11 Dec 2006 2010H

As hopes are fading, GM turns to Design to save the day

I’m taking a slight pause from this week’s Monday Night Football, featuring Da Bears at St Louis, to feed the blog. I’m hoping the Bears are who we think they are, which gives me a little time to talk about GM, who is not and has not been for sometime the company that we have thought that they are or should be. Now, I like GM generally, since we’ve driven two generations, maybe three of Cavaliers, one of which protected my parents from injury in a catastrophic car accident, and a cantankerous Saturn, and it doesn’t help us in America if we lose huge parts of industry like the motor industry. So I’m hoping the best for them, but it’s difficult to buy a car from a company you don’t have much faith in.

As this Motor Trend article says, GM looks not too shabby compared to, and mostly because of the poor state of, their Detroit competition. Now, when CEO Rick Wagoner made this declaration back in August of 2001 and said they were bringing Bob Lutz out of retirement, I wasn’t quite convinced, because the impact of styling is limited compared to reliability, function, fuel economy, the areas that the Japanese motor companies are killing us on. Perhaps this is the downside of management by numbers, as Ed Wallace writes. But it’s not heartening to hear the stuff coming out of Lutz’s mouth:

When GM was in this period of absolute market dominance and maximum greatness…design ran the place. Design did the offices. Design did the GM show stands. Design did the interiors of the corporate airplanes. Design did the brochures. Design did the street signs.

Bob, never mind the interiors of the corporate airplanes. The American people aren’t coming to GM to buy offices, showstands, brochures, and street signs. The style is an important part, yes, but performance, quality, and value are also just as important. Now, what this sounds like is that they are picking the lowest hanging fruit, since the design component is comparatively a low investment compared to new engine design or reliability engineering. But is it enough to pull them out of the morass? Because it sounds like a lot of GM’s problems have nothing to do with building cars.

GM can be the challenger brand and target the Corolla and the Civic to become the best, or it can employ the blue water strategy and say, we’re going where no one else is and own that space. Perhaps someday, hopefully soon, they’ll challenge the Corolla and the Civic and our government will subsidize their development in the ways that the Japanese government has helped to subsidize their companies. We’ve done that before. Just look what a shot of government intervention did for Harley Davidson, an American global brand. So they need to get their stuff in the game. But that’s a long way off. In the meantime, I’m buying Japanese.

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12 Dec 2006 0136H

tim writes:

Well it’s nice that they want to have better looking cars. Some of the new cars like the Vette and the CTS-V are pretty cool but…on the whole the basic cars are not so good.

Gm’s “primacy of design” is why they got fucked so hard the last time. The Tornado and Riviera were great looking cars–technologically backwards, breakage prone, gas guzzling pieces of crap.

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