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From Swedespeed.com Miscellaneous Features 2006 was a banner year for Volvo at the SEMA Show. The aftermarket industry event in Las Vegas has always been an important show for the Swedish auto maker, but the impending launch of the C30 made last year’s event an even more aggressively planned-for display. Key to that display was the plan to supply three preproduction C30s to aftermarket tuners even before the car had been introduced at the Paris Auto Show or even photos shown on the web. The whole process started with secrecy and continued at a break-neck pace before the three C30’s November debut. With the 2007 SEMA Show just one week away, Swedespeed will be offering a three-part look back at these three C30s.
Swedespeed: Since SEMA, you showed another design alongside your camouflage version at the German tuning show in Essen. Was this another of the C30 proposals you submitted? Henderson: The Red D5 “THOR” concept car that was presented at Essen shared some ideas from one of the three concepts we submitted for SEMA, yes. When the C30 opportunity came along, we submitted three basic concepts. The first was an adaptation of the ODIN HS4 S40-based concept. As you can imagine, this was an aggressive, sporty concept featuring wide-body styling evocative of that on the ODIN show car. Aggressive suspension, racing styling cues, and all in all a very sport-minded concept. The second concept we took the habit of nicknaming “Slick” internally. This was a concept focusing heavily on, and borrowing heavily from Volvo’s expressed target marketing for the C30. Our design concept took direction from the Volvo press materials on the C30, trying to accentuate the features and style that speaks to the city-living, young professional demographic that the C30 is targeting This concept more aggressive styling than stock, but a darker demeanor, a ‘smoother’ style to it, carbon fiber leather, carbon fiber inside the car, etc. This proposal was the closest to the type of styling and content that one might expect at the Dealerships. The final concept was our interpretation of the “XC” design language. The idea here was to execute a package that one could pack a bunch of gear into and “go”. Strong performance, great styling, but a bit more of an active-lifestyle vehicle that could be driven every day on the street, and up to the slopes. Those were the three that we came up with, and VCNA asked us to do the 3rd concept, the “XC” version, so to speak, which we were pleased to take on. That was the genesis of the project, getting a proposal out to Volvo and being chosen. There are a lot of people who really respond to, call it XC70+ or call it Audi Allroad + styling…not “baja”, but a slightly more rugged look than stock. Strength of XC70 sales over the years is indicative of this. We certainly found this out…there is a guttural response that people seem to have to a car that is actually raised a bit, with a little bit more of an offroad look to it, and the SEMA car bears this out. Swedespeed: It almost has a rally feel, which is probably very interesting to Europeans especially. The car seems like it was designed to be a little more like a driver, something that you might actually encounter on the road. Could you walk me through the car, maybe starting with the engine? What has been done to the engine and how you have reacted to the results? Henderson: The all-wheel drive feature of the project was something that was crucial from day one.
Swedespeed: How hard was that? If one of your customers wanted to replicate that, is this something that Heico would offer? Henderson: Unfortunately not likely at this stage. It is something that we could offer, in theory. The main issue has to do with the electronics. What we ended up doing was starting with an all-wheel drive S40 donor vehicle. We then tore everything out of the car to use in the C30. It comes down to an electronics challenge because all three wiring looms within the car, including a whole series of ECU’s, have to be reused…the donor has to be stripped to the chassis. You can physically take the all-wheel-drive components and plop them into a C30 and still not have it to work properly because you don't have the electronics set up to be speaking with each other. The system is highly integrated, so you can’t short-step this. What we had to do was to build one of two things: we had to convince the car that it was a 2004 S40 T5 all-wheel drive, or we had to convince the C30 that it was now all- wheel-drive. No such animal existed (that we know of), so this was the difficult part. We actually worked with VCC Sweden directly on that part of the project to come up with the right data settings so that the traction control worked, EBD worked, ABS worked, etc. Everything in the car works properly, the way it would on a standard model car. If we re-flashed the car right now to current C30 T5 FWD spec it would toss the AWD feature. That level of sophistication was a primary goal of the project, and HEICO GmbH was able to engineer a solution that works perfectly. Swedespeed: It could be something as basic as a software upgrade at the dealership, if someone actually did this to their car and took it to the dealership and the dealership runs the software upgrade, boom, all-wheel drive is gone? Henderson: In a manner of speaking, yes, on this particular car, as there is no other example of AWD software out there that we’re aware of for C30. For a properly developed, commercially available package this would be a different story, of course, but the complication and development time needed to make this happen remains in force. Remains to be seen, but we don’t have any immediate plans to offer our own AWD version of that driveline. This type of work is well above the level of ‘normal’ engine ECU mapping, so I’m not sure a commercial aftermarket solution makes a lot of sense. That is work one essentially cannot do without factory support. Swedespeed: In the US, you guys are more product driven - distribution of product to your own distributors, dealers, what have you. Contrarily, something you see less in the Volvo aftermarket are shop driven businesses focused on engine swaps and those sorts of conversions. Is that something where you could provide them that technical expertise now or is it really something where Volvo stepped in and you really need their okay or their assistance again to ever replicate? Henderson: Possible, I suppose, but the resources required would be cost-prohibitive, in our opinion. This is not anything that other Bosch-savvy firms don’t already know, but long gone are the days of checking motor mount locations, shortening driveshafts, and plopping a modern engine into another modern engine bay. It is possible, perhaps, to develop a system for installing newer engines into older cars, for example. However, taking a new T6 engine and popping it into a car that doesn’t already come with a T6, as an example, would be quite a challenge and I would immediately wonder what the cost-benefit math would look like. This type of software development is on the ‘proprietary’ side of things, for starters. We wouldn’t normally make a big effort to step into that realm without a really strong business argument in place. I don’t think there is a business argument to do this kind of thing from the aftermarket side as of yet. We’ll see what type of buyer ends up supporting C30 sales when it arrives…may be an option down the road a bit. All-wheel drive was a backbone of sorts of this project from the get-go. We ripped the AWD system out of another car, shipped it over to Germany and got going on it. The physical implementation took a couple of weeks but the software side took quite a while, with a lot of tinkering back and forth until we got everything working correctly. All of this was, of course, coordinated with suspension design at the same time. At this point the car runs as it would if the car were offered in all-wheel drive from OE. This is not a patch solution or a work-around…this is not our taking all-wheel drive out of another car and “kind of” adapting it. Everything works the way that it would normally work. Moving on from there, we didn't want to do something that was going to be beyond the capability of the all-wheel drive system, which had some mechanical limits. We certainly didn't want to come up with something that was going to be ‘anti-Heico’. We didn't want to produce something that was going to snap your neck off but not be very drivable or very usable on the street. To that end, we set a target of 300 horsepower and one of the other things that we wanted to be very careful about was that the car would run on US fuel - 91 octane. To do that, we lowered compression a little bit and actually tested the car down to 87 octane. So the 300 horsepower figure that we published is running on 87 octane.
Swedespeed: How replicable is the engine upgrade on this car. Is that a kit or a product that you’ll be selling or is this something that was really developed for the show car? Henderson: Our goal was pretty much to stick to what we know, at least in part due to the schedule. One of the ways that we got this done within the available time window was doing the engine work in parallel on a C70 already in the HEICO demo fleet at that time. On this C70 HEICO was able to do all of the testing, dyno runs, autobahn testing, all that stuff while the C30 was still in pieces.. We put about 9,000 kilometers on that engine before it went into the C30. In terms of longevity, making sure the thing ran correctly, making sure that there are no electronic issues, that was the only way to do it in that amount of time given. The engine actually physically went into the car about one week before it left Germany. In the US market, we advertise 250 horsepower output from our standard power package. If you have a front wheel drive car that is about all she wrote in terms of drivability, in our opinion. You are liable to drive the wheels right off the car at 260 horsepower from a stop. So, 300hp doesn’t make a lot of sense to us unless the car has our limited slip diff or AWD. It depends on what we see. If, when C30 arrives, we find that there is really high demand for this level of work, then we might go for it. At present, we are talking about sticking to our bread and butter - ECU, exhaust, down pipe, air filter, etc. Swedespeed: Probably something designed for Europe but on tap if there is demand from the U.S. market? Henderson: Perhaps, yes. We built the car knowing that it was going to spend a year in the US, with people anxious to drive it and to get it out there while people experience it properly. However, I don't think, costing what it does, that the full-blown show engine would be a package that makes sense to offer in this market quite yet. We may, if there are enough T5s kicking around between C70 and C30, decide to offer something similar in the future, but it’s fairly hefty surgery and we are constantly cognizant of the price ceiling that we’re under. Swedespeed: Why don't we move on then from the engine to what else you did to the car? Henderson: The suspension was another big outlier in terms of cost and development time. We looked at a couple different options for suspension. We looked at air suspension systems and a couple other iterations of racing technologies that we had used before with external reservoirs and different proportioning and that type of thing. What we found in testing the driving dynamics of the car was that the coilover system that we use in our regular program could be modified with the help of KW to raise the car and still offer good tracking and good spring rates. The car would still be enjoyable to drive, but one would have some added ground clearance. The main impetus for this is to achieve the look we were shooting for during auto shows, but we also wanted to make the car a real ‘driver’ that still handles really well. The guys that have driven it so far have actually been very impressed with the handling performance, despite the added clearance Along the lines of suspension, we also did a carbon fiber strut bar for the front. We’re talking about making that a production piece, possibly. It may switch to aluminum to try and get the cost down a little bit. Carbon fiber is a little expensive these days because a lot of carbon production is ending up in different applications that find their way into military production. There is a bit of a global shortage of the raw materials at this point. It is very likely that we will stick to aluminum on that. We may have one for the rear as well, but we haven't decided on that yet. Brakes are from our standard program. The brake supplier that we use is not really well know in the aftermarket, but they are one of the biggest, most well-respected brake suppliers in the world. “Ate” is the brand name they use in the U.S. that you might recognize, and that’s who HEICO works with on our production brake kits for P1. Ate is an OE supplier for Volvo on a few different vehicles. On this car HEICO built a special version of their quad-tip sport exhaust system, including downpipe with racing cat. In HEICO’s home market, their sport exhaust systems have to pass EU’s noise level restrictions. Generally speaking, that works to our advantage in the sense that most Volvo owners do not want a super-loud exhaust, so it tends to be a pretty good match what we offer in the first place. European standards are pretty close to what people are looking for here, we find. The system designed for the SEMA car is a little beyond that standard, and a little bit more free-flowing, with a more aggressive tone, and it is certainly a bit louder, which sets it apart.
The rest of the theme was supported by the paint, bodywork, the body kit itself. We were working with Burton on the project, of course, and part of what we were trying to do was to serve a few different masters in terms of style. Burton was great to work with and we really had a good relationship with them on the project. Burton has a highly honed brand identity, marketing expertice, and of course product line, all of which dovetailed very, very well with what we were trying to achieve on this project. As I say, we were very fortunate to have Burton involved throughout the process. Ultimately, one goal was to build in features into the overall concept that picked up a few styling cues and some of the brand identity of Burton Snowboards, and that was one of the reasons for the paint – our goal was to come up with something that was a little unique, a winter camo type theme. “Heico Ice” is how we referred to it, as there is some special pearl effect in the paint that gives it some added depth, along with the patterning and colors. If you notice, the big theme this year at the Show was matte paint finish. HEICO did that the year before on ODIN. I think it is fair to say that the trend-setting is going right to left when it comes to paint because matte finish was really big at Essen last year and not this year. We didn't want to do another matte finish car and camo was starting to become somewhat more common over in Europe. The camo theme tied in well to Burton’s clothing line, and happened to also reflect the tip of the spear in terms of automotive fashion in Europe. The paint is seven stage, so it is essentially, paint, mask, paint, mask, paint, mask. To end up with paint that doesn't have any build up among the color was the challenge. There was no going backwards to ‘fix’ problems in the design in between stages, so this really was a work of art. Nerve racking…very easy to do in Photoshop, but requires an incredibly competent paint technician to do this in real life! The body kit takes its cues from the look of the XC70 and XC90, as well as a few Volvo concept vehicles from the past. The side skirts, fender flares, and rear diffuser area were all carefully done to emote the overall concept that we were shooting for, but without screaming it. The rear storage area in the back was an homage to Burton. We wanted to stick to the precept that the car was to provide space for 4 people when traveling to the slopes. It was tempting to take what is a great Volvo feature of the standard car, the 4 person seating, and to steal the back two seats to have more room for our modifications. However, in the end, we felt this was an important component of the OE design and needed to be retained. That was the idea behind using a roof rack on the top with two snowboards and then two boards inside the car, which was something we discussed with Burton from day one. The other goal was to develop a really ‘finished’ concept for boot and gear storage, which HEICO achieved in the rear of the car with a false floor with storage underneath.
We worked a little bit with Motorola as well, who is a Burton corporate partner for some of their snowboarding wear, in integrating a Q phone into the console in the center of the car. It’s got power to the phone and also power to an iPod right in the center stack, which was a big hit (“you’re welcome” to whoever stole the IPOD at SEMA). The leather that we chose has a little bit more of a rugged texture than normal. We didn't want to do a Neoprene kind of thing and we didn't want to do Alcantara either. Potentially, someone who snowboards would be harder on the leather due to the type of use the car might get in that case, so we chose a little bit of a stronger hide. We find that it’s easy to go overboard with contrasting stitching and colors, so we made an effort to accentuate the styling of the existing car with colors that we felt best reflected the basic theme we were shooting for. Patterning the leather is along the German model. HEICO addressed every area of the interior in leather including the headliner. We are finding that a lot of luxury-oriented firms are getting away from Alcantara and going back to leather headliners, which has a very rich feeling to it...this is something people who have gotten a chance to sit in the car have all mentioned. We modified the Volvo steering wheel a little bit by having it recovered, making it a little sportier in shape. The rest of the car is basically full of parts right out of the standard Heico program – pedal sets, dead pedal, door pins, shift knob, etc. Swedespeed: Could you give a quick breakdown of build time? When did you get the car? How long did it take you? And how down to the wire was it in the end? Henderson: I think it was the last week of July, if I am not mistaken. We had about ten weeks to do the car. We wanted to enjoy the benefits of building the car at the HEICO facility in Germany, rather than here. Volvo allowed us to do this, which was great, but this also meant that we had to get the car done a bit earlier than normal to make a flight to LA for the pre-Show photo shoots. All of the builders were under a difficult time crunch, which is often the case with SEMA projects, but the plane trip was the plane trip…no room for last minute tinkering. Week 1 one was dedicated to aerodynamic design. The car was stripped down, HEICO started the clay modeling process, started picking suspension, going through and getting all-wheel drive stuff plopped into the chassis, getting the ride height correct etc By week three, HEICO was working on aerodynamic molds. For show vehicles, you don’t have the limitations or the advantages that come along with production-quantity, production-level molds. It’s harder and easier, in the same breath. There are a couple ways to best handle this. On this project HEICO used a clay modeling process. Clay allows for quicker design changes, new ideas to be added quickly, etc as you’re working, and the resultant part quality is very high, even in small volumes. Time was the issue on the design side. Parts were on the car during week five, in terms of the aero. In the meantime, the motor was being worked on in the C70. During week six, we started seeing paint samples, which meant a lot of internal discussions about where to go with the paint direction. Week seven, it was in the paint shop.
Essentially the car went together all at once in week 9. The technical team had to work around the clock. Many of them work on the HEICO race team as well, so they are used to weekends and staying up into the night and that kind of schedule. Whether used to it or not, there was a lot of dedication applied to this project, which I think is born out in the final result. My hat goes off to HEICO’s technical staff in this regard. The interior work was done by a supplier near HEICO’s headquarters. They needed a couple of weeks as well. So the first thing HEICO did was to remove the interior and to get those pieces over to the leather supplier. Juggling access to the car by the various suppliers is always a challenge. Paint… same thing. Suspension… same thing. Engine… same thing. We had these steps going on in parallel and that was a very difficult part of the process, as it always is with show vehicles. Tire development was one area that was very cool on this project. We originally considered doing and aggressive snow tire type of concept. Toyo really stepped up to the plate. They came up with various themes using their semi-slick tire, essentially hand cutting the Heico patterning into the tire. We ended up going with the one that had the Heico helmet logo in it, which came out very nicely. I have seen custom cut tires before but not anything like this. This support is an off-shoot of Toyo’s close working relationship with Heico that is based upon the ODIN racing program. Toyo reacted very quickly as well, which was very helpful. It took about six weeks, end to end, to get the all-wheel drive up an running correctly. So while this typhoon of activity was going on around the car in terms of paint and whatnot, the engine work was on-going. We would have been sunk without doing it that way. HEICO got the car built and tested in 10 weeks total. AutoWeek magazine came through to do a test-drive, I think it was 3 days before the car was put on the plane. Volvo PR UK also brought some journalists over to see the car before it left to do some press work. HEICO received the car, built it, tested it, drove it, and shipped it all within about a 10 week window, so the schedule was very tight. Swedespeed:What was the reception that you found to the car, either at the show or since then? Henderson: Reception has been very positive. I think HEICO managed to come up with a concept that is quite close to a car that, in a parallel universe perhaps, could end up being produced without being ‘foreign’ to a Volvo customer’s sensibilities. I think that is what people really respond to most positively. The paint is also very impressive in the flesh, I have to say, but the depth of concept and the details are what we are most proud of. For those that don’t identify most closely with the “XC’ness” of this particular car, HEICO followed up at Essen with the production level “THOR” body kit that we now offer, so this outlines two basic visions of what is possible with C30. HEICO recently built a cosmetically similar car over in Europe a bit ago that has been getting very positive feedback as well, including television coverage, print media, and Volvo Importer support in a series of countries, so we’d have to say the basic concept has very long legs and the car has been very well received. All three SEMA C30’s were very impressive, in our view, and we were very pleased to be involved in the project this past year. Our thanks goes to Volvo for allowing us the chance to showcase one vision of what we feel the C30 is capable of…we’re excited for the release of the car in the U.S.
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