Mark Reuss, in the 'knothole'

GENERAL MOTORS MILFORD PROVING GROUND, Milford, Mich. Mark Reuss is a V-8 Corvette kind of guy in a four-cylinder Equinox world. But as much as Reuss, a licensed road racer who created General Motors' Performance Division, relishes the fast lane, his appreciation for the carpool lane also runs deep. He gets a thrill from precise steering, silky handling around corners, whisper-quiet cabins and ingenious ways of adding convenience and utility. "I do, and I think everybody on the team does, too, because we know where the volume is, and we know the exposure to the customer base is going to be much higher on some of those crossover segments," said Reuss, GM's head of global product development since January 2014. "I get as much excitement out of driving an Equinox for two weeks before we ship it to dealers, because I know our dealers are going to be thrilled selling those to customers," he said. "They surprise and delight people in a different way than a Camaro or Corvette, but the effort and the work that goes into one of those is equal and sometimes harder to do from a styling standpoint than our halo vehicles." Reuss met with Automotive News this month at GM's Milford Proving Ground, a 4,000-acre, 93-year-old campus just beyond the fringe of Detroit's suburban sprawl. Each Friday he, GM President Dan Ammann and various engineers gather here to put the company's upcoming vehicles through their paces on the surrounding rural roads. The tests, known as "knothole rides," also involve seat time in the outgoing model, if there is one, and the rival vehicles GM aims to beat. Mark Reuss"It's really exciting -- how quiet it is and how fluid it is. To drive it against the competition, that's highly satisfying." A week earlier, the group had driven the 2018 Buick Enclave with all of its final calibrations complete.

Mark Reuss, in the 'knothole'

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