How to design a Corvette

The studio sits in a quiet corner of a large and very modern industrial estate in Leamington Spa, right in the heart of the UK’s car industry. Julian chose to base the studio here because of the deep well of design talent that lives and works nearby, and perhaps also because he can walk here from home. The gleaming studio is ultra-modern and brightly lit, equal parts upscale hotel lobby and smart co-working space. At its core and in pride of place you’ll find two 20-metre long, perfectly level modelling plates, plus several towering robotic milling machines. This is where the clay models are painstakingly crafted. The designers and modellers, 30 or so in total, sit at their desks beneath a canopy along one wall where they can spin in their chairs or walk a few paces to share ideas with colleagues.

Mike Simcoe, the most senior designer in all of General Motors – his full title is senior vice president, GM Global Design – retires in three months. He will leave to his successors that enormous central studio at Warren, the handful of newly established satellite studios including this one, and arguably the best design infrastructure of any car maker on the planet. Simcoe chose the UK for one of his smaller studios largely because Julian was available. ‘I hadn’t worked with Julian before but I knew him by reputation,’ Simcoe tells me. ‘We just got on the phone and talked. I was pleased that he was impressed with the notion of working for GM Design.

‘We think fairly similarly, we both enjoy the craft. Enjoy time on the floor of the studio where it’s happening, rather than in meetings. This is a dream job for him. He’s out of the corporate world. He’s doing pure design with a prospect that it can become reality. It’s meaningful work.’

Keeping several studios around the world seems almost lavish, but there’s good reason for doing so. A small, nimble group of largely British designers will approach a given project very differently to a much larger team of mostly North American designers working at the mothership near Detroit. As will a couple of dozen designers in Los Angeles, Shanghai and Seoul, where the other Advanced Design Studios are.

As a case in point, Julian’s studio will soon reveal its design study for a new GMC truck (though they’d never describe it as such). It’s been created almost exclusively by people who don’t have an instinctive understanding of what a GMC is or should be, so it’s quite different to anything the Warren-based designers would produce. And to one extent or another, those designers will be influenced by it.

‘We’ve had advanced studios before that we sometimes listened to or sometimes didn’t,’ says Simcoe. ‘And that’s more about the personality of the person running the studio or, frankly, the people who are, like me, talking to them. The value comes when you allow them to think differently and be a little bit controversial or contrary to the mainstream. In our world, if you’re not careful, you can create an echo chamber. You start talking to yourself eventually, you know too much. It’s nice to have an alternative opinion that does make you step back and think about what you’re doing.’

I expected Julian to tell me he’d steeped himself in the history of Corvette before tackling this concept – driven every example he could get his hands on, read every book on the subject, visited museums, met former designers… But that would defeat the very point of his studio. ‘If you get too immersed in it, if you become too expert, you’ll do the same as them,’ he says, reinforcing Simcoe’s point about differing points of view.

Julian goes on: ‘If you’re a big company making all these products, you want as many ideas as possible in the melting pot. I’ve worked in an advanced studio for Volkswagen as well. That one was in Barcelona, away from the mothership, just to get a different feeling, a different attitude. Because if you’re in that set environment just doing that same thing day in, day out, you can get a bit blinkered.’

I wonder how the various satellite studios interact with one another. It’s hard to believe there isn’t a fierce sense of competition between them – a determination to be the studio that produces the ‘winning’ design. Julian says he has experienced exactly that in the past: ‘Everyone was trying to second guess what the other person was doing. “Oh, I heard he likes this car, or that car”. You can’t design a car like that. You can’t be creative like that.’

It’s why the studios collaborate very closely with one another. There’s no guarding your own work from your colleagues even if they’re halfway around the globe. As Peter Robinson highlighted in the story he wrote for Ti after visiting Julian’s studio last year, the senior designers join a call every Tuesday to share ideas and discuss the work they’re doing. Julian welcomes it. ‘What’s different about GM compared to other companies I worked in is that it is a very, very collaborative process,’ he says. ‘When I walked in on the first day, I talked to the designers and saw how willing they were to share work and information and move it around. It wasn’t like some design studios, where everyone hides their work. And so I’m very happy to collaborate, to influence, and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve made people think about what they’re doing.’

Besides, in the case of the three Corvette concepts that will be shown this year, each will be given the same airtime as the next and none is expected to be chosen wholesale to be the ninth-generation production Corvette. It’s all about that melting pot of ideas, those different points of view.

That being so, how do Simcoe and his colleagues in Warren determine how effective the satellite studios are? If it’s not as simple as the number of designs that eventually get the green light, what is the metric? ‘It’s the quality of the work,’ Simcoe says. ‘Julian built a team around himself and instantly produced great results. The first real job they got into was this Corvette and the results are spectacular. So as long as the very high quality work keeps coming, and as long as it’s influencing us back in North America, it’s valuable. That’s how we judge success.’ The studios in the UK, China, Korea and California do feed top design talent into the Warren studio too.

And how does Julian know if his studio is doing a good job? ‘I think we’re here to put forward a point of view that probably goes a little too far,’ he says. It’s not for Julian and his designers to constraint themselves. ‘We want to do something that’s somewhat extreme, just to push people [in Warren], and we expect them to dial back a bit from that.’

Nobody could accuse the UK studio of underplaying its Corvette concept. The whole process took eight months, a rapid turnaround that can only be achieved by a small, fast-moving team, though Julian says they take their time where necessary. It is one of the most extreme reinterpretations of the Corvette brand that I can recall. Seen in person, it looks sensational. It’s effectively split in two, the very elegant upper part of the car, painted white, contrasting with the complex and technical lower part, all aerodynamically optimised, finished in black. There’s active aero, visible pushrod suspension and clear nods to earlier Corvettes, like the split windscreen and the spine that runs the length of the car, invoking the 1963 second-generation model (certain versions of which featured split rear screens), and the proud and prominent fenders, inspired by the third-generation car.

Even so it’s not obviously a Corvette, which I suppose is the point. But traditionalists will find this concept challenging, I’m sure, not least because the proper small block V8 makes way for electric motors, a decision taken locally. ‘Our Advanced Design Studio network is intended to push the envelope, challenge convention and imagine what could be five, 10 and even 20 years into the future,’ says Simcoe. This car clearly does that.

Its upper section, for me at least, reintroduces an element of beauty to the Corvette, a core component of the early cars that’s missing from more recent ones, particularly the current model. Julian defends the boldness, or even brashness, of modern Corvettes, arguing that striking and confident design is what makes them not only Corvettes, but American.

If the Leamington Spa studio’s Corvette made you, and GM’s designers in Warren, stop and think for a moment, its job is done, even if the ideas you see here go no further.