Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [52]
This produced some interesting tensions. Frequently our winning design (and they pretty much all won their clinics after we placed the focus back on styling) would be subject to some detailed criticism for poor visibility or lack of shoulder room compared to the competitors. This almost always triggered cries of “We’ve got to fix that.They want more room.They want more visibility.” In the bad old days, that got fixed: a more upright, boxy car with a stiff windshield. Problem solved, but nobody bought it. I had to keep pointing out, “Hey, guys, we won the clinic by a wide margin! They know it’s less roomy, they know it’s harder to see the overhead traffic lights.Yet they still want that car because of the way it looks. So, let’s be happy and quit screwing around, or we’ll mess it up again.” A seemingly simple lesson, but one that bore endless repetition: even the smartest of the left-brain thinkers had trouble with the concept of trade-offs. In the automotive game, as in other parts of life, appearance counts. If the public loves a car, its other deficiencies are quickly rationalized away.
Only when the vehicle design was an uncontested clinic winner was it turned over to theVLE for execution.That was their job, and they did it, for the most part, well.
It proved to be a good move to keep Wayne Cherry that extra year. He provided stability and motivation during the tough transition back to normal automotive design activity. He would be replaced, once we completed researching the best the outside world had to offer, by our very much homegrown Ed Welburn, the first African American ever hired into GM’s lily-white Design staff in the early 1970s. Upon his elevation, he became the first-ever African American vice president of design, and just the sixth man to lead GM Design in its long history. It was to be my finest personnel decision: Welburn, with his style, taste, coaching and mentoring abilities, has taken GM Design back to a level exceeding the halcyon days of the 1950s and ’60s.
As stated, when he started, Welburn inherited a department trying to change an entire culture, not to mention a stable of product shortcomings. Above all, there were the interiors: dark gray plastic wastelands. Some Pontiac instrument panels had all the appeal of molten lava that had spilled through the sunroof and cooled. GM’s interiors were the worst in the business. When I complained, I was told, “On the contrary! We have fewer problems with our interiors than any other car company, according to J. D. Power.”Ah, once again, the analytical left-brainers coming up with the wrong answer. Our “freedom from defects” merely meant that our speedometers worked and the knobs didn’t fall off. Of course, many potential customers never experienced the “defect-free” part because the depressingly shoddy appearance of the car’s insides kept them from making the purchase.
Interiors had, over the years, gotten short shrift. They were not only an afterthought; they were the last happy hunting ground for the stressed VLE trying to make his cost target after absorbing dozens of overruns from suppliers. So, the part of the car that, next to the exterior, is the most important, the one in which the customer spends 100 percent of her driving time, was cheapened to a level that could only be termed hopelessly uncompetitive.
We established, within Design, an Interiors Group, initially led by the hard-driving, no-nonsense Anne Asensio, who had been freed up when “brand development” was cancelled. Equal in rank to the head of exterior design (up till then, designers assigned to interiors thought they were being punished and sent back to the minor leagues), even the formidable Ms. Asensio