When GM product czar Bob Lutz speaks, we tend to listen. When he gives his take on the negative comments about the Volt’s styling, we sit up in bed, panting and sweating. Well, not really. We do find it rather interesting that he felt he had to reply, though.
In a recent article on his FastLane blog, Lutz speaks about the recent wave of “that ain’t the Volt we saw at teh auto showz” and “boy, that sure do look like a Prius” comments floating around. Specifically, Lutz mentions:
The vehicle’s design has come under some criticism, most of it, to me, unwarranted. The challenge to the designers wasn’t to design the most beautiful car imaginable and accept the compromises you have to make to do so. It was, make no compromise to fuel efficiency and electric range, and then do the most beautiful design possible, around those aerodynamic dictates.
In other words, “form follows function”, something that we Designers know all too well. The Volt we saw almost two years was the vision vehicle. It was the aesthetic direction that GM wanted to take in the production version. It, like all concept vehicles out there, is not gospel. Very rarely do we see a production vehicle look identical the concept it was birthed from. In fact, GM’s OTHER milestone vehicle (the Camaro) captures the concept fairly well. The reason? Well, it’s because the concepts are based on production specs and are almost ready to hit the road, minus a few things here and there. The Volt, on the other hand, was an idealized concept. A vision for a technology that was still four years away.
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