metabolism? How do you make trade-offs between a car’s performance and its efficiency? Is
it now possible, thanks to emerging automotive technologies, to somehow have it all? Or is
this a design brief without a solution?
FRIDAY IS BARRA’S FAVORITE DAY of the week—but not because it signals the start of the
weekend. Friday is the day Barra heads out to GM’s proving ground in Milford, about 45 minutes
northwest of Detroit, to spend the day test-driving vehicles that are making their way through
GM’s product pipeline. A spin on the track is less about rendering a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a new model than trying to calibrate whether the car she’s driving is precisely what
it should be. For instance: Can you feel the way it absorbs imperfections in the road? “We want
a smooth ride,” says Barra. But sometimes, depending on the car, not too much of a smooth
ride. A Camaro shopper might want to feel some texture from the tarmac; a Buick buyer seeks
what GM engineers call the “library quiet” of that particular brand’s interiors. Just before I
visited Barra, she had been test-driving the Chevy Sonic and Chevy Spark, two tiny cars that
are being built by GM this fall and winter, respectively. If they succeed, these two vehicles—
fuel-sipping, sporty, inexpensive—may demonstrate that an American-car company can
actually make a profit on small cars, which has long been an elusive business proposition.
The hurdle, as Barra puts it, “is that these can’t be cars where people think they’re settling.”
“Both of these vehicles are built off of a core architecture,” Barra continues. It’s another way of saying
that these cars are being built on what’s more commonly referred to as “global platforms.” This means
that all the design and engineering work for a new
model is done in one place (Korea, in the case of the
Sonic and Spark), and is swiftly adapted to plants and
markets around the globe. To Barra, it’s the simplest
way to get more vehicles into the marketplace more
quickly. If more cars worldwide share common components, including engines and frames, the efficien-cies of scale become obvious. A new model that has
already been introduced in, say, Asia can be quickly
tweaked and built for consumers in the U.S. or Brazil.
So far about 30% of GM’s products rely on global
core architectures. But by 2018, Barra intends for that
number to reach 90%. Many of the auto-industry
analysts I spoke with see GM’s global-platform effort
as an important and laudable bet, even as they remain
skeptical that a full transition will cut vehicle-development costs as dramatically as GM CEO Akerson is requesting. And in the process, there is a
danger of leaning too heavily on a one-vehicle-fits-all
strategy—something Barra is fully aware of: “You
don’t want to say, ‘Here’s our global midsize car. Hope
it works for you,’ ” she tells me. “What India might
want is very different from what Canada might want.”
And it’s not only a matter of different tastes; it’s designing an automobile that can span an emerging
market such as India, where roads can be primitive
and may create serious durability issues, to a developed market like Germany, where the road system
is among the best in the world. A car’s global architecture, in other words, has to be flexible enough,
both stylistically and mechanically, to be modified
for any country in the world.
The burden of solving this problem—which, Barra
says, requires an interrelated solution of design,
engineering, manufacturing, and marketing—falls
continued on page 148
BARRA FIRST BEGAN WORKING ON A GM ASSEMBLY LINE AS AN 18-YEAR-OLD.
