Made in China

Joe Qiu's interior for a Chinese Buick caught Detroit's eye--and got Shanghai into a global design bake-off.

The Chinese LaCrosse was designed entirely in GM's PATAC studio--with enough bling to sate Shanghai's young buyers.

In Detroit, it's 6 p.m. Welburn shifts in his chair, weary. There's still more work for his team to finish before going home. But he's energized by the spirit of his Chinese colleagues. They handled the nit-picking well. And the fact that there was this sort of exchange at all--well, that's telling, too. "Historically, we wouldn't have gone to this level of detail even three years back," he says of the hour-long meeting. "We would have turned it over to engineering and moved on. This level of detail, this sweating of the details, is different."

GM's Design Center is an iconic place. Imagined by the modernist Finnish architect Eero Saarinen in the 1940s, its lobby features an elegant, spare floating staircase hung over a reflecting pool. A water tower--GM says it's the world's tallest stainless steel structure--rises out of a placid lake. Bright white walls are lined with photos of famous car designs. (By contrast, the China studio is tucked away inside of PATAC's shabby, utilitarian offices where the landscaping consists of an iron fence and a dusty parking lot.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, GM's design chiefs (there have been only six) controlled the carmaker's destiny. They decided what the cars would look like and in doing so determined what America would drive. They brought us the Cadillac fin and the Buick porthole. But by the 1980s, design had taken a backseat to GM's increasingly powerful engineering and manufacturing divisions. The studios were doing little more than "wrapping a pretty skin around what the engineers had designed," says Bob Lutz, GM's vice chairman in charge of global product development.

Lutz, Detroit's best-known iconoclast, was hired in 2001 to help resuscitate GM design. He tapped Welburn to head design in 2003. They along with design director Asensio believed that great car design would be critical to any comeback. "I have seen a rebirth of a company through design," says Asensio, who came to GM from Renault. "Design is the key enabler. That's why I came here. I knew that there was something that could come up from design that could turn around GM."

But the executives also understood that they could no longer depend solely on Detroit talent. To compete with the best products, and to serve a global market, they would have to tap creativity in new places and in new ways. Welburn and Lutz decided that competition--the bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred sort--would expose the best ideas, wherever they came from.

Their plan, unprecedented within GM, was to pit teams of designers from around the world against each other. The new ruling assumption: Just because a car was going to be sold in the United States didn't mean it had to be designed stateside. As important, the winner in each case would run the project worldwide, working with GM's global purchasing, engineering, and manufacturing units to get a new car on the road.

From Los Angeles to Russelsheim, Germany, designers at GM's 11 design centers began revving up their CAD software to compete for various new models. But in 2001, the Shanghai studio was barely ready to sketch a car, let alone design one. Shyr was still building his team, scouring China's cities for whatever designers he could find. At the time, there were no car- or art-design schools like the Art Center of Pasadena or the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.

So when Welburn decided to pit the China team against the North American team to design the new LaCrosse, it was as if he'd asked a Chinese high-school basketball team to take on the Detroit Pistons. Leading a car's design isn't just about thinking up great lines to be stamped into raw steel. It requires creating hundreds, perhaps thousands, of three-dimensional computer models, building perfect clay replicas and knowing enough to specify which materials will be used. It means working with suppliers around the world and spending years looking after the smallest of details.

But Welburn had seen something in Qiu's design of the Chinese LaCrosse, as well as in the team's work on a Buick minivan and a stretched version of the Cadillac STS. He thought PATAC was ready to at least give a good showing. "Chinese consumers are so demanding--and that team had met their needs so well that even though the studio was small at the time, I knew that China was changing faster and growing up faster than most people realized," Welburn says.

The China team didn't disappoint, jumping into the competition with a vengeance. "There's no doubt, we wanted to beat the North American guys," says Shyr, who admits pressing his young team to outdo their more experienced colleagues. For months, over several rounds, design files flew back and forth between Shanghai and Detroit. The two teams occasionally saw each other's work--both feeding the sense of urgency and giving each other ideas.