Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [60]
At Anne’s request, we called all the suppliers of interior parts to a large meeting. I addressed them personally and told them what we wanted. If there was any doubt, or if they were getting “mixed signals” from our own engineers and purchasing people, they were to contact Anne or even me directly.
My friend, fellow Marine aviator and vice president of engineering Jim Queen (more on him later), was a powerful ally: he appointed a senior executive as the person responsible for interior perceptual quality. Jim called him “the knothole”—everything had to pass through him until the new standard was fully understood and accepted.
The beleaguered, brave Anne Asensio was viewed by many as the mad Frenchwoman who was disturbing the carefully nurtured culture of poorest-fit, lowest-quality material that would reliably hold together. It was like a clothing store selling tailored burlap bags that fulfill all the functions demanded of clothing.
To reach the people who actually performed the work, we initiated Friday afternoon Perceptual Quality Program Review, or PQPR, meetings.Vehicles at every step of the pipeline would be analyzed for crooked seams, clunky knobs and switches, gaps between adjacent parts, too much or too little gloss . . . anything a customer would see, feel, hear, or touch.
Key competitive vehicles, usually Audi, VW, or Lexus, were routinely present in the room. For four or five solid years, I “taught” those classes personally. Was that the best use of a vice chairman’s time? Most organizational theorists would probably say no. I just couldn’t find anybody else to do it, at the outset. Later, as the culture changed and the participants from Design, Interior Engineering, Purchasing, and Manufacturing all became infused with the vision of making GM interiors the envy of the automotive world, it became self-sustaining. By that point, I knew the culture, as far as interior and exterior precision were concerned, had reached the point of no return. Bad executions were simply no longer going to get through the system. So focused on excellence did these teams become that, as a proud observer at the later PQPR meetings, I would sometimes find myself thinking, “Wow! I didn’t even notice that, and I doubt many customers would!” But I always kept that reaction to myself.
The “perceptual quality” problem was, after a few painful years, solved for good.
Meanwhile, Vietnam veteran, F4H Phantom pilot, and U.S. Marine captain Jim Queen, a man of medium stature but towering presence, created a team to clean out many decades’ worth of antiquated “engineering requirements”—methods adopted by GM after something went wrong. In the 1920s and ’30s, for instance, there was a problem with tires blowing out against rocks in the wilds of Alaska. Solution: create a test at the GM Proving Ground so severe that this could never happen again. It’s called the “curb test,” whereby the car is driven over a four-inch steeledged curb at normal speed. The tires and wheels must survive the brutal impact. Good! But to achieve that performance, tires must be fat and pillowy and the steel or aluminum wheels small: exactly the opposite of today’s style trend to larger wheels with tires of much-reduced height. So, no eighteen-inch (or, heaven forbid, nineteen-inch) rims for us. I asked about competitors who routinely sold cool-looking wheel and tire combinations in the U.S. market and was told, “Oh, they all fail the test! In fact, [German competitor with a great reputation] actually suffers front suspension failure!” So, we had ugly wheels because of a problem we experienced seventy years ago!
The position of the wheels relative to the side of the car bothered me, too. Cars look dynamic and stable when the outside tire face is flush to the body, a look many competitors, notably Audi and BMW, pursued consistently. Our wheels tended to be “tucked” under the car, with a