GM Upgrades Its Design Strategy

The Detroit News reported that General Motors Corp.'s vehicle development boss is betting that more competition between the automaker's designers will result in more stunning new cars and trucks and fewer dogs. Under a new design strategy to accelerate the introduction of more appealing cars and trucks, GM plans to pit a trio of styling teams against each other for each new or redesigned model it seeks to create. "We'll research those three, select the winner, hone it, and adapt things off of some of the other themes," Bob Lutz, GM's vice-chairman in charge of vehicle development, told Wall Street analysts last week. Lutz isn't limiting the competition to GM's U.S. designers in Warren and Los Angeles. In some cases the competition will include artists from GM's design centers in Europe, Asia-Pacific and South America, and possibly from independent studios such as Pininfarina in Italy. "Our design process is not only going to generate winning concept cars, but it's going to generate winning production cars," he said.