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It was once a white Acura Legend, Japan's most expensive and glamorous automotive export. Designed to fly down the highways and byways of America, it could have sleekly satisfied the upscale tastes of some yuppie in California or New York.
But it never got the chance. Instead, coldly, mercilessly, like a frog in a high-school biology class, this brand new car has been ripped apart, its parts now spread out for intimate viewing by dispassionate engineers in a drafty old warehouse here.
Today, this unrecognizable pile of Japanese steel, with all of its glamour gone, is just one of 13 automotive subjects under scrutiny by General Motors engineers in a massive hall hidden away in the back of the General Motors Technical Center in suburban Detroit.
Call it GM's "Intelligence Center."
Officially, it bears a different name of course, one better suited to the strait-laced world of General Motors. But while GM executives may call this their "Vehicle Assessment Center," there is no mistaking its real purpose: This is where GM tears apart its competitors' cars to spy on the enemy.
Fender by fender, crankshaft by crankshaft, even bolt by bolt, the center's staffers dissect the latest Hondas and BMWs, Fords and Porsches-and any other new cars they can get their hands on. Then, they splay out the contents in seemingly endless rows for up-close and personal inspection by as many as 19,000 GM managers, designers and engineers each year.
Here, the purpose is for the men and women working on GM's next generation of cars and trucks to get a very palpable sense of the opposition before returning to their drafting computers to do battle once more.
Here, as they walk past the center's long tables, loaded down with forged metal and molded plastic parts from Nagoya and Stuttgart, they can put their hands around a Toyota transmission, or a Mercedes dashboard display, and feel both the physical and the intangible factors that make the imports such formidable foes. Often, the innards of a competing GM car...