General Motors has vowed that the practice of simply adding a Bowtie to models before selling them as Chevrolets will stop – the company has plans to unveil the brand’s new design theme at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
General Motors has vowed that the practice of simply adding a Bowtie to models before passing them off a Chevrolets will stop – the company has plans to unveil the brand’s new design theme at the Frankfurt Motor Show.
In line with its positioning as GM’s global mass-market brand, the marque will receive its own design theme. David Lyon, executive director of GM Daewoo’s Korean-based design studio, said most of the product development for Chevrolet was done in either Korea or in North America. Cars built to be sold as Chevrolets in Asia, Europe and Africa have very little in common with the company’s SUVs and trucks, generally sold in the US, Lyon said.
“In the past, Chevy has not had the consistent look that it should have,” Lyon told . “Occasionally, we’d take a vehicle and put a Chevy Bowtie on it and that would be a Chevy.”
“We don’t want to have a global Chevy and a North American Chevy – we can get to one Chevy, and we’ve been working on that look.”
The front-end was described by Lyons as having a “little bit of a truck influence”, with a large grille and a metallic bar running across it bearing the famous Bowtie logo. Some of the design cues were seen on the Chevrolet SS concept car shown at the Detroit Motor Show in 2003, after which GM decided to adopt a common theme. The new styling was approved in November 2004, and a production model of the Malibu SS is currently being shown at the New York Motor Show, bearing a hint of these themes.
But with such a broad global scope, the company has identified some risk to the planned global look, so has decided to keep the design cues to a minimum.
“We want to avoid ‘Here’s the Chevy rulebook. Now you have to put all these things in whether it works on the car or not’,” Lyon says. “If we impose too many rules, studios don’t have any flexibility to do what’s right.”
