A team from Lear, meanwhile, had independently arrived at a similar idea. The team took that idea to people from GM's van division, who liked what they saw and paid Lear for the concept. The next step -- for Lear, the key step -- was to go from concept to contract. And speed was of the essence. "It would have taken two, maybe three years to make a van like this in the GM system," says Larry Szydlowski, 59, GM's program manager for the Express IT. In that time, the demand for such a van might have come and gone -- or, worse, a rival carmaker might have implemented the idea first.

The Lear team told GM that it could go from contract to product in just a year. Making that claim was pretty cocky of Lear: The company hadn't proved that it could do this kind of full-scale makeover. But the Lear team, pinning its faith on the company's own technological makeover, put its money where its mouth was. In August 1999, after going through a series of design iterations in the Reality Center, Lear created a physical prototype to show GM -- a costly move that most suppliers are loath to make if they have not yet secured a contract.

People from GM were impressed -- both by the risk that Lear took and by the speed with which Lear was able to work. "Typically, a supplier would come back to us four or five months later with some mock-ups," says Cook. "The Lear folks took 30 days, and it was as if they had taken the ideas right out of our brains." By February 2000, Lear had landed the contract -- and a year later, as promised, the Express LT was in production.

Cook and Szydlowski knew that they had a winner last January, when they took a group of GM engineers on a test-drive of one of the van's first working models. Usually, on a test-drive, everyone clamors to get in the driver's seat. But this time, "nobody wanted to drive," Cook recalls. "Everybody wanted to sit in back and watch videos and play computer games."

Fara Warner (fwarner@fastcompany.com), a Fast Company senior writer, is based in San Francisco. Visit Lear Corp. on the Web (www.lear.com).

Sidebar: Model Team

Bob Hamilton stares at the giant screen in the Reality Center at Lear Corp. With a few clicks of his mouse and a series of rapid-fire keystrokes, he's creating a virtual world using CAD software. Amid the purple, red, and green lines that cross the screen, he seems to have carved out a massive curved tunnel. In fact, he has rendered a 2-mm-wide groove from the top of an engine cover. (The days when Lear made only car seats are long past.)

Hamilton, 38, is a virtual-design leader, but he might just as easily be called a "computer sculptor." Today, he is "sculpting" a 3-D version of 2-D art created by his collaborator, industrial designer Marc Beauregard. While CAD technology might make it possible to combine their two jobs into one, they prefer to work as a team. "I try to stay as digital as I can," says Beauregard, 34 -- but he notes that technology has its limits. He often develops his designs on paper before moving to a computer. And he still hands off his designs to Hamilton, rather than taking on the sculpting task himself.

Hamilton has a background in real-world manufacturing that serves him well in his virtual-design work -- and makes him a highly valued partner to Beauregard. Because he understands manufacturing, he knows whether a particular curve or depth can actually be mass-produced from stamped metal or plastic. "I'm the guy who keeps everyone honest," says Hamilton.