I fear for the future of General Motors

I was innocently reading the sports section of the ol' New York Times this morning when I came across this review of the new Cadillac station wagon:

Behind the Wheel 2010 Cadillac CTS Sport Wagon: The Wagon of Cadillacs

There's a lot of interesting stuff in there about the reasons for the decline and fall of station wagons in North America, the continued popularity of station wagons in Europe, and the decision of Cadillac to start making a station wagon this year, the only American-brand station wagon.

But here's the part that caught my eye:

Particularly unusual for a wagon are the ultraslim rear-quarter windows and extra-wide rear pillars. They make it look as if Cadillac’s designers were afraid to let their wagon look like a wagon — and they were.

“There’s a stigma of what a wagon is and I think what we were trying to do is something that was not a traditionally defined wagon,” said Clay Dean, Cadillac’s chief designer, who is also executive director for G.M. global advanced design. “The D-pillar is thicker than you would normally do; normally you’d thin that thing up as much as you can for visibility, but it was a conscious choice.”

From the driver’s seat, the low priority given to visibility is painfully evident, as the chunky pillars have a tendency to make cars in the adjacent lane disappear. Before changing lanes, precise adjustments of the side mirrors are advised, along with over-the-shoulder glances. ...

The firm front seats, however, earned low marks for comfort. In the rear, space is adequate — a 6-foot passenger can sit behind a 6-foot driver—but the seat cushion is short and low, and the rather small door openings impede access.

In another compromise to style, the rakishly sloping roofline and forward-canted rear window shrink the luggage space. The cargo hold is well-finished — there are movable tie-down loops set in tracks on the carpeted floor, shallow bins underneath and a cover that can be propped up to help keep items from tipping over — but it is small.

In other words, according to their own chief of design, Cadillac deliberately chose to sacrifice visibility, safety, and space to style for their station wagon.

There are a lot of cars in which style can and should drive the design. But a station wagon? A station wagon?! The point of moving from the sedan version of a car to the station-wagon version is that you pick up a lot of additional functionality.

To be honest, General Motors cars haven't been very high on my "to-buy" list for quite a while, but it has nothing to do with oft-cited GM problems with reliability, durability, mileage, or performance. It's because what they like to call their "aggressively sloped" rooflines don't leave me enough room to sit upright in the damn cars. I'm a pretty tall guy (6'3", for anybody reading this who doesn't know me) but I'm not Shaquille O'Neal. And, honestly, all of the other stuff doesn't matter if I can't sit upright in the car without turning my head on its side.

And I've sat in a lot of GM cars over the past ten years. In fact, it's become an annual highlight of my tour of the Detroit Auto Show, the portion we like to call, "John sits in a couple dozen different Chevrolets, Buicks, and Cadillacs, bumps his head into the roof, and gives up the thought of ever buying a GM car."

By choosing your low rooflines, GM, not only are you making it physically impossible for me to justify shelling out for one of your cars, you're also telling me that you don't care about me, that you think style is more important than me, the driver and purchaser. You are doing the same by choosing style over visibility and cargo space in a station wagon. This is not a customer-centric vision of the future.

The only possible silver lining in all this is that I'm sure that this car was designed before GM went bankrupt. So I can only hope that this proud "conscious choice" is a leftover of now-discredited policies. I don't see any reason to believe that to be true. I just like to vaguely hope that somebody GM will have learned from utter failure. I'm an optimist.

Finally, since I am now a majority owner of your company (as are all of my fellow taxpayers) and you're pissing off your boss, a note directly to GM's board of directors, CEO, and executive director for G.M. global advanced design Clay Dean:

Please stop making crap and trying to sell it to us all on the basis of style. That strategy already wrecked your company once. Just make good cars, and sell us good cars. C'mon, you used to be able to do that. Really, I'm rooting for you. But sometimes you make it very, very difficult for me to keep doing that.