OSHAWA, Ontario - Amid the usual fun and fanfare of a Job1 ceremony, the serious but determined face of Norm Sholler stood out in the crowd.
Sholler, program manager for the Chevrolet Lumina and Monte Carlo, seemed weighed down by the gravity of his mission even as the first Monte Carlo was assembled here last week.
Simply stated, Ford Motor Co. and Japan Inc. ate lunch at General Motors' mid-sized car banquet table until GM was starving. 'If you recall, our biggest losses at General Motors were in the mid-sized car area,' Sholler said. 'So this program is really important to Chevrolet to re-establish our presence in the market.'
After more than a decade of languishing with under-performing mid-sized products such as the Celebrity and Lumina, Chevrolet is getting a third chance with the all-new 1995 Lumina and Monte Carlo, due in showrooms around June 1.
To get customers back into Chevrolet showrooms to shop for a mid-sized car, Sholler knows the Lumina and Monte Carlo have to set new quality and customer satisfaction benchmarks for GM. That's why after the first Monte Carlo coupe left the line, the plant fell silent. Production for the next few weeks will be deliberately slow to assure that quality stays high when numbers rise. Cars will barely trickle from the plant for weeks while workers tune the plant to deliver on Sholler's quality targets.
Welcome to the new face of product launches at GM: Always quality at the expense of volume, something the company has demonstrated it was willing to do with Saturns, Suburbans, S-series pickups, Camaros and other models in recent years.
Job1 for the Monte Carlo's sedan sibling, Lumina, is March 7, the birthday of Chevy General Manager Jim Perkins.
The original Lumina sedans and coupes, introduced in 1989, have always been considered GM's feeble response to the Ford Taurus. 'Chevrolet once owned 70 to 75 percent of the mid-sized market, and now it has half that,' said Joe Spielman, vice president and general manager of GM's Midsize Car Division, which engineers and builds the Lumina and Monte Carlo.
The key was to come out with fundamentally better designs. Spielman admits making a deal with GM's design staff when he took over the Midsize Car Division in October 1992: 'No more ugly cars.'
Spielman says his wife is his gauge for good looks. If she'll sit in a car, its design passes the test. She wants to own a Monte Carlo, Spielman notes.
The Lumina and Monte Carlo are seen, at least internally, as the cars that can turn GM's mid-sized fortunes around. 'We've been playing defense for some time,' said Perkins. 'This is our chance to go back on offense.' To make sure the Lumina and Monte Carlo can reach their potential, GM says it won't cut corners on quality.
You can have any exterior color you want on the early Luminas and Monte Carlos, as long as it's black or white. Torch red also is available, but only on the Monte Carlo. Limiting colors allows GM suppliers to focus only on how the car goes together, until it's finally done right. Then they can focus on color matching the various materials that go into or onto the cars.
Even though Job1 signifies the start of saleable production, none of these cars are for sale. The first 720 will go to Chevrolet for testing and verification.
