Industry analysts were excited by the prospect of soaring sales of luxury vehicles to baby boomers entering their peak earning years.īut GM was saddled with a luxury brand that few baby boomers would even consider. But Cadillac was on the wrong side of shifting luxury-market demographics. GM executives desperately needed a strong luxury brand. "When I got there, it was clear, having talked not just to Ron but Jack and Rick and others, that they really wanted to figure Cadillac out," John Smith says. Smith found GM's top executives - CEO Jack Smith, Wagoner (then president) and GM North America President Ron Zarrella - deeply concerned about Cadillac. GM's brass had summoned Smith to Cadillac a year earlier from his post as president of GM's Allison Transmission subsidiary.
The effort to transform Cadillac had begun a year earlier.Īs much as GM's leadership wanted change, it would not commit lightly to a project that, in finance guy Wagoner's words, "ate up a lot of capital." He had just three months to get it right. He delegated his administrative workload and handpicked his design team. The board's 90-day deadline was the kind of challenge that Cherry - a workaholic even by GM standards - relished. "While it was sort of shocking in its boldness, it was, upon reflection, something that fit. "It was clearly one that challenged people," Wagoner says. But now Wagoner was willing to take a chance on the design. Cadillac's geriatric image had to change.Ĭherry's sketches challenged GM's executives to take the kind of risk that they usually avoided. President Rick Wagoner and the rest of the strategy board - GM's top decision makers in North America - were deeply worried that GM would miss the U.S. To do so, he had teamed with John Smith to propose the sweeping changes. Most important, it would require GM to break out of its bureaucratic slumber.Ĭherry, criticized for dull designs in the 1990s, was eager to sell his radical new styling. It would require a new rear-wheel-drive architecture, a new assembly plant and a new product lineup. The board would have to spend $4 billion to bring Cherry's design to fruition. Much more than a simple vehicle design was at stake. Over the next three months, the members of GM's North American Strategy Board would be asked to bet that this risky new look could revive Cadillac. Above, a technician in GM's design studio works on a scale model of the Evoq before the concept was unveiled at the 1999 Detroit auto show. Top: Sketches and models of the Evoq, the first concept with the theme. Skeptics had a field day when Cadillac floated a new angular look. "They looked at Wayne and said, 'You have 90 days to bring us the vehicle that you showed us in the dome this morning.' " "They completely rejected it," recalls John Smith, then Cadillac's general manager. Then the executives viewed the alternative - a conservatively styled replacement for the lackluster Cadillac Catera. Inside the Design Dome at GM's Warren, Mich., technical center, 20-foot-long boards displayed dramatic sketches of an entry-luxury vehicle with a creased, slab-sided, sharply angular look. 3, 1998, to view design chief Wayne Cherry's new look for Cadillac, they were ready to gamble. When General Motors' top executives gathered Feb. But before they would vote to place a $4 billion bet on Cherry's design, they game him 90 days to perfect a 3-D model. They gathered in suburban Detroit to see chief designer Wayne Cherry's bold sketches for Cadillac vehicles - a look some critics later called downright ugly. In February 1998, the Cadillac brand was in a coma, and General Motors' top executives knew it.