‘Don’t call it retirement’ – Ed Welburn on life after GM’s top design job

Car Design News caught up with only the sixth person to hold the title of vice president of design of General Motors’ just a week before he officially handed over full control to the seventh, Michael Simcoe, on 1 July. Here, he muses on the highs of a career that has spanned five decades, ponders a few lows, and we find out what he plans to do next…

Car Design News Firstly, I’ve got a small bone to pick with you for not ‘letting on’ about retiring when I asked you about it late last year for the Car Design Review interview!

Ed Welburn I’ve been tight-lipped person for a long time [chuckles]. I’ve been planning this retirement for three-to-five years. In fact I’ve been searching for a word better than ‘retirement’. I hate that word. That’s not me, or what I’m doing. 44 years at one company is a long time, but there are still a lot of things I want to do. It’s not a switch you can just turn off.

CDN So what are you planning next?
EW I’ve established the Welburn Group, a company that will be doing consultancy in design. It’s not my intention to take ‘full-on’ design projects but who knows?

CDN Will that be automotive design consulting or everything?
EW Everything… I’ve got a strong interest in fashion design as well as automotive of course, and [GM CEO] Mary Barra has asked me to be a consultant. She wants me to stay on until the new design building is done and that’s at least three years away. It’s going to be an amazing building. The architect and I have a very close relationship. I’ll continue to judge at Pebble Beach too…

Ed Welburn early in his career

CDN Judging at Pebble Beach isn’t really work though is it…
EW At first glance it’s fun, but it’s tough too. You have to deal with the owners who don’t win.

CDN Are you a five-year planning sort of guy?
EW There are things that change those plans, but I would say the last four to five years have been really good. I live in the suburbs but work down in Detroit in Harley Earl’s office, the finest in GM, it’s wonderful.

My mission for the next chapter of my life is to have an office that is even better, and the only way I can think to do that is to have a Corvette Stingray right there in my office. I’m adapting an old firehouse, a little west of downtown Detroit in Cork Town.

I have some associates that I will be working with, and that’s it for now, I want to keep it very lean. I don’t want to be getting up at 4.30am in the morning, but we’ll see what happens. The GM role I’m keeping on will only be a couple of days a week.

GM designers including Bill Mitchell and Harley Earl (third and fourth from left)

CDN Talking of Earl’s office, did each previous head of design leave something there for the next one?
EW I thought about that. I don’t think the others before me did; matter of fact each one probably took something as a way of remembering the office!

CDN Did you suggest your successor Michael Simcoe?
EW Yes, there was shortlist and we did some thorough research.

CDN Was that shortlist internal or did it include designers outside of GM too?
EW All I’ll say is that we did some very thorough research. I felt good how the whole thing rolled out.

CDN What condition do you think GM design is in right now?
EW I’m glad I’m leaving GM on what I consider to be a high. There’s hardly a thing I would have wanted to do differently. I’ve done more than I ever dreamed of doing.

Bill Mitchell with 1963 Buick Riviera Silver Arrow (left) and his 1973 Buick Riviera Silver Arrow III (right)

CDN What do you think your legacy as head of design at GM design will be?
EW There are a few cars I could point to, but I think my greatest legacy was creating the global design organisation. Harley Earl, Bill Mitchell and the others ran GM North America, they had some influence and dialogue with the other studios around the world, but I was the first to bring all 11 studios together under one leader.

Also, the relationship I’ve developed between design and engineering, a relationship that wasn’t quite the same in the past. You have to have that in place to then do the great cars. The relationship between Buick, Opel and Vauxhall is an incredible deal and you couldn’t do that if you didn’t have those global teams and relationships in place first.

CDN Was the ‘global idea’ your pitch to get the job, or did you decide once you were in it?
EW Once I was in then job I realised it was something we had to do. I had an informal relationship with all of the heads of design around the world but two years in, [then vice-chair of global product development] Bob Lutz agreed that it should happen, and at the same time for engineering as well. The design shift happened within like 45 minutes, as I already had that association in place.

Welburn with fibreglass model of 1988 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme Indy 500 Pace Car

CDN What was the first GM car you had a significant role in?
EW The 1976-88 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme – I was just one of the team but my designs were frequently chosen. At one point they were selling 500,000 units a year. And the sketch for the [1987] Oldsmobile Aerotech concept car [which created two speed records].

2006 Chevrolet Camaro concept

CDN What do you consider your biggest car design hit while in charge?
EW It may not have been perfect, but bringing Camaro back. When the concept was shown in [Detroit’s] Cobo Hall in 2006, it was probably the most emotional event in the history of that auto show. It wasn’t just the vehicle, it was the effect it had on the entire Chevrolet brand, all over of the world. It was an obtainable halo for the brand even more than the Corvette C6 at the time.

2010 GMC Granite concept

CDN… And one that didn’t quite turn out how you wanted?
EW We did the GMC Granite concept [in 2010] and I really think it would have been a great production vehicle. It had an influence on other vehicles but the very innovative door system became very difficult to execute and as a result it didn’t do into production. I think it would have been a great vehicle without that complex door system.

Ed Welburn meets Bill Mitchell in 1971

CDN There are some great photos in the GM archive. Can you tell us more about that ‘Bill Mitchell handshake’ image when you were starting out…
EW I was a summer intern at GM from Howard University where I had completed my junior year in sculpture. But in that summer of 1971 I did more sketching than sculpting. We’d had a review and Mr Mitchell came in and was introduced to all of us. I completed my senior year and went back [to GM] and they quickly saw that I was fairly good for a rookie, and put me in the advanced design department for Buick, which was sort of a toy box for Mr Mitchell, where we worked on special bodies. I got to know Mr Mitchell a bit better there, as much as a young designer might.

CDN Did Mitchell ever give you any advice?
EW He never really talked to me, it was more by example, the cars he liked and the spirit he had in the studio, he was a great leader and someone I really looked up to. The cars he did in the 1960s and 70s were spectacular, some of my all-time favourite cars, and cars that today we still use as kind of heart and soul [examples].

Irv Rybicki – GM’s third design boss (1977-1986)

CDN GM has only had five design leaders before you and you’ve worked for most of them. How did their approaches differ?
EW I didn’t work for Harley Earl but every single one of them afterwards. After Mitchell was Irv Rybicki. He was a real gentleman and a very good designer. I think he’s been misunderstood. They [the critics] just saw a lot of lookalike designs that came out during that period [1977-1986], but he led design at a very difficult time, due to budget and the control from outside of the design department.

He designed the original Camaro and worked on the original Stingray but doesn’t get credit for that. I learned a lot from him. Chuck Jordan [1986-1992] had a lot of flair and Wayne Cherry [1992-2003] was very focussed on concepts and differentiating brands, and concepts were a way of demonstrating what the brands could be about. I worked closely with Wayne, especially in the last couple of years [of his tenure as boss].

Wayne Cherry in the Buick Bengal Concept

CDN So you must have been around when the infamous Pontiac Aztek was designed. Who was to blame?
EW I don’t just say this to distance myself [he gives a wry smile] but I was in Germany when the Aztek was launched. However, I felt like I was very close to it as I was getting a lot of phone calls from people wanting guidance. I was nowhere close to the job. It was a great concept, but the problem was engineering, marketing and design all had their visions.

There was no common vision for what the vehicle should be. And the car suffered. The relationship between design and engineering was not good then, or even between different areas of the design department. And when the proportions aren’t right, because they didn’t work well with the engineers, designers tend to do some bad things to kind of make up for what was not in the foundation of the vehicle.

CDN Is it true Wayne Cherry wouldn’t sign the Aztek off?
EW You’d have to ask him… and prepare for a very long answer [chuckles again].

Michael Simcoe with the 2004 Chevrolet Cruze

CDN What advice would you give your successor Michael Simcoe?
EW Michael is the natural choice, he’s really strong. There will be so many things that will be a pull on him so he’s got to set his priorities, and only he can do that. There’s a core of activities you’ve got to deal with and that will take up say 95 percent of your time. Then there are a lot of activities around that core that will try to consume you. You have to decide what you can delegate to others and what to say ‘no’ to. I thought it was important to have a role in film – product placement – and on that outer ring I made that a priority. It was a creative way of getting our product across. He may choose something else.

CDN Will he find it tough being an Aussie in Detroit?
EW He’s worked over here in the US a couple of times before and it’s such a global organisation with people from everywhere, so they all know him.