PULL-AHEAD PROGRAM; Full-size pickups give GM an early lead in looming truck wars.(News)

Byline: BOB GRITZINGER

In March 2005, more than two years into development of General Motors' latest full-size pickups, word came from management that these big trucks needed to be in the market 13 weeks ahead of schedule.

GM's brain trust, faced with a slackening demand for its profitable but aging fleet of full-size trucks and sport/utility vehicles and weak demand for most of the rest of the products in its portfolio, saw these vehicles as its best opportunity to dig out of a multibillion-dollar hole. They also heard whispers that Toyota was planning an early 2007 debut for its all-new, full-scale Tundra. GM didn't want to come in second in the truck race-and definitely not to its rival for the title of world's largest automaker-which prompted the pull-ahead.

"Obviously, these pickups are hugely important,'' said GM product development vice chairman Bob Lutz. "With the volume they represent, they're enormously important.''

What kind of volume? Try 998,614 Silverados and Sierras (in 2005), and 10 million since 1998 when the previous generation went on sale.

The 2007 Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra trucks, on sale now in limited quantities, represent an enormous leap on the truck evolutionary scale. But they also represent a gigantic step for GM's product development process.

"We called it BHAG-that stands for Big Hairy Audacious Giant,'' said Jully Burau, chief engineer on the full-size trucks. BHAG was an extended-cab, short-box pickup that was built and tested using GM's powerful new virtual-engineering computer system. The truck is the first product in GM history to be fully developed, engineered and validated in a virtual world before the initial preproduction prototype was built.