GM Unable to Deliver

Regarding the April 2 story, “GM’s Revolution in Auto Design”:

Certainly, it is good news that General Motors has given its designers more creative flexibility and has abandoned its patently reductive “cookie-cutter” car designs.

But the article, by being all “good news,” is in a sense as disappointing as GM’s performance. It fails to note important elements such as GM’s continuing inability to deliver the customers what they want to buy.

It appeared with pictures of the flashy Pontiac Banshee--a car that is all “concept” and not in production. Yet it does not analyze the failure of the closest thing to design leadership that GM has attempted in recent years, the Pontiac Fiero, which despite a relatively (for GM) efficient factory and a mature design, was ill equipped to compete with other sports cars because of GM’s scant investment on high-performance mechanical systems.

Although GM’s exterior design has indeed often been stodgy and even silly, the company has bigger problems. If the “cookie-cutter” cars had been well built, fuel efficient and comparatively trouble free, they would not have been so thoroughly derided.

JOHN H. HALE

Los Angeles