VE under the skin: torturing the mules

The VE's new chassis is the foundation on which Holden's future success will be built. Every pun intended! Around eight years in the making, while much of the development was conducted in the virtual environment, it also involved a whole series of mules and prototypes -- many built at extremely high cost.

Benchmarking was conducted against the best of the imports -- in many cases cars that sell for multiples of the finished VE product.

In 2000, comparative testing led Holden engineers to conclude that while Lexus was the quietest and most refined of the benchmark brands it was not sporty enough for Holden's brand character. The BMW 5-series was seen as having the right mix of refinement and sport.

After determining the optimum front and rear suspension designs (separate story here) Holden technicians hand-fabricated the proposed VE suspensions and fitted them to two stock VX Commodore shells. This was in 2002 and called Mule Zero (pictured). Although they featured crude steel tubing and other fabricated steel sections, the test cars enabled engineers to optimize geometry before locking in any tooling. Basic load measuring equipment was introduced.

The next prototype, Mule 1, was a special one-off hand-built model that combined a stretched VY shell over VE dimensions and hardware including the longer wheelbase and wider front and rear tracks. This car cost $500,000 alone.

The next stage was a 40-strong fleet of VY models called Mule 2a. These cars looked really wicked when they were effectively VY body shells stretched over VE running gear. They featured front and rear carbon-fibre guards and special rear-door skins that flared out to house the wider VE track. The longer wheelbase was slotted in ahead of the front doors and disguised in subtly lengthened front guards.

These cars also featured dual exhausts which couldn't be fitted to the standard VY and the front and rear-wheel angles were noticeably more vertical than the VY. The VE development cars were based on sedans while the long wheelbase Statesman mules were disguised under similarly-stretched VY wagon bodies.

Although these cars helped optimize suspension specifications, the lack of body stiffness of the earlier shell eventually dictated an update. Thus after the final VE body shape was locked in, a second batch of 35 Mule 2 platforms were cloaked in the VE body style and called Mule 2b.

A single $2-million plus version of Mule 2b was built with $1.5-million worth of instruments and a set of four data acquisition wheels worth $800,000.

This car was used to generate 30 Gigabytes of rough road data that was translated into virtual reality then fed into a destruction test rig that replicated the same pounding and forces on a VE suspension and body inside the laboratory.

The test rig exposed stress points and cracks as predicted by the simulation process which could be rectified before the road cars and tooling reached that point.