GM Defense hopes to grow further after it won its first major Army contract in June, Jeff Ryder, the company's vice president for growth and strategy, said during an interview with Inside Defense earlier this month.
The company remains interested in the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle follow-on contract, and Ryder said there are opportunities to adapt electric and autonomous capabilities from its parent company's commercial vehicles for military purposes.
The follow-on contract from JLTV could be worth $12.3 billion over a decade for 30,000 vehicles and 10,000 trailers, the Army stated at a Dec. 17 industry day.
Oshkosh won the original competition for the JLTV, and it has produced the vehicle since its introduction. But the Army created the new competition to see if another company could build the same vehicle at a lower price.
Manufacturing capabilities and experience will be a key factor in the follow-on award, the Army has said. That is where Ryder sees GM's advantage, as its parent company sells more cars in the United States than anyone else.
"The strength we know we have is we're a world-class manufacturer, and that's what the Army is looking for," he said. "We obviously deliver a lot of high-quality commercial vehicles every day, that's what we do. And so we're investigating what it takes to bring that capability into the JLTV contract."
GM Defense's ability to offer and modify General Motors' existing vehicles is why the Infantry Squad Vehicle was a natural fit for the company, Ryder said. The ISV is closely related to the Chevrolet Colorado ZR2, the off-road version of General Motors' compact pickup truck. Ninety percent of the ISV's parts are standard commercial products.
Beyond leveraging its manufacturing capabilities, technology adapted from commercial vehicles will provide many of GM Defense's future opportunities, Ryder said.
"We’re not going to compete in really bespoke applications where the defense contractors are very comfortable," he said.
Instead, GM's scale in the automotive sector allows it to spend far more than defense-specific companies on autonomy and electrification, Ryder said. He said GM plans to spend $27 billion over the next five years to develop those capabilities.
"GM spends more in R&D per year than the top defense contractors do combined," Ryder said. "Our invested IP and R&D is very relevant to government and military customers."
Ryder cautioned that the Army is not suddenly going to flip all of its vehicles to electric or hydrogen fuel cell drivetrains. But a there is now a "dialogue" about introducing these new technologies to production military vehicles, he said.
"The technology is here and is coming," Ryder said. "We're at an inflection point with electrification."
The Army released a survey last month to gauge market availability for an electric light reconnaissance vehicle, which would be intended to complement the Infantry Squad Vehicle that GM Defense builds.
The eLRV, as the Army has stylized the vehicle's name, would weigh about 12,000 pounds fully loaded, the Army survey stated. That is around the expected weight class for some versions of the upcoming GMC Hummer electric truck.
Features from the Hummer could make it into a potential GM Defense bid for the eLRV if the project goes forward, but the Hummer probably serves as an example of the possible technologies for a military vehicle, rather than the exact vehicle the company would offer, Ryder said.
"That vehicle demonstrates the kind of capabilities broadly that we can take into military markets," he said. "The fact that there's an electric vehicle of that size, the fact that it has some pretty unique off-road capabilities, is of interest to some military customers."
Although GM Defense plans to serve as the prime contractor on most vehicles it is involved with, the company has considered contributing subsystems to another prime contractor's vehicle, Ryder said.
The company has had "teaming discussions" to provide power and propulsion systems for heavier vehicles, in which General Motors does not have as much expertise, he said. GM's battery and fuel cell technology could be mated to another company's large vehicles.
"We're open to different arrangements, whether we're prime or teammate or whatever it might be," he said. "We have so much proven technology with batteries and fuel cells, you know there's an obvious synergy to it, which is, if we're not going to compete at a prime contractor level, but are they really going to stand up independently a battery or electrification or fuel cell capability to what we have."
General Motors has already created and refined a number of autonomous features within its automobiles, such as adaptive cruise control, that the military could use in its vehicles, Ryder said.
"The more it's like an on-road application, the more it's applicable to what we're doing," he said. "If you get into off-road, combat-zone type autonomy, which the Army is working on, that's farther afield from where we are right now, but we're looking into that."
Ryder cautioned that fully autonomous vehicles, especially fully autonomous combat vehicles, will take longer to develop. Rather, autonomy will come in steps. For example, he said the leader-follower experiments the Army has run will have to be refined and proven, then engineers could go to the next step toward autonomy.
"As you break down the whole autonomy question, there are pieces that we can bring today, and there are pieces that we can bring tomorrow," Ryder said. "There are pieces that everyone's working on that are very challenging."