Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [57]
The GM paint was another spectacular example: by reducing the sheen of the paint, minor defects such as an embedded dust mote or a minor “run” on a vertical surface were much less apparent to the customer. Of course, the customer experienced no joy or pride in her car’s paint; it was just “OK.”
My nagging finally induced Gary Cowger, soon to be president of GM North America and an executive of impeccable manufacturing background, to investigate further. Some months later, I was invited to a joint Engineering/Manufacturing paint team meeting.The team’s conclusion: I was right. In scientific measurements of paint brilliance, image clarity, and reflectivity, we were the industry’s worst performer. (But . . . low complaints!) The team presented an upgrade plan, involving both paint type and application methods; the stated goal was to beat everyone in paint excellence without giving up too much in “things gone wrong.” In less than two years, we got there; even our competitors, who conduct the same type of cross-make benchmarking we had performed, asked our people, “What the hell happened?” From rock bottom to parity with Lexus. The change was noticeable by all; any car looks better with a superb paint job. The average buyer may not be able to say why it looks better, but it just does.
This was but another example of GM knowing how to do it right, rallying to the challenge, and getting the job done. The obstacle had been, as always, pursuing a subgoal that was easy to game instead of putting the real objective above all.
There’s an old, presumably apocryphal tale about body integrity, good body sealing, and absence of unsightly gaps around the hood, trunk, and doors. It goes like this: To test for the car’s airtightness, Toyota engineers would leave a cat in the car in the evening. The next morning, if the cat was active and chipper, there was obviously too much air entering the car somewhere. But if the cat was limp, listless, or near dead, this indicated a tightly built car. Hearing of this cat test, a GM assembly plant also placed a feline in a just-assembled car, shut all the vents and doors, and awaited the morning. But, when the engineers came back to check the next day, the cat was gone!
The obvious exaggeration can’t hide the fact that GM’s body fits in North America (we knew how to do them in Asia, Europe, and Latin America) were deplorable.The precision of sheet metal, like paint, is another element of so-called perceptual quality. Most people will tend to prefer a car on which everything fits perfectly, even though they can’t articulate why it looks good. GM’s standard for body gaps was five millimeters, with a variation of up to two. In practice, this means a trunk lid could have a three-millimeter gap on one side, a seven-millimeter gap on the other, and be declared “acceptable.” The German cars routinely show four- or five-millimeter gaps, but with little or no variation; same goes for most Japanese brands. In the United States, Ford had begun to master well-assembled sheet metal.
I complained and complained and started carrying a gap gauge with me, making a show of using it whenever reviewing one of our production cars, loudly proclaiming the bad results and wondering, rhetorically, when somebody was going to fix this. It turned out