Car Guys vs. Bean Counters - Bob Lutz [8]
Mitchell gathered his peers from Engineering, triumphantly started the engine, and blipped the throttle, resulting in decidedly un-Pontiac-like shrieks of high-pitched Euro-power. “That, gentlemen,” spoke Mitchell, “is how a goddamn sports car is supposed to sound!” Point made—but Camaros and Firebirds never did get V12s. Still, “Pegasus” was arguably Mitchell’s favorite among the many “special” vehicles he and the other leading designers liked to drive.
As you might expect, things weren’t always quite so “ethically pristine” in Design at that time. It was quite possible for senior designers and other key executives (in Mitchell’s good graces) to have major restorations performed on their collector cars.Whether working on an old Auburn “boat-tail Speedster” or a prewar German “Horch” cabriolet, the Design shops at the time were as good as today’s restoration specialists, doing complete, frame-off mechanical and cosmetic refurbishments, resulting in what the classic car trade calls “Condition 1” cars.
Some of these GM-restored vehicles are still regularly seen in major concours d’elegance.To be fair, it must be added that audits performed years later led to the owners being billed laughably small sums for the work. (I was a minor miscreant: Opel Design custom painted the racing fairing on my Honda CB-750 four-cylinder motorcycle. Luckily, I had left GM for BMW by the time the auditors showed up.) To say that Design’s behavior rankled the more orderly elements in the company would be a crass understatement.
The “Empire” of finance, accounting, law and order, “the way a sound company is run” . . . all these sensitivities were assaulted on a daily basis. It had to stop. The Empire struck back! Mitchell was retired with full honors in 1977 and replaced by Irv Rybicki, a fine, upstanding, seasoned design executive of modest demeanor who spoke reassuringly of fiscal responsibility, teamwork, “design is just one link in the chain,” and other homilies that went down like warm olive oil with the ascendant “professional managers.”
No longer would the uneducated public think that the vice president of design was the CEO. No longer would GM produce flamboyant, impractical designs with crazy fins, menacing chrome grilles, and interiors out of a Buck Rogers movie. No more grinning, expensively tailored chief designers on the covers of magazines. No more “secret” or “no unauthorized entry” studios. Design was to be put in its place; the era of the prima donnas was over.
“These guys are just artists, for crissakes,” GM execs declared. “They’re no more important than the guys who design shampoo bottles at Procter & Gamble.” Design was to become “part of the system.” Design would no longer originate a product, the way it did with the original Buick Riviera, which was dreamed up by the designers as a premium Cadillac coupe. (Cadillac didn’t want it, so it was shopped around until Buick wisely took it.)
From now on, products would be initiated by Product Planning (a department composed of recycled finance types); they would ferret out market segments and define exterior dimensions and interior roominess to the millimeter. Engineering suddenly had a lot more say in what went where, and Manufacturing weighed in massively on questions of ease of assembly and number of stamping dies per panel. Instead of being originators, as in the old days, the designers simply were told: “Here, we’ve decided what this car is going to be. How long the hood is. Where the windshield touches down.We’ve defined all the roominess criteria. By the way, for investment reasons, we’re going to share doors across