At GM, Design Is Going Hollywood

It will be months yet before the remodeling is completed and the office furniture and elaborate digital design and model-making equipment are moved in at General Motors Corp.’s new advanced design center in North Hollywood, but studio chief Frank Saucedo’s head is already crammed with plans.

The outspoken designer acknowledges that the auto maker has run at the back of the pack in the last decade when it comes to styling--that GM’s brands win customers more from a sense of loyalty than from a feeling of excitement about the company’s cars and trucks.

He points to his former employer, Volkswagen of Germany, as a model of great design, citing cars as diverse as VW’s Golf and New Beetle and just about everything in the arsenal of its Audi luxury-car subsidiary as examples of the kinds of vehicles that grab consumers’ attention.

But all the European auto makers these days “do a very good job of design,” Saucedo says. Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler’s U.S. operations--the former Chrysler Corp.--are no slouches either, he says.

The 38-year-old Alhambra native worked for GM for 11 years, starting with the company’s Opel subsidiary in Germany and winding up as head designer at GM’s previous California studio in Newbury Park, in Ventura County.

He oversaw the closing of that facility in 1996, when GM decided to consolidate all of its design operations at its main studio in Warren, Mich. Saucedo himself then moved, joining the Volkswagen-Audi U.S. design center in Simi Valley.

Saucedo was lured back to GM two months ago, he says, to help the world’s largest auto maker redefine itself as a company that can compete in the marketplace with the best the competition can throw at it.

He cautions that it takes several years for new thinking to manifest itself in production vehicles, but he says GM advanced design is already showing improvements.

“We showed some things in Detroit that you would not have expected to see from GM,” Saucedo says, referring to last month’s North American International Auto Show. One, the hot-rod-styled SSR mini-pickup that some are calling GM’s answer to the Plymouth Prowler, has now been approved for production and is expected to hit dealer showrooms by early 2002.

In addition to its wide fenders and low-slung stance, the two-seat SSR concept includes a retracting steel top that turns the hardtop into a convertible at the push of a button--a feature that owes more to Mercedes-Benz’s SLK convertible hardtop than to anything in GM’s stable.

“There are some signs that GM has some fresh new thinking,” says automotive marketing consultant Dan Gorrell, vice president of Strategic Vision in San Diego. “But the company has to present a complete new personality, not just a face lift.” Even with some of its new products, such as the Impala sedan, GM has “failed to really break new ground,” Gorrell says. “The interior was kind of dated, and it just didn’t speak of something new and different.”

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For Saucedo, a big part of the package that sent him back to GM was the commitment of G. Richard Wagoner Jr.--then company president and now chief executive--to making pursuit of design leadership a corporate goal once again.

“The fact that a major executive is talking about design is a big step for GM,” Saucedo says.

Being offered his own studio to run was also attractive, he says, as was the opportunity to do it all while remaining in Southern California.

Still, Saucedo says, he won’t fall into the trap of considering all things Southland to be good.

“Our mission out here is to offer an alternative,” he says, “and one sign of that is the diversity of who we are hiring. I’m probably the only ex-GM guy we’ll have. All the rest are going to be from European or Japanese companies. And we want to get some people who are just out of school with no professional experience.”

To find them, GM won’t shop exclusively at Saucedo’s alma mater, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena--the source of about half the auto designers working in the U.S. today.

“We want diversity of thinking,” he says, so he will be extending his talent search to such institutions as Brigham Young University, the Pforzheim design school in Germany and Royal College of Art in London.

“My experience in Europe has shown me there’s a lot of talent there,” Saucedo says. “And with a mixture of that and the home-grown perspective of American-based designers, I think it’s going to be a good mix.”

So far, Saucedo’s hires include Franz von Holzhausen, 31, formerly of VW’s Simi Valley studio, and Rob McCann, 38, from Porsche Engineering’s studio in Huntington Beach.

Von Holzhausen will head the GM center’s analog design studio--the place where physical models of various vehicles are built--while McCann will head the center’s digital design studio.

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Ultimately, the North Hollywood studio is to have about 30 employees: a mix of designers, market researchers and a team from GM’s Advanced Portfolio Exploration Group, a multifaceted corporate think tank dedicated to pondering the future and posing questions for GM’s designers, engineers and marketing specialists to answer. (“They’ve even asked us to think about GM in a future in which there is no need for personal transportation vehicles!” Saucedo exclaims.)

In addition to a permanent staff, the advanced design center will play host to visitors from GM affiliates and subsidiaries all over the world.

“What we’ll be doing here is developing scenarios that drive an architecture--the configuration of a vehicle,” Saucedo says. “And then at some point we will have to decide, here or in Warren, which of the GM brands will get that architecture. And the brand will then drive the final design. You wouldn’t give a small economy car architecture to Cadillac, for instance.”

But there will be some surprises in what GM’s new advanced design studio is willing to do, Saucedo suggests.

“You have to take risks in this business. If we are doing the same things they are doing in Warren, then we have failed,” he says, referring again to GM’s main design center. “Our job is to go a few years beyond what they are thinking of. The challenge is to come up with vehicles that don’t just replace something but that fill new places in the market.”

Nissan did it when it introduced the compact pickup truck to North America in 1959. More recently, Chrysler did that with the minivan in 1984.

“Chrysler started with a little niche product and it became mainstream,” Saucedo says. “Now it’s easy to replace a minivan with a new, updated minivan.

“The quest is to find that next niche product that will become mainstream. You’re looking for the next big hit, for what’s going to replace the sport-utility vehicle. And we know it’s going to happen. We just don’t know yet what it’s going to be.”

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Times staff writer John O’Dell can be reached at john.odell@latimes.com.