Cliff notes: the Society of Automotive Historian’s president goes to GM’s Technical Center and finds very little technology, or cars for that matter.
In 1965, I journeyed to New York City to attend the 1964-65 World’s Fair. Back then, such fairs were big events, featuring awe inspiring, one-of-a-kind exhibits. At this particular fair, one of the most impressive exhibits was the General Motors Pavilion. I’m sure there were Ford and Chrysler buildings as well, but the one I remember was GM’s. The GM Pavilion was the successor to the wildly popular and influential GM Futurama exhibit at the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair. The former could also be viewed as the culmination of the GM Motorama promotion, wherein General Motors piqued the fancy of the buying public by featuring “dream” and experimental cars, plus the latest production models, in eight traveling auto shows from 1949 through 1961. The 1964-65 GM Pavilion featured futuristic cars, a trip to the moon, and a piece of road equipment that in one, continuous motion felled forest trees at its front and laid a finished asphalt road at the rear, a technological feat that was awesome to this 22-year old. In 1965, General Motors was lord of the automotive world and created memories for me that have lasted for over four decades.
Recently, as part of the events connected with the IX World Forum for Motor Museums, I had the opportunity to visit the GM Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. It is there that GM cars of the future are conceived and developed. As one might imagine, in an age of industrial espionage, security is a major concern at that multi-building facility, or “campus” as they call it. Therefore, it did not surprise my fellow conference attendees and me when we were all warned a day in advance that all photographic equipment would be collected at the GM Heritage Center (our preceding tour site) and returned to us after we completed our visit to the Tech Center. There was an air of excitement as we contemplated the futuristic designs and engines that we believed we would see the next day, something akin to the feeling that one used to experience when purchasing car magazines to view photographs of the partially disguised vehicles of the next model year.
<i>That morning, in preparation for the Tech Center trip, GM's Stu Shuster gave a brief PowerPoint introduction. Technically brilliant and flawlessly delivered, it curiously did not feature a single car, but rather focused on the architecture of the Tech Center's campus, which was built back in the mid-fifties and designed by internationally-acclaimed architect Eero Saarinen. I thought, for a moment, that Mr. Shuster's speech writer had confused his audience with a meeting of the American Institute of Architects, but reasoned that this was background information that GM would rather present there than on the tour.</i>
<i>Three hours later we had deposited our cameras and boarded buses for our trip to the Tech Center, just a few miles away. As we traveled from one campus building to the next, it was obvious that our tour guides shared Mr. Shuster's enthusiasm for the architecture of the place. It also became painfully evident that we were not to be allowed to pass beyond the public lobby of each building. </i>
<i>Finally, as the last stop on the tour, we were deposited at the Vehicle Engineering Center, a recent (2003) addition to the Tech Center campus, and the "cornerstone of GM's strategic plan to consolidate vehicle engineering functions formerly performed at several locations." Surely here, I thought, we would finally see something automotive-and indeed we did. On display were the 2006 General Motors models, in effect a large showroom for a dealership that carried all the GM marques. Nothing more, nothing less. There was much joking on the way back to the Heritage Center of the "insider" photographs that we might have taken with hidden cameras and then sold at top dollar to Road & Track or Car and Driver. </i>
I have tried to enliven what was in reality a rather deadly couple of hours. Why devote so much space to it? Because I think it is indicative of a corporate mentality that threatens to destroy the house that Sloan built. After all, it appears that General Motors cannot even relate effectively to enthusiasts of the product they manufacture. Given a collection of executives from motor museums around the world, the best that GM could muster at its Tech Center was a tribute to the 1950s architectural brilliance of Eero Saarinen. It was almost as if the award-winning architecture symbolized the height of GM’s glory and they had chosen to freeze that moment in time. If anything, it was visual preview of an op-ed piece that appeared later that month in the Wall Street Journal. Therein, freelance writer John Schnapp indicted GM for inadequate corporate governance, a culture of management non-accountability, technological followership, brand proliferation, and, most importantly, vision failure.
<i>There is probably little we can do to reverse the downward spiral that threatens to drop General Motors behind Toyota as the world's largest manufacturer of automobiles. After all, GM ignored our pleas and allowed Oldsmobile, then the oldest continuously manufactured American marque, to expire a few years ago. Nonetheless, the possible demise of General Motors is a sad development, and one that we, as students of automotive history, should mourn.</i>
[right]- Mike Berger, SAH President
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