Why can’t we all just get along? Well, sometimes we do.
In politics there are Mary Matalin and James Carville. A right-wing conservative and a left-wing liberal. Yet they’ve gotten together and had children.
Esoteric automotive designers, who are responsible for how a vehicle looks, and no-nonsense engineers, who make it run and meet safety standards, also are cooperating more. But that doesn’t mean a vehicular lovefest.
Whether you call the working relationship antagonistic, a battle for dominance or a healthy confrontation, sparks can fly.
But without the sparks, you aren’t going to get something special, said Tom Peters, vehicle chief designer for the Cadillac XLR at General Motors Tech Center in Warren, Mich.
“It’s an explosive relationship because there’s so much passion involved,” Peters said.
Working well as a team doesn’t mean everything is always harmonious, said Nancy Gioia, chief engineer for Thunderbird and now vehicle line director for Ford lifestyle vehicles (Thunderbird, Mustang and Windstar).
But Gioia admits she loved the creative energy as the designers and engineers sparked and discussed and wrangled over what they would do.
“It becomes point-counterpoint, and there’s good debate and I mean good debate. There were times in those debates when we would actually go nose to nose,” said Gioia.
The relationship that designers have with engineers has historically been very antagonistic, said J Mays, vice president of design for Ford Motor Co. in Dearborn, Mich.
“I don’t know why,” said Mays, who then declared that every time he sees how they had to move the front wheels on the Thunderbird back one-half inch from where they were on the concept because of engineering considerations, it makes him furious.
It is a clash between form and function and trying to meld the emotional with the functional that provides the potential for confrontation.
“The stylist is an artist, and artists want something that is aesthetically pleasing and different. They want to express their creative abilities through that vehicle,” said David E. Cole, director of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. “The engineer tends to be more functionally oriented, wants the car to ride and corner well and have a certain powertrain, brakes and chassis. These two come at the world differently, so inherently there is a conflict.”
“Every group thinks the other group is encroaching on their territory,” said Tom Semple, president of Nissan Design America, San Diego. “Designers have a paranoid tendency to think that everybody wants to be a designer, and somebody is going to come in to ruin their day.
“Engineers think, `why don’t those damn designers just do what I want and everything will be OK?’ And then product planning says I just don’t understand why they just don’t make this car look like a BMW, and then we’ll sell a million of them. Everyone has their own point of view,” said Semple.
While there is still some conflict, engineers and designers cooperate more now than ever, Cole said. That cooperation starts in the beginning. Engineers and designers are working together even when the designers are sketching the first “wild, new designs,” Gioia said.
“Character is defined by the way a vehicle looks, but it is also defined by the way a vehicle moves and its seating capacity. All these have to feed into those early concept sketches,” the engineer said.
Stylists might sketch a sports car with 20-inch wheels and an ultra-low roof, but an engineer will come along early in the game to inject a note of reality.
Gioia, for one, might say something like: “Well, that’s a cool-lookin’ sketch but there’s no human being that could ever fit into that vehicle. And by the way that slope on the hood, although intriguing, wouldn’t fit any kind of powertrain that would be considered.
“Because if you have the most beautiful concept sketch in the world and you can’t implement it, then it’s a beautiful piece of artwork but it’s not going to be a vehicle,” she said.
Gioia said one of her less-satisfying experiences was as a design engineer dealing with designers on audio components.
“It was, `Oh, you peon. Don’t you understand I am the great styling god, and this is what I told you to do. Go away and do it, and we don’t care about your opinion,'” she said.
At Nissan, in the past, there was a “battle for dominance” between design and engineering, said Semple. But now the two are under the same person in Nissan’s organization.
Semple thinks that is why Nissan did such a good job with the 350Z sports car, which goes on sale this summer. Not only will it be a no-compromise sports car, it also will have a starting price of less than $27,000. That price and performance would not have been possible if designers and engineers did not work successfully together, he said.
Costs favors cooperation
Controlling costs is one of the major advantages of this new relationship, Cole said.
One of the rough guidelines is that 75 to 85 percent of the cost of a vehicle is not controlled by its manufacturing, but by the decisions made early in its development, Cole said.
In the past at General Motors, design and engineering functions were more compartmentalized, said engineer David Hill, vehicle line executive for performance cars, including the Chevrolet Corvette and the new Cadillac XLR.
They worked in a sequence in what Hill describes as a chimney structure with functional silos.
Design was its own department and worked unilaterally. They would toss their finished design over to engineering, which had different priorities. Then engineering would toss the project off to manufacturing, which had its own priorities.
“Styling had a lot of authority and didn’t always agree with engineering; and manufacturing might not be able to execute the construction of the product with the kind of quality that we have today,” said Hill. “Zora Arkus-Duntov, the first engineer at Corvette, had a devil of a time with the styling people who created the Corvette and some of the confrontation was legendary.
“Some vibrant products came out, but not anything like the products that we make today in terms of having great style, great engineering and really great quality,” Hill said.
This work style was decades ago, Hill said, when it was only the Big Three instead of a global auto industry with increased competition for winning and keeping customers.
“Competition has forced companies to get more collaborative and do things more simultaneously and more quickly in order to have compelling product in the marketplace,” Hill said.
Friction mostly in the past
Indeed, the working relationship has changed dramatically, said David McKinnon, vice president of small, premium and family vehicle design at DaimlerChrysler. His domain includes the new Chrysler Crossfire and Pacifica.
“Unfortunately earlier in my career it seems the best way you got product out was to fight with engineering. It really was a very uncomfortable way to work,” he said.
At Ford there is strong support from top executives who are also engineers for vehicles that combine performance and visual impact, said design chief Mays.
“We’ve got some incredibly passionate engineers in Richard Parry-Jones and Wolfgang Reitzle. They are bona fide car nuts. They not only like cars to function perfectly but they like them to look great as well. They are our biggest helpers in producing vehicles that look good.”
But when the head-butting continues and neither side wants to give, how does it get settled? It depends on the company and the nature of the dispute, Cole said.
“We try to have them [disputes] resolved by consensus,” said Hill. “But when a confrontation comes to an impasse, the vehicle line executive has the authority to make the final decision.”
In the case of Corvette or Cadillac XLR, that’s Hill. Though companies would like to have small decisions and compromises made at the lowest possible level, fairly senior executives can get into the act, Cole said.
“A company like General Motors just brought Bob Lutz in, who had retired from DaimlerChrysler and had been with BMW and Ford. Bob is extremely sensitive to these issues so you can expect that a number of these large-scale disputes will be resolved by him,” Cole said.
Resolution must be achieved
But at the end of the day, Gioia said she, as Thunderbird’s chief engineer, and Doug Gaffka, its chief designer, would have to agree on issues.
“Doug would say, `Nancy you’re telling me this doesn’t look right, and I’m telling you this isn’t your job.’ And I would say, `Doug you’re telling me that someone ought to be able to technically do this. I’m telling you that I’ve done all the benchmarking, and we can’t.'”
But it was also her job to get her engineers, who could be as resistant to change as designers, to try to do something that design asked. It came down to Gaffka’s call if it had to do with aesthetics and was technically feasible. “If there was a technical feasibility issue or we couldn’t consistently deliver quality, that was my call,” she said.
At Ford, design chief Mays got involved in moving the front wheels on the Thunderbird back one-half inch from where they were on the concept car. Engineers needed that extra room to help them meet federal crash-safety standards and to use parts from the Lincoln LS.
“So we pulled it back one-half inch and got a very safe vehicle. That was the right decision. And for 99.9 percent of the public, we still got just as good-looking a vehicle as the concept car.
“But it pisses me off every time I see it,” Mays said.
