At Design Lab, GM Looks Way Down the Road : Autos: The giant car maker hopes that the laid-back atmosphere of its Advanced Concepts Center in Newbury Park will inspire creativity--and help it regain the design lead.
A red light on a ceiling-mounted motion detector flashes silently inside General Motors’ Advanced Concepts Center, guarding the super-secret new car designs in this remote Ventura County facility from curious competitors and unwanted intruders.
Since GM opened the center in 1983 as a laboratory for leading-edge automotive design, the 22,000-square-foot facility has been shrouded in secrecy. The nondescript building, which houses 40 employees, is identified only by a small sign.
Car & Driver magazine, noting that the center “issues no press releases, encourages no organized visits and practically calls security if somebody walks in off the street,” compared the center to the Central Intelligence Agency in its fastidiousness about security.
Almost two weeks ago, however, consumers got a rare indication of what goes on at the center--situated in Newbury Park about 45 miles from downtown Los Angeles--when General Motors unveiled a prototype electric passenger car that can go 124 miles on a single charge and can even outrace some internal combustion engine cars.
Called the Impact, the teardrop-shaped two-seater car was designed to help place GM “on the cutting edge of technology,” GM Chairman Roger B. Smith said when the experimental car was unveiled Jan. 3.
In recent years, the search for the automotive cutting edge has brought more and more outfits like the Advanced Concepts Center to Southern California for creative inspiration.
Virtually every automobile company, including all of the Big Three domestic auto makers, have opened design studios here. And some, including Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Ford and Toyota, are already marketing cars whose bright colors, rounded aerodynamic exteriors and people-friendly, or ergonomic, interiors have been inspired by Southern California, experts say.
“Styling is still the one feature that buyers fall in love with first every time,” said Chris Cedergren, senior automotive analyst with J. D. Power & Associates, an automotive research firm in Agoura Hills. Because Southern California is such a cultural and ethnic melting pot, he added, it is fertile ground for finding creative styles that “consumers all across the country can identify with.”
Unlike some of their competitors, however, employees at the Advanced Concepts Center are not working solely to produce the next best-selling passenger car design. They are encouraged to dream far into the automotive future and produce vehicles such as the electric car.
“We are not tied up in all the office politics,” said John R. Schinella, director of the center. “We have freedom--the freedom to think and create. The distance (from GM headquarters in Detroit) helps. But being in California is the true freedom. There’s more going on out here than anywhere else in the U.S.”
Encouraging the creative process is not inconsequential to automotive manufacturing. Car design is among the most complex of manufacturing pursuits, said Donald B. Macfarlane, manager of engineering and design services for the center. And incorporating currently available materials and parts into new styles or trends, he said, often requires keen management and engineering prowess as well as creative skill.
Yet designers don’t have an entirely free hand when it comes to shaping a car’s sheet metal. There is a host of federal regulations covering everything from bumper protection, headlights and windshield glass. And corporate automotive design tradition and machine tool restrictions often dictate that new car models be evolutionary rather than revolutionary in design.
“It’s not like the (Nissan) Infinity ads, where you look at a flock of geese and then, Wham!, you dream up a new car bumper,” said Jon Albert, head of the electric car design team. “I liken it (car design) to architecture. A good creative designer always sees the freedom, not the restrictions.”
To encourage that attitude, the Advanced Concepts Center has adopted a laid-back attitude.
There is no dress code for the mostly 30-ish employees, who often come to work in jeans and tennis shoes. What’s more, designers and engineers are encouraged to go to custom car shows, the movies and even the beach in search of new ideas. And the corporate brass in Detroit has given employees at the center a virtual free hand to dream up anything they want, so long as they produce results.
Such an easy-going working environment is something of a departure for the giant auto maker, which since August, 1987, has closed eight auto assembly plants and idled 30,000 workers. GM’s sluggish sales have in part been blamed on the boxy, lackluster design of its cars. Although GM has begun to change that image with the Fiero, the Corvette and some recently introduced models, many observers say GM is still playing catch-up.
Mark Stehrenberger, a Santa Barbara consultant who has done design work for BMW, Volkswagen and Renault, noted that while most car makers “are very conservative” about change, it was “only under pressure” from Ford that GM adopted the aerodynamic look that prevails in many cars today.
Schinella agrees that GM’s huge bureaucracy has sometimes slowed its responsiveness. Today, however, GM is trying to retake the design lead with the Advanced Concepts Center. Although the center was not the first to produce an electric car, its Impact car is one of the few electric prototypes fast enough to be considered a practical vehicle for the consumer market.
