Designing Cars Of The Future
Sunday, April 1st, 2007
At 34, Vicki Vlachakis who is already an acclaimed designer has her stamp on two of GM’s recent triumphs: the Saturn Sky and Pontiac Solstice. The sleek, eye-catching sport convertibles have managed to reinvigorate two GM brands as Detroit strains to avoid ruining the business. Vlachakis is at the front of a small, but increasingly influential pack of smart, young designers that Detroit counts on to make it relevant to an under-40 crowd that doesn’t much care for American vehicles and has almost no loyalty to the home team.
Part car geek, part glam girl, Vlachakis insists, “Design is going to be the big thing to pull us out of this mess.” It’s a mission launched by GM products chief Bob Lutz, who has restored power to designers. “They’re back to basically running the asylum,” Lutz said in an interview last week. “Design is the last great differentiator in products,” Lutz said. “All cars work well. They all have about the same fuel economy. They’re all safe. They’re all comfortable. They all have heat and air-conditioning. What you’re left with is, ‘Do I love it? Do my friends admire it? Do I feel good about myself when I drive it? When I’m sitting in it?’”
While Michigan is still heavily involved in design, Detroit is absorbed in designing vehicles that will be produced and on the roads in the next few years, while the more distant future is unfolding out West. Every major automaker is represented in Southern California, with advance design studios spread from the beaches of Santa Monica to the outskirts of San Diego.
Designers wax about the state’s natural beauty and the inspiration they draw from its sunsets and coastline. But there are more practical reasons. An LA studio allows automakers to capitalize on the area’s creative talent and forward-thinking tendencies. The Solstice, for one, was conceived in GM’s design team in North Hollywood. “I thought about the car on the Pacific Coast Highway early in the morning, the way it would look, the way it would feel,” Vlachakis said.
She then spent the next few years in Detroit trying to hold on to that image as the vehicle worked its way from show car to factory floor at the Warren Tech Center. When the Solstice went on sale in 2005, GM sold the first 1,000 online in 41 minutes. By that August, when the Solstice went into production, Pontiac had orders for 12,000 more. A year later, while most Pontiac vehicles were sitting on lots for months, the Solstice moved in less than three weeks. BusinessWeek dubbed the Solstice “Pontiac’s Budget Porsche.”
There are many different colleges in which one would be able to study graphic designing, which they can in turn use to create their own unique vehicles for the future. Some of the more popular colleges to choose from are University of Pheonix, ITT Technical Institute, and Collins College.
Tags: designing vehicles, pontiac solstice, vlachakis
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