Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [5]
The 1930s saw generation after generation of increasingly beautiful, well-crafted GM cars, all distinctive in appearance and performance while sharing common body engineering and construction through GM’s body works, the Fisher Body division.This was an early example of the successful application of “economies of scale,” achieved while maintaining the all-important separate character and role of each GM division.
While the 1930s were a struggle, the advent of World War II in 1941 brought a sudden halt to automobile production as U.S. industry as a whole turned to defense production, with GM at the forefront in the production of military vehicles—both amphibious and land—diesel engines, and even aircraft. It was a period when production skills, which GM already had in spades, mattered, and the only customer was the U.S. war machine.
In 1945, the atomic bomb ended World War II with an exclamation point, and the corporation returned rapidly to civilian production. The nation had been without a single new car since late 1941—the pent-up demand was huge; tooling of the 1942 models was dusted off, minor design changes were introduced to identify the cars as the “all-new, postwar cars,” and the race for dominance in the U.S. car market was on.
GM’s design and engineering prowess was all-conquering. While other Detroit companies gradually fell by the wayside or merged (Packard, Nash, and Hudson had all disappeared by the 1960s) and while the other “Big Two,” Ford and Chrysler, produced some highly notable successes, there was simply no overcoming the sheer brilliance of the cars produced by GM. They were brash, exciting, chrome-laden, at times startling, as when Cadillac first introduced tail fins—inspired by the Lockheed P—38 Lightning fighter aircraft—on its 1948 models. All the GM vehicles of this era had beautiful proportions and simply radiated excellence. GM was the first, in the early 1940s, to introduce the fully automatic transmission, the Hydra-Matic, which Ford was forced to buy while Chrysler struggled with a less capable and less sophisticated semiautomatic unit.
Flaunting its sure grip on America’s tastes, GM paraded new models and concept cars around the country in “Motoramas,” live shows featuring music, talent, lights, motion, and chrome to rival any Hollywood production. By now, the Harley Earl baton had been passed to the even more talented (and flamboyant) Bill Mitchell, who, through talent, personality, and astonishing displays of expensive personal haberdashery, became the incarnation of the automotive designer: cocky, confident, disdainful of “marketing,” resisting the constraints of “finance,” scheming to overcome the dictates of the engineers. Mitchell and his team became the force that ran GM in the late 1950s through the ’60s. Talented young designers sought jobs at GM Styling, because that’s where the great stuff happened!
Audacious, seemingly impossible dreams made it through to production under Mitchell, from the monstrous lateral fins on the 1959 Chevrolet to the aerodynamically useless vertical fins on the 1961 Cadillac.Was everything in the best of taste, or with actual customer utility in mind? Of course not. Like Mitchell himself, who had a lovably insolent and profane side to him, his operations at times were greeted by headshaking among the country’s intellectual elite. But it didn’t matter: the public adored what GM produced and demanded more of the same.
GM launched ever more desirable products, like the legendary Pontiac GTO, the Oldsmobile 442, the Buick Riviera, a plethora of Cadillacs, and the sensational “tri-5” (1955, ’56, ’57) Chevrolets, the first of the brand with a V8, which sold in record