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Design Center Gets
New Lease on Life

General Motors' efforts in the Los Angeles region represent a return to an area the company left in 1994, when it closed its Advanced Concepts Center there. The new design studio, in North Hollywood, Calif., will be handling advanced design work by April 2001.

General Motors Design Vice President Wayne Cherry says the company is transforming a former bakery complex on two acres (0.8 ha.) into a studio that will incorporate the newest advanced concept development techniques. Cherry cited the Los Angeles studio as more evidence of GM's commitment to product innovation and world design leadership. It will serve as a resource used by all of GM's global automotive development centers, and it will benefit the entire GM Group, including Opel, Vauxhall, Holden, and partners at Isuzu, Suzuki, Subaru and Saab.

The Los Angeles facility will serve as one of the company's design listening posts. It will employ more than 30 designers, sculptors, engineers and analysts. "I'm delighted that we are now positioned to appreciate fully California's trend-setting nature," says Cherry. "The L.A. studio has been carefully located where it can monitor design and style trends and facilitate strategic alliances. First and foremost, we are expanding our imagination base," he adds. The studio it is at the epicenter of design trends in fashion, furniture, consumer electronics, the entertainment industry, everything that influences design for consumers around the globe.

According to Cherry, GM is interested in going beyond the traditional transportation design discipline in staffing the new design center. "As we design an ever more diverse portfolio of products, we are calling upon a wider range of talents," says Cherry. "The core of our talented team will continue to be people with transportation design backgrounds. But now more than ever, we want to complement those talents with exceptional people in other design disciplines."

California, in addition to offering fashion-conscious marketing and design people, also offers a useful window into a broad range of electronic technology that may have an ultimate application to the automotive industry. BMW Group, for example, owns DESIGNWORKS U.S.A. in Thousand Oaks, Calif., specializing in automotive design. BMW also maintains a 20-person office in Palo Alto, Calif., to seek out new technology, such as voice activation. "We identify transferable technology," explains Martha McKinley, a spokeswoman for BMW. "It's a listening post to scout out applications."

In addition, the company is building a $28 million North American engineering and vehicle-emission-testing center in Oxnard, Calif. At the same time, BMW Group began a $1.2 million expansion and renovation of the existing Vehicle Preparation Center there. "Our decision to locate this facility in Oxnard underscores the importance of California to the automotive industry," says Victor Doolan, president of BMW of North America. "Many companies have engineering and emissions-testing operations in the Midwest, but California is setting national and worldwide trends in vehicle emissions, design and other areas, so we believe it is important to be in the midst of such an integral process." The newly expanded BMW engineering facility will include a nearly $7 million emissions -testing laboratory.