Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [50]
Two years later, after endless hand-to-hand combat with sensor reliability, motor sequencing, lubrication, durability, water leaks, redesigns, and cost overruns, the XUV was proudly unleashed on a motoring public that didn’t have the foggiest clue what they would ever use the thing for. Besides, it was ugly and expensive. Sales struggled, and after a grand total of 13,000 units were produced and forced into an unwilling market, production was stopped and the loss written off. It was a bitter lesson for me, but it taught me to adopt an attitude of total disdain for what the legions of high-grade-point-average MBAs in the “volume” planning group came up with.While my gut was sometimes wrong, a ten-minute look at a product and its pricing normally delivered a more accurate estimate than one delivered by “the system.”
So, the situation I faced in the first few weeks was this:
• A disenfranchised Design group incapable of establishing an aesthetic direction, as they had no control over the final design.
• Input from Marketing (“Brand Management”) that was perhaps appropriate for a soft drink or cosmetics company, but wide of the mark for automobiles.
• A Planning group obsessed with “needs segments,” thinking that vehicles fulfilled certain identifiable consumer “needs.” (As I pointed out frequently, the only real vehicular “need” that most customers have is easily fulfilled by a two-year-old used car; everything else is psychology and “wants.”) These various segments all have complex but ever-so-important-sounding designations, like “Macro 34.”
• An Engineering group that, over the decades, had established a stifling thicket of criteria: where the wheels had to be placed relative to fenders, how the windshield should slope to permit easy viewing of overhead traffic lights, how ashtrays were to open and close—all well-intentioned, and all inhibiting the freedom of design to create beautiful cars. (Prior to my arrival, GM had purchased a Chrysler 300M, the most spectacular of the successful “LH” cars. In the center of the Styling Dome, having been asked by senior management why GM couldn’t come up with a car this beautiful, Design displayed the 300M adorned with more than ninety Post-it notes, identifying the areas where Chrysler had violated GM criteria.)
• A vehicle line executive system which, while orderly and predictable, was obsessed with meeting internal goals like cost, weight, hours of assembly time, parts reuse percentages, and, especially, timing. “Success in the marketplace” and “best new vehicle in its class” were targets pursued solely by the full-size truck and SUV VLE and the nearmaniacal VLE in charge of Corvettes. And the other VLEs routinely rejected valuable input from the market research group.
• A generalized tolerance of sloppy execution. Body gaps (the width of the space between adjacent body panels) were large and uneven. Upholstery was lumpy and crooked. Plastic parts were cheap, poorly grained, and shiny. Switches and controls looked and sounded like plastic toys. Paints lacked sparkle and luster. No wonder that import owners, renting a GM car on a business trip, routinely found themselves reinforced in the resolution never, ever to consider a GM car. (Again, things were much better in full-size trucks and SUVs, and more than a few owners of high-end German cars owned a Tahoe or Yukon full-size SUV.)
• A senior management team, at least in the United States, that was seemingly oblivious to these problems. “We have smart people, carefully hired engineers, skilled planners, a history of great designers . . . we set budgets, quantify targets; what could possibly go wrong?”
• A regionalized patchwork of product development organizations and manufacturing groups around the GM world. This resulted in needless local duplication of essentially