General Motors Daewoo Auto & Technology (GM-DAT), better known as the designer and maker of Chevrolet’s small and medium cars, is focused on widening its product range by plugging previously untapped niches.
Here, in its native Korea, that has already begun with the launch of the locally built E-segment Alpheon – a variant of the Buick Lacrosse sold in North America and China and built on the same architecture as the Opel/Vauxhall Insignia.
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Next up, after the seven-seat Orlando crossover, another new niche entered, comes redesigned Aveo hatchback and sedan and then a new small SUV to challenge the likes of the Kia Sportage.
Design chief Taewan Kim insists the design is “still not fixed” for production but the detailed study is finished to the sort of standard designers reach before wheeling in The Boss to sign it off as ready for production and the interior ‘mock-up’ looked all but sorted to give the suppliers the go for first off-tool samples. Looks? Cameras were banned but think ‘I shrunk the Capitiva’ and you get the idea. The interior blends the current two-tone, Chevrolet dual cockpit look with a new type of instrument cluster with analogue tachometer and digital speedometer. This is not an ‘if’ small SUV, it’s a ‘when’.
GM-DAT, bought from the bust Daewoo conglomerate in October 2002, may still be a distant third in the domestic market (just 8% share, according to president and CEO Mike Arcamone) but is nevertheless humming as “homeroom for design/development of GM’s global mini and small vehicles”.
Arcamone reckons he’s at full capacity for design and engineering with 2,500 engineers employed. The facility takes full charge of small cars but also kicks in on other projects, sharing resources with Warren, Michigan, Holden in Melbourne, Australia and other GM centres around the world. While Korea led on the Cruze platform and sedan body style, Australia designed the hatchback; the Koreans recently contributed the interior to a North American GMC truck product.
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By GlobalDataArcamone also presides over four manufacturing plants in Korea making both cars and powertrains; three are at full capacity and the main Bupyeong plant still has a little room. The chief says he is squeezing out a little more at some plants by upping line rate but any further would require a third shift. Capacity is 900,000 vehicles a year. 1.5m engines and 1.4m transmissions; remember that many Korean Chevys head overseas in boxes for local assembly. All up, the company is targeting 1.82m sales domestic and export for 2010.
As a proportion of General Motors’ sales, GM-DAT has risen from 7% in 2003 to an expected 22% this year and now produces one in four Chevrolets sold worldwide.
In Europe, it is eyeing growth from 140,000 units in 2003, 426,000 last year to 1m by 2015/6.
Arcamone wouldn’t give numbers but insisted GM-DAT would be profitable this year. “Operational profit is solid,” he said, without elaborating.
The automaker would launch eight new or revamped products in 2011 – two imported and six locally made. This many had never been launched in a single year before.
GM-DAT is slowly rolling out the Chevrolet brand in Korea where Daewoo still holds sway, as it does in Uzbekistan. Arcamone said the decision on which brand to use is made ahead of each model launch but Koreans so like the Chevrolet brand many rebadge their Daewoos and, since June, dealers have sold kits enabling them to do so.
“A new breed of young Korean consumers like foreign brands,” he said, noting the success of Apple‘s iPhone in a market famed for its own cellphone brands such as Samsung.
One exception is the Buick-based Alpheon which was introduced effectively unbranded as a stand-alone marque.
