to work on core products across all of its brands, but declined to offer specific examples, saying only that “if someone is a great brake engineer, we’ll move them where they can be of the most benefit.”
What about the Camaro? And theCorvette!?
Of course the suspension of HPVO’s work means that high-performance versions of next-gen cars—a potential Chevrolet Cruze SS, for example—are shelved for now. But what about products like the Camaro SS, future Corvettes, or a potential CTS-V coupe? Take a deep breath: All are safe. (Provided, that is, GM can secure additional government loans and survive past March.)
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