GM Selects North Hollywood Site for Its New Design Center
General Motors Corp., eager to lure unconventional thinkers who have advanced computer animation skills to its styling staff, said Wednesday that it has selected a 60-year-old former bakery complex in North Hollywood as the site of a new advanced design center and has hired the head designer of a rival Southern California studio to run it.
GM, long No. 1 in global sales but generally regarded as a laggard in automotive styling, last had a Southern California design presence with a Ventura County studio that it closed in 1996 for budgetary reasons.
The auto maker has been criticized for shuttering the studio--GM was, in fact, the only major auto maker without a design center in Southern California. The company acknowledges that exposing designers to the region’s ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic stew will help keep their thinking fresh and free.
“It had become pretty apparent that they really needed an outpost here,” said Ronald C. Hill, chairman of the transportation design school at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
The still-unnamed GM studio--a project first reported by The Times last week--will be directed by Frank Saucedo, a 38-year-old Art Center graduate hired away from Volkswagen’s U.S. design center.
In hiring Saucedo, who worked at the joint Volkswagen-Audi studio in Simi Valley, GM didn’t stray too far from home.
The designer got his start at the company’s Opel unit in Germany in the ‘80s and was chief designer at the GM advanced design center in the Ventura County community of Newbury Park when it was closed. While at GM, Saucedo worked on numerous vehicles, including the 1994 Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird twins and the current-generation Chevy Corvette sports car and C/K pickups.
While not quite the “outsider” GM officials would like to paint him to be, Saucedo “has had the benefit of being in the kind of yeasty auto design community that produced cars like the New Beetle and the TT, and that is excellent training that will benefit GM,” said Art Center’s Hill.
Hill, a former top designer for several GM brands and a longtime acquaintance of Saucedo, said the designer’s training with Opel also steeped him in a European styling tradition that should help fashion a fresh look for designs coming out of the North Hollywood studio.
Saucedo will head a staff of more than 30 designers, model makers and support personnel. The center will give GM a global studio to work on cars and trucks from all of its domestic and overseas brands, including Opel, Isuzu of Japan, Saab of Sweden, Vauxhall of Britain and Holden Cars of Australia.
Wayne K. Cherry, GM’s vice president for design, said the company set up shop Monday at the former Oroweat Bakery on Biloxi Avenue and will spend several months remodeling, building up the staff and installing computer and technical equipment necessary to outfit a full-service auto design studio.
“We came back to California because of the quality of [design] people here, and we chose North Hollywood because of its location, near the Burbank area with its entertainment businesses. We will be close to the infrastructure we need for design, for model building, for electronics and for computer animation skills.”
While GM was celebrating its new center--the formal announcement came Wednesday night at a gala event in Santa Monica attended by Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and top GM officials, including Cherry and GM North America President Ronald L. Zarrella--officials at Volkswagen were more likely fuming.
Saucedo is the fourth top VW-Audi designer to leave the company in recent years: Ford Motor Co. hired former chief Audi designer J Mays in 1997 to head all of Ford’s design operations; Jeff Teague quit as head of the Simi Valley studio in 1998 to start up an automotive design program at the Academy of Arts College in San Francisco; and Freeman Thomas vacated the top spot last year to join DaimlerChrysler as vice president of advanced design strategy at the company’s U.S. headquarters in Michigan.
Mays and Thomas are credited with developing the 1994 Concept 1 show car for Volkswagen that evolved into the New Beetle in 1998 and the Audi TT in 1999.
Torsten Goeckeritz, design director at the VW-Audi center, could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but Volkswagen of America spokesman Tony Fouladpour said the company isn’t feeling particularly beleaguered.
“The industry is changing,” he said, and though it used to be routine for auto designers to spend their entire careers at the same company, job hopping is becoming an accepted practice as the emphasis on design as a critical marketing tool increases.
“We’ve hired from other companies, and others have hired from us,” Fouladpour said. “But Volkswagen and Audi still have a lot of very talented designers, not only in Simi Valley but in Germany at the Volkswagen and Audi studios there.”
GM design chief Cherry said GM is entering the design wars in full force, with a dozen concept vehicles for its various brands to be unveiled over the next few months at major auto shows in Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and New York. Those concepts, he said, “should give people a good indication of the talent in this organization. They show what we are capable of doing, and they show what has been going on at GM now.”
