Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [59]
Over time, Alex Mair, to his astonishment and delight, would report that twenty randomly selected Chevrolet Malibus had, on average, much better, tighter sheet metal fits than twenty Honda Accords. Our cars became so close to perfection that Mair stopped his dealer visits and turned his attention to other aspects of retirement, presumably equally rewarding.
In the later years, before Spielman retired, I asked him how the miracle was performed and with so little apparent investment. His answer was another eye-opener: “It didn’t cost much.We had to upgrade some hemmers [presses that create the folded edge of the outer sheet metal panel over the inner one] for a crisper hem flange, but mostly it was just explaining to the supervisors and operators that this is what we want. Turns out, they knew how to do it, and actually wondered why we had never asked for that kind of precision before.They were enthusiastic!”
So, once again, the company had people with both the talent and the desire, but it never put them to use. Sometimes, the media would ask me when GM would start producing “decent” cars, like the Japanese. I frequently challenged them to do the Alex Mair Test: “Go to dealerships and see for yourself. Take a new Chevrolet Malibu and go down the street to a BMW dealer. Place the Malibu next to the Beemer, look each over carefully, and then tell me which one is assembled to a higher standard.” To my knowledge, nobody ever did it. It probably didn’t fit the generally accepted “truth” that GM’s cars were sloppily stamped and assembled.
Meanwhile, over in Interiors, the redoubtable Anne Asensio was fighting a battle with all the “best practices” folks from all the functional areas.“Best practices,” those ways to do things that were written down in some digitized scripture, usually involved specifying methods and materials that were lowest cost and involved the least amount of assembly time. This meant using nameplates like “Chevrolet” or “Equinox” cast all in one piece to reduce mounting time (and avoid spelling mistakes), or using the “hider” design technique (beloved by thriftier manufacturing organizations) on the instrument panel. Instead of adjacent plastic pieces being sharply squared off to minimize any gap between them, the “hider” technique calls for making everything with big radii at the corners, more or less the shape of an old TV screen.That way, if adjacent panels don’t quite line up, it’s much harder for the customer to tell. It’s analogous to mounting pictures in elliptical frames: hard to tell if they’re crooked! Or designing a watch with really fat pointers so that it’s tough to see if it’s a few minutes off.
“Hiders” are nothing more than a cheap trick to reduce complaints about poor fits by making everything so nonlinear that the customer can’t quite figure out if it was supposed to be that way or not. Needless to say, many other auto companies eschewed the practice and created instrument panels that looked like the work of a skilled cabinetmaker. I wanted that!
There was resistance: It would cost more (true). It was more difficult to assemble (not if the build of the car is sufficiently precise). Customers wouldn’t notice the difference (they hated GM interiors for some reason). Anne and her team fought bravely, but once beyond the design stage, the new instrument panel would be engineered, and the materials specified. “There must be some mistake here,” the responsible engineer would say. “We’ve never specified sharp corners like this before, or half-millimeter gaps. I’ll just change this all to the way we’ve always done it!” And so, low-gloss would change back to high-gloss, fine graining (the leatherlike imprinting of plastic parts) would change back to coarse, tolerances would revert from “tight” back to the old standard. As Anne chased these practices through the system, adopting a “seek and destroy” mind-set, she ultimately wound up at the suppliers. And