How GM Made The Most Important Car Design Job In The World A Little Less Important

Soon there will be a changing of the guard at the top of an automotive institution. A new leader will sweep asunder all before them, place trusted lieutenants in key positions to secure their power base, and ensure orders are conducted with ruthless efficiency. I’m not talking about my Machiavellian plans to take over the Autopian, Terran Empire-style and implement my evil plan to give this website a dark mode. I am of course referring to General Motors’ recent announcement that effective July 1st Bryan Nesbitt will be succeeding Michael Simcoe as Vice President of Design.

If your reaction to hearing these two names is ‘who?’ I don’t blame you. It’s been a long time since the person holding what once upon a time was the most prestigious and influential design role in the entire automotive industry was on the lips of enthusiasts and journalists. Read an old car magazine and, if a new GM car was road tested within the front and back covers, the chances are the name of the chief designer will crop up somewhere in the copy.

Without looking them up, can you name any of the other six incumbents of the position? If it’s more than three or four I’ll be impressed. If you can name all of them have a lollipop. Why should we as scholars of car design give a shit? The person with overall design responsibility for an OEM doesn’t exactly do any of the dirty work getting marker stains on their fingers or modeling clay stuck under their nails so what does it matter?

Having a design figurehead in a sharp suit and wearing a watch that costs more than your house is important for media duties, but more than that the design buck stops with them. They get to receive all the plaudits, praise, and meaningless glass trophies if the cars are well received OR get pelted with rotten vegetables and eventually shuffled out the side door if they are not. Despite pioneering the whole discipline, the words “General Motors” and “design leadership” haven’t appeared in the same sentence for a long time, because they are trapped in a Euripides tragedy entirely of their own making.

The Father of Modern Car Design

It was in the 1924 shareholders report that Alfred Sloan made his famous ‘a car for every purse and purpose’ statement. Sloan realized that the General’s disparate collection of marques could not compete with Henry Ford on price. Ford had weaponized mass production techniques and was stamping out the gimcrack Model T with ruthless efficiency.Sloan’s idea was to create a hierarchy of brands offering a range of styles and appearances for customers at all price points, as opposed to the one-size-fits-all Ford. In Hollywood, he found a young car customizer by the name of Harley Earl. Earl had been working in his father’s body shop coachbuilding one-off cars for movie stars. Sloan contracted Earl to design a car for Cadillac – the 1927 LaSalle, the success of which encouraged Sloan to hire Earl to set up the General Motors ‘Art & Color’ section – the world’s first production car design studio.

Earl’s skillset wasn’t entirely unique – coach builders had long been creating flamboyant one-off bodies for discerning and well-heeled customers for years. But in setting up the GM studios he pioneered and rationalized the working methods and processes that are more or less still used to this day – sketching, clay modeling then hard models for board sign-off and approval. There was a lot of internal resistance across the GM divisions to this new-fangled idea of ‘styling’. After the debacle of the 1929 ‘pregnant’ Buick when body engineers altered the bodyside to make it easier to stamp, an enraged Earl bought engineers inside the studio so such a thing could never happen again.

Outside the studio walls division managers didn’t know what hit them. Who the hell was this dandy to lecture them on how their cars should look? A 6’4” firebrand of a man, Earl was used to getting his own way, according to the great book The Art Of American Car Design. Usually well-lubricated and with a wardrobe of dapper suits as colorful as his language, he had Sloan’s ear and the two would spend quieter summer months sailing together as Earl put forth his ideas for forthcoming models. Earl wasn’t strictly a car designer as we would understand the role today – his own drawing skills were non-existent and his understanding of three-dimensional forms was limited. He insisted that orthographic front, side, and rear drawings had to be completed before any modeling started. Instead, Earl’s talents lay in directing his designers to come up with ideas that would fit his unique vision.

After the Second World War, fully integrated bodies became the norm and, thanks to Earl, GM led American car design into one of its first influential periods: The Fifties. Inspired by the Lockheed P38 Lightning, Earl came up with the seminal tailfin which first appeared on the 1948 Series 62 Cadillacs. Even the likes of Pininfarina were not immune from Earl’s outsize influence, shrinking the American gestalt onto cars like the Austin A55 Cambridge and Peugeot 404. By the end of the decade Earl was nearing mandatory retirement and his cars were becoming bloated chrome barges, with none of the finesse of his earlier work. The GM studios that Earl had pioneered were overworked; young designers chafed under his dictatorial management style and left to set up studios at competitors. One of them, a young Virgil Exner, rendered Earl’s aesthetic obsolete overnight with his ’57 Chryslers. Another, the outspoken Raymond Loewy working for Studebaker, had begun criticizing Earl’s cars in the press.

A Second Golden Age of General Motors Car Design

Upon his retirement in 1958, Earl handpicked the man he wanted to succeed him – Bill Mitchell. Earl hired Mitchell from Madison Avenue in 1935, and within six months he was head of the Cadillac studio. Mitchell’s first complete car was the 1938 Sixty Special, which would begin to hint at the ideas Mitchell would later introduce as VP of Design; taut surfaces, sharp creases, and minimal external decoration. If Earl had laid the foundations for the OEM studio system, Mitchell modernized them. He hired more designers, ending the 12-hour/six-day week that had been the norm under Earl. This increase in designers meant advanced design studies could be carried out without affecting production models, something that would’ve been impossible previously. Mitchell set the individual division design studios into friendly rivalry with each other, ending the locked door policy that Earl had created to maintain an iron grip over the division studios.

By the early Sixties, Mitchell had managed to steer the American aesthetic away from chrome barges to a much sleeker, sharper European-influenced look that gave the GM design hegemony a second wind. The first car to exemplify the break between the two men is the 1963 Buick Riviera, originally sketched by Ned Nickles. Nonetheless, Mitchell had to tread carefully as he didn’t enjoy the personal patronage of Sloan, who retired in 1954.

He knew the policy committee (which dictated model strategy) and engineering committee (which decided on platforms) wanted to gain control over the Tech Center. Like Earl, Mitchell saw his job as setting trends, not following them and obsessing about what competitors were up to, which he thought GM executives were too preoccupied with. Again, from The Art of American Car Design:

“Oh, when Earl left, they thought they had me, ’cause they couldn’t run him [Earl], so the first couple of years, I had to watch it. They were moving in on me, and I fought like hell, and I made it. I used to think I’ll never make it, but I did, and I had his [Earl’s] picture in my office. I thought I’ll never let you down, whether it was Murphy or who it was. I got the guys that loved cars like Knudsen and Cole to back me up”.

A Period of Timidity When The Opposite Was Needed

Both Earl and Mitchell were strong-willed personalities who believed in the power of attractive design to sell cars. Neither man was given to the opinions of those outside the design studios – not customers and certainly not GM management. During Earl’s tenure, GM had become the largest corporation in the world, and under Mitchell, GM sold an astonishing 72.5 million cars. Nonetheless, GM executives wanted a chief designer they could keep on a tight leash so when Mitchell retired in 1977 they appointed Irv Rybicki as his replacement over Mitchell’s chosen successor and number two, Chuck Jordan. As Jordan said in a 2006 interview with Motor Trend Classic:

“When Irv Rybicki took over and I was number two, that was a hard thing for me. They didn’t want any more Mitchells around, and I was a Mitchell guy. Irv and I had very different philosophies. Irv had good taste, but he didn’t encourage exploring. And I was the opposite. I was always running through the place saying, “Try this, try that. If it doesn’t work, throw it out.”

Writing Jordan’s obituary in 2011, noted automotive historian Martin Buckley summed up the differences between the two men:

Rybicki was viewed as being less of a Mitchell acolyte and thus less associated with the excesses of the previous decade – not to mention an easier character to handle than the sometimes disarmingly direct Jordan.

Mitchell in a 1984 interview was similarly dismissive of Rybicki’s ability to stand up for good design against GM management:

“Irv [Rybicki] has been in seven years, and nobody knows him. He won’t speak up, and they’re just taking it away from him. You’ve got to fight for what you want”

During the Seventies, the US domestic market was changing rapidly and GM had to adapt – Rybicki’s time in charge coincided with Roger Smiths hell-or-high-water attempts to drag the sprawling corporation into the Eighties. Attempts to streamline the design process by giving corporate platforms like the 1982 A-body a nose and tail job for each of the divisions was not the answer. When times are tough design becomes more important not less. Within General Motors the role of design in creating distinctive, attractive vehicles was becoming subservient to external concerns.

Chuck Jordan Tries But It’s Too Late

Chuck Jordan joined GM after graduating from MIT in 1949. By 1953, he was working in the special projects studio where in 1955 he designed the GM Aerotrain. In 1957, Jordan became head of the Cadillac studio. He was the first GM Vice President of Design to have worked overseas – he spent three years in the late Sixties working at Opel – a position offered initially to Rybicki who turned it down because his wife didn’t want to live in Germany.

Like Mitchell and Earl, Jordan was very European in his influences, owning a succession of Ferraris. There were sporadic bright spots for GM design under Jordan – the 1992 Cadillac Seville might have been an engine-lunching, badly built mess but the exterior design was admired by Bruno Sacco. The first generation 1994 Oldsmobile Aurora was conceived by Jordan as “a sedan with some wow.”

Jordan was determined to right the wrongs of the Rybicki, but these were brief flickers of light as opposed to a fully fledged design resurgence. Jordan himself felt the corporation was finally becoming what it had always threatened to be – risk-averse and lead by clinics:

“After I retired, the culture changed. The engineers and brand managers were put in charge, with design relegated to a lower level. And what happened to the Corvette is clear: the C5 was conservative. These guys were so afraid of risk, they’d say, “Oh, let’s take it to a clinic.” I mean, they took sketches to a clinic! I just about had a hemorrhage. I never would’ve let that happen. A good designer doesn’t need Mr. and Mrs. Zilch from Kansas telling him what to do”.

Wayne Cherry

For all its dynamic ability and performance bang-for-the-buck, there’s no doubt the C5 Corvette is as balletic as a hippo performing Swan Lake. Created under the leadership of Wayne Cherry, who took over from Jordan in 1992, Cherry spent sixteen years making his name first at Vauxhall in the UK, and then at Opel in Germany after GM consolidated its European design operations.

Showing an early appreciation for the science of aerodynamics to influence a car’s appearance and its economy he created the wedgy teardrop Vauxhall SRV concept in 1970. Cherry then led Opel to a series of aero-led production cars: the Kadett E (which via Daewoo became the Pontiac Le Mans), the Opel Vectra/Cavalier III (replacing the GM J Body cars) which sired the slippery Calibra coupe and the Opel Corsa B (also appearing in Australia as the Holden Barina). Returning to his native America in 1991 Cherry became Vice President of Design a year later.

Enamored with the idea of technology as an enabler of design, Cherry set up digital studios with virtual reality and an advanced studio in California. He wanted each GM brand to have its own distinct identity – arguably he was most successful with Cadillac’s ‘Art & Science’ form language; crisp edges, sheer surfaces combined with a bold modern version of the traditional Cadillac grill that feels like a natural progression from Wayne Kady and Bill Mitchell’s legendary 1967 Eldorado. Despite this, he wasn’t immune from the retro fad gripping American design studios at the turn of the century – the Chevrolet SSR and Nomad concept both appeared on his watch. The 2005 Chevrolet HHR, designed by a certain Bryan Nesbitt was started under Cherry, who retired from GM in 2004.

An Important Pioneer

It’s impossible to understate the significance of Ed Welburn who took over from Cherry. Beginning his career with GM in 1972 as a sculpture and product design graduate, Welburn only ever wanted to design cars and was well aware of his pioneering achievement:

“My parents knew there were no Blacks designing cars, that it would be a challenge to get into the field and I was on a mission,” Welburn recalled, chuckling. “They thought, ‘Well, maybe he should be a mechanic or something. No, he wants to be a car designer.’ So they did everything to help me realize that dream,” Welburn recalled several hours before speaking at the 50th anniversary summit of the 1964 Civil Rights Act at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, where GM served as the lead sponsor.

Working his way through the Buick and Oldsmobile in the Seventies, Welburn was head of the Oldsmobile studio by 1989 and led the design of the Aerotech, a concept designed to highlight the potential of the revolutionary Quad 4 engine. Spending time in Germany was by now an expected line on a resume for GM designers being groomed for greater things, and Welburn was assigned there in 1996. He was given responsibility for all GM’s North American cars in 2003, and by 2005 assigned to the top job.

If his predecessor Cherry was the first ‘modern’ car designer to lead the Tech Center, by collaborating with the worlds of film and fashion Welburn dragged GM design into the modern media age, regularly appearing on car-related channels and TV shows. He even had a speaking cameo in a Transformers movie thanks to the franchise’s close association with GM vehicles. President Barack Obama praised Welburn at the 2012 Washington Auto Show, commenting that “the design of GM cars has gotten so much better in the past few years.” The two men were seated in a 2013 Malibu at the time, so I don’t think I’ll be inviting President Obama to any of my design reviews. Nevertheless, Welburn played a significant role in steadying a GM ship navigating its way out of the storms of 2009, even if the cars were not uniformly great.

It would be churlish to place the blame for GM’s 2009 bankruptcy solely on the range of shittily designed cars it was attempting to pawn off on an unsuspecting public, but the delegation of design to a secondary consideration within the company meant a series of muddled brands that overlapped each other and before that a succession of world car and corporate platform debacles GM didn’t learn the lessons from. The T-Car rear wheel drive economy platform of the Seventies had differing sheet metal on either side of the Atlantic. The Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky roadsters had no brand separation between them – and the car itself was a badly packaged parts bin special. Saturn itself, created in the Eighties with the hope of beating the Japanese at their own game, had been reduced to selling rebadged Opels as captive imports prior to Chapter 11 proceedings.

The General Turns Australian

Taking over from Welburn in 2016, Michael Simcoe was a native Australian who had led GM’s Holden outpost while it still existed. He became GM Asia-Pacific chief in 1995, and led GM Korea before moving to the U.S. to become Head of North American Design in 2003. Ed Welburn sent him back to Australia in 2011, before Simcoe returned boomerang style to the states to replace Welburn as VP of Design. In true corporate bullshit fashion, this became a senior VP position in 2022. He reported directly to GM President Mark Ruess.

The car that first made Simcoe’s reputation is the 2001 Holden Monaro  – a two-door version of the VT Commodore. This car landed on US soil as the Pontiac GTO, another Bob Lutz captive import folly. Despite some slightly fawning media coverage in the Australian motoring media, Simcoe has kept a lower profile than his predecessor – when news of his appointment broke I didn’t have a clue who he was. Behind the scenes, he has been instrumental in expanding General Motors design facilities, opening the new Design West studio at the Tech Center in Detroit, new advanced studios in California (again!), Shanghai, and puzzlingly Leamington Spa in the UK.

Design West brings all of GM’s domestic brands together in one big studio, finally eliminating the separate studio system that went all the way back to Harley Earl. This sort of environment makes sense from an organization standpoint – all your design resources are in one place. But it can lead to a Borgification of your designs if it isn’t carefully managed because individual teams are not so focused on the DNA of each brand. Ever the master of unintended consequences, GM divesting itself of Vauxhall/Opel in 2017 meant they no longer enjoyed access to a European design studio. So Simcoe tapped up ex-Jaguar design chief Julian Thomson to propose a C9 Corvette. The result of this commission impressed Simcoe and Reuss so much that they asked Thomson to set up a facility in the UK. Despite what Simcoe says about wanting European influence, why that’s necessary when you don’t sell any cars in the region remains a mystery to me.

A Big Car Design Job Requires A Big Personality

So finally we get to Bryan Nesbitt, another Art Center grad who originally joined Chrysler in 1996. That alone makes him unique amongst his predecessors in not being a GM lifer. After working on the Chrysler CCV concept (a sort of composite 2CV for developing markets) he went on to pen the PT Cruiser. Initially imagined as Plymouth, by the time it reached production in 2001, Plymouth was dead and the ill-fated merger of equals with Daimler-Benz was in full swing. Nesbitt moved across town to GM the same year and was encouraged by Bob Lutz to repeat the PT Cruiser trick for Chevrolet – the HHR.

Posted to Europe to buff up his resume in the grand GM tradition, Nesbitt spent three or so years as executive director of GM Europe Design before returning to the U.S. as VP of Design for North America. After the GM bankruptcy, there was a corporate reorganization and Nesbitt found himself in overall charge of Cadillac (not just the design studio) before Mark Reuss removed him after a couple of months. Nesbitt then bounced around GM’s various operations for a few years, including a stint in China before landing his current role as Executive Director, Global Cadillac Design in 2022. Since his arrival there he’s overseen the Sollei Concept, the Opulent Velocity Concept, and the Celestiq hyper luxury EV – a car I personally remain utterly unconvinced by [Ed note: I like it! – MH].

It’s not exactly a glittering car design CV forged by a succession of stand-out cars, and I know that sounds a bit rich coming from someone with a not exactly glittering car design CV himself. Ascending to the top of the corporate ladder in any industry is as much about being a shrewd political operator as it is any modicum of ability. It’s also unfair to judge someone on a position they haven’t technically held yet. Making comparisons with giants like Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell (and to a lesser degree Jordan) is also somewhat fallacious – not because of their achievements but because that type of unreconstructed man simply couldn’t survive in the modern world. I’m fairly sure workplace drinking is frowned upon these days unless you’re employed here, where it’s positively necessary.

It’s not hard to trace the through line in this story wherein GM’s golden periods have coincided with having strong characters in the Vice President of Design position. Likewise, the reverse is true – GM’s late seventies and early eighties retrenchment occurred when the board and executives subsumed design to economic considerations. When Japanese imports started invading the continental US their designs were mostly caricatures of American cars designed to appeal to an American audience – which would have been the exact time for GM to break away from its brougham tropes and establish another round of design leadership. But by then they had squandered the capability to do so. Instead, it took Ford and Jack Telnack bringing the aero look over from Europe to establish an innovative design direction for American cars.

Think about the big OEM car designers you have heard of: J Mays. Ralph Gillies. Ian Callum. Peter Horbury. Gerry McGovern. Peter Schreyer. Chris bloody Bangle. Frank Stephenson. Patrick Le Quement. There are loads of them. All these personalities were at or near the top of their respective companies and whether you like their work or not stood for something. They passionately believed in their designs and all their cars bear their distinct authorship.

The market has homogenized out of all recognition in the last twenty or so years – partly out of necessity but also because the underlying mechanicals are no longer as differentiated between OEMs as they used to be. The passenger car is a much more mature product now and the gains are marginal. We keep hearing that design and branding are going to become much more important to the new car market going forward, especially to fend off another overseas invasion. The problem for GM as a corporation is it doesn’t take design seriously enough.

Despite being a senior vice president position, Michael Simcoe’s headshot does not appear on the GM leadership page. Nesbitt, at least, has designed some cars that everyone still talks about. That’s something, though not enough to convince me that he won’t end up relegated to the Chorus in the Greek tragedy that is modern GM.

• The 1977 Caprice Was Legendary Designer Bill Mitchell’s Last GM Masterpiece And How Jaguar Inspired It
• GM’s New Design Chief Is The Man Behind The PT Cruiser And I’m Excited
• Let’s Dig Deeper Into GM’s History To Make A Next-Generation Chevy HHR
• How Bruno Sacco Made Mercedes Design So Perfectly Timeless