Here’s a revealing look behind the scenes at the product testing process at General Motors in the 1980s.

In viewing this circa 1984 General Motors film, we were reminded that the General had an awful lot on its plate in the 1980s: Five U.S. car divisions, two truck brands, and an entire fleet of vehicle platforms in production or under deveopment. Let’s see, there was the A-Body, B-Body, C, D, E, H, Y, X, J, P….we can barely list them all. Many will say that’s an impossible number of brands and product lines for one company to manage effectively, no matter how good it is, and it’s difficult to argue with that conclusion. Though it was a painful process, including a bankruptcy and reorganization in 2008, today GM is a more rationally scaled and profitable organization.

This film details the testing and development process for all those products, including some excellent glimpses behind the scenes at the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan, the GM Proving Ground in Milford, Michigan, just northwest of Detroit, and elsewhere. (More on the GM Milford Proving Ground here.) There’s even a brief chapter on GM’s cold weather testing facility way up north in remote Kapuskasing, Ontario. In watching the film, it’s fun to reflect that while the tools have advanced tremendously over the past few decades, the basic process of developing a vehicle for production is not so different at all. Video below.