Electronics For GM Vehicles
Atwood spent four years in Kokomo as general manager of Delco Electronics Division of General Motors and was primarily responsible for leading it into the high-tech age. He saw in Delco Electronics a company with great technical ability and a vast untapped potential. Much of its technical staff was working on low volume or one-off programs, in the design and construction of commercial digital systems for General Motors plants, and internal manufacturing support. On the automobile, the only places where electronics could be found on GM cars was in the voltage regulators, and radios. With radios, Delco Electronics was losing market share rapidly to a foreign invasion of radios into GM dealerships. Also the anticipated technology transfer to commercial grade inertial guidance systems was not making much progress. Atwood was determined to change all this.
Atwood initiated programs in Kokomo to turn back the foreign invasion of radios with improved products with new features and functions that made the radio more integrated with the vehicle controls (such as integration with steering wheel controls). In Milwaukee, he reinvigorated the commercial Carousel inertial navigation system by selling it to the military. Atwood also laid the groundwork for Delco Electronics' international operations - a move that kept Delco Electronics in the radio and climate control businesses.
It was in the field of microprocessing that Atwood, an expert in electronics control, saw the most growth potential. "It was apparent that microprocessors would open a whole new field in control electronics." Atwood said, "and that Delco Electronics would become critical - the heart and soul of the electronics revolution for General Motors. I had faith in our ability to do the job." Atwood took that faith into negotiations with General Motors and the other GM divisions who also thought that it was their destiny to control their systems with their own electronics design. Atwood did prevail and negotiated GM's engine control business for Delco Electronics and then brought the product on stream. In 1989, the company was producing 28,000 engine control modules a day.
Read more about this topic: Donald J. Atwood Jr.
Famous quotes containing the words electronics and/or vehicles:
“We live in a highly industrialized society and every member of the Black nation must be as academically and technologically developed as possible. To wage a revolution, we need competent teachers, doctors, nurses, electronics experts, chemists, biologists, physicists, political scientists, and so on and so forth. Black women sitting at home reading bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it.”
—Frances Beale, African American feminist and civil rights activist. The Black Woman, ch. 14 (1970)
“Only by the supernatural is a man strong; nothing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before which the state and the individual are alike ephemeral.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)