Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [64]
It all came to a head when GM Asia-Pacific decided they needed a compact SUV and proposed creating an all-new, groundup vehicle. I argued that we already had a successful architecture, fully engineered, in the Saturn Vue and Chevrolet Equinox. Using what we had, I argued, would save time, money, and scarce engineering resources. Further, if we made the Daewoo SUV stylistically and mechanically excellent, it could, in turn, become the long-desired compact SUV for GM Europe. And, finally, the styling and engineering done for Europe’s Opel and Vauxhall could, in turn, become the next-generation Saturn Vue. My vision was to have a family of GM compact SUVs—Chevrolet Equinox, Saturn Vue, GMC Terrain, Daewoo Winstorm and Opel Antara—all different as necessary, all adapted to their markets, but all sharing common parts in those areas where differences provide no brand value: air conditioners, seat frames, braking systems, basic body structures, and more. Fierce arguments raged over this program, and Fritz Henderson, at that time the president of GM Asia-Pacific (later, CEO of GM after the firing of Rick Wagoner), quite naturally led his region’s charge for its very own compact SUV. The decisive Automotive Strategy Board meeting rolled around, and both the “globalists” and the “regionalists” recounted familiar arguments.
After much discussion, Rick Wagoner spoke: “In the decades I’ve been in this company, I’ve listened, time after time, to reasons why it is critical for this particular vehicle to be totally new and different. And, just as many times, we later ask ourselves why on earth we did that. I’m tired of it, frankly, and we are going to execute the Korean company SUV based on the architecture we already have for the Vue and the Equinox.”
And so a key blow was struck for intelligent product sharing across GM’s regions. Since I feared he might be stung by what he considered a major defeat, I penned this memo to Henderson:
Thanks for accepting the decision of the GPDM. I hated the fact that we had a conflict, and felt like a hypocrite because of all the times in my career where I fought hard (and almost always successfully) for the “regional” solution. But, in this case, it was much less about “winning” than it was to really get GM into a global, total-system optimization path, much like Honda. When I look at the golden opportunity GM North America has with the adoption of the Holden VE program for Chevrolet, Pontiac, and Buick, saving us hundreds of millions in engineering and vendor tooling, and, conversely, when I see the relative failure to obtain the synergies we wanted with Epsilon and Delta architectures (“We have to re-tool locally anyway, so why not change it?”), I am convinced that an intelligent global architecture strategy, with flexibility, to be sure, is the way to go. In this particular case, there is no doubt that the GMAP proposal was the best for your region.Yet, I do believe that, for our company as a whole, giving up one inch of width (vs. GMT-1901 Equinox) and losing the availability of the XK6 engine will prove to be small prices to pay for the major downstream and, as yet, unidentifiable savings and synergies. Again, Fritz, I hated the controversy, and I hated disappointing Nick Reilly and the guys. But, as they say,“Nuttin’ personal; it’s strictly business.”
See you soon.
Bob
And thus was launched the first, albeit imperfect,