TORONTO: The Chevrolet Malibu has been launched and the developers said that they have reduced about 300 pounds weight of Chevrolet Malibu 2016.
Chevrolet engineers have developed the “Teen Driver” feature, which will be standard on most of the next-generation Malibu as a method for parents to check on how their cars are being driven. Parents can use a PIN code to pull up a display on the dashboard’s center screen to view how their teenager (or frisky valets) drove the vehicle. It records the maximum speed reached, distance driven and number of times active safety features such as the forward collision alert were engaged.
Unquestionably the amount of mass they took out of the new Malibu is impressive. On the surface Ford’s claim of cutting 700 pounds from the F-150’s waistline sounds even more compelling, but when you think about how big a full-size truck is they have a lot of areas and systems they can optimize. That’s not the case with a midsize family car, which is small in comparison. This makes GM’s achievement particularly remarkable.
Of the 300 pounds Chevy’s 2016 Malibu has lost some 120 were removed from the structure itself. This car rides on the company’s new Epsilon II architecture.
Jesse Ortega, chief engineer of the Chevrolet Malibu said, “One of the techniques we’ve been bringing forward is optimizing around lower variations.” He explained that the car has been designed to only offer four-cylinder engines (like today’s model). This simplifies the structure and provides the opportunity to use down-gauged materials.
“We weren’t going to try to be an architecture that could do everything, because at the end of the day you’re just carrying that mass,” said Ortega. He also mentioned that in some instances it makes sense to offer a V6 engine along with four-cylinder powerplants but that was not the case with the new Malibu.
Beyond a sensible powertrain lineup GM did a lot with advanced simulation. “We have a computer-aided approach, which we call multi-disciplinary optimization and you create the structure in math and then you run all the load cases, whether they’re crash, whether they’re stiffness, whether they’re structural, whatever they are, and then the computer goes in and says you can take mass out of here but you need to add here,” Ortega said.
Of course the main reason for mass reduction is to improve fuel economy. When equipped with the base 1.5-liter turbocharged engine the 2016 Malibu is estimated to return 37 MPG highway. Not surprisingly the hybrid variant will be even more economical, delivering at least 45 MPG combined.
