O Welburn.
The question was not really rhetori- cal. Buses and trains are modes of trans- portation. Cars are the largest form of utilitarian art most families ever invest in. It is how a potential buyer feels in or next to a car which closes a sale. And while news from the various 2010 auto shows was that GM and Chrysler are coming back from the brink and again competing in the marketplace, success will not rest on the existence of small cars, fuel effi- cient hybrids, the use of quality materials, and the latest electronic gadgets. Those technologies are widely known and every car company has them. To sell cars by the millions, GM and Chrysler will need fleets with pizzazz, with flair, with allure, with styles that will bring buyers back into the showrooms saying “wow!” as they reach for their checkbooks.
The future of these two troubled,
historic, American automakers now rests largely with the fertile imaginations of two black artists: the sculptor, Ed Wel- burn, vice president for Global Design at GM; and the executive and designer, Ralph Gilles, president and CEO of the Dodge brand and senior vice president of Design, Chrysler Group LLC. The two men are cut from different
cloths. Welburn, the 60-year-old Phila- delphia native, is a generation removed
86 USBE&IT I WINTER 2011
n his left, glistening on a slowly moving turntable, was a silver, supercharged, 556-horsepower, Cadillac
CTS-V; on his right, the new edition to his growing rolling flock, was a silver CTS-V station wagon.
Which prompted the question: “Ed, why would you make a 150 mile-an-hour station wagon?”
“Because we can,” replied Welburn, grinning. “Besides, does that look like a station wagon to you?”
In fact, the functional station wagon did not look like one at all. The rear was more tapered, the windows were trap- ezoids under a sloping roof reminiscent of Acura’s crossover, the ZDX, and the front was the aggressive grill of the Cadillac car.
“Who wouldn’t want one?” asked
from Gilles, who was born in New York in 1970 and raised in Montreal, Canada. Welburn grew up in the era of the 1950s “hogs;” those long cars with huge tail fins whose styling cues came from lumber- ing, big-winged, Air Force bombers. Not surprisingly, while his wife tools around in the sleek Saturn Sky roadster–one of Welburn’s favorite designs–Welburn pre- fers to tool around in his vintage yellow and black 1969 Camaro.
Gilles, on the other hand, is a product of the 70s and 80s, when stealth jets and sleek, fast, fighters dominated the design cues of transportation artists. Growing up, he was inspired by Formula One race cars tearing through the streets of his hometown in Montreal. Today he loves to race his beloved Dodge Vipers in the new Viper Cup racing series.
And they are artists with differ- ent missions and starting points. Gen- eral Motors came out of bankruptcy a slimmed-down giant with four successful, ongoing brands–Cadillac, Buick, GMC, and Chevrolet–which Welburn had been developing new cars for. He was most sorry to lose Saturn, a line he had just finished completely redesigning. “But I understand it fully,” he said. “It is a business, like they said in The Godfather, which is still my favorite all-time movie. I’m still proud of those designs.”
At Chrysler, Gilles, Black Engi-
neer of the Year President’s Award, has recently helped feed the Chrysler Group’s product pipeline with 16 all-new or significantly refreshed products for the 2011 model year. Chrysler, which went bankrupt and is now partnered with Italy’s Fiat, is primarily a domestic auto maker. Historically, it has concentrated on large sedans and trucks–an area where Gilles made a name for himself. He now wears two hats: president of Dodge cars and senior vice president of design for all of Chrysler Group LLC. One of his missions is to take Fiat’s expertise with developing small, fuel-efficient cars, and make those little boxes appealing to American tastes, in addition to ensuring that Chrysler’s re- maining brands turn out an arresting fleet of high performing, eye catching sedans, SUVs, and trucks.
That requires something of a race against the normal three-year develop- ment timeline, and the company has been running on all cylinders. Chrysler intro- duced a new Grand Cherokee in June– characterized chiefly by a remarkably upgraded interior–and followed up the highly praised launch with a slew of new products, including the all-new Dodge Durango and Dodge Charger, to finish out 2010 and head into 2011 with dealer lots filled with fresh new products. General Motors is still the world’s
largest auto maker and Welburn, as design chief, controls a variety of crayon boxes to meet the world’s disparate motoring tastes. He is the sixth design chief in GM’s history, with his stamp on every vehicle conceived by the more than 1,600 designers at the company’s 11 design studios in eight countries. “I don’t think what I am doing is the same as what Ralph is doing,” mused Welburn. “I have a lot of respect for Ralph. But I am dealing with a global design organization dealing with a lot of different cultures. I am in and out of a lot of places I never thought I would be in and out of, and leading teams of people from cultures I never thought I or any one else of African American descent would be leading.
“I’m working with Australians for that market; folks from China or Korea for the Asian market; or Brazil or here in the United States. I don’t dwell on that, but it doesn’t escape me at all that it’s a long way from Philadelphia.” For a young Ed Welburn, the 1958 Philadelphia International Auto Show was the key to his future. It wasn’t the eight- year-old’s first exposure to the intricacies of cars. His father, Edward, owned and operated an auto body and repair shop in nearby Berwyn, Pa., and young Ed spent hours watching his father working on the cars from the skeletons out. “The ‘50s were a very car-oriented
period,” Welburn said. “And it was a period in which cars had a lot of flair. You could easily identify different brands by their looks. They all have very strong character.
“It was a very exciting auto industry, and I grew up in a family where there
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