GM’s Advanced Design California Studio Promises New Styling

• GM has opened a new, larger, much-improved Advanced Design California studio in Pasadena.

• The Pasadena facility replaces the old North Hollywood space with more room, more milling machines, and something called the Cadillac Kitchen.

• Expect great things from GM design henceforth.

Depending on how you look at it, General Motors has always had a design presence in California. Harley Earl, the original king god of automotive design who started the whole idea of it in the 1920s—and who even invented the use of clay models—was born and raised in Hollywood, for instance.

More recently, GM has had a design studio in Thousand Oaks, then in North Hollywood, and now—and this is the news here—in an all-new facility in Pasadena that just opened.

GM Advanced Design California is an eight-acre, 150,000-square-foot, $71 million attempt to make GM cars among the coolest in the world. If they can’t do it here, they won’t be able to blame it on the facilities.

“This site is almost eight acres versus 2.5 acres (at the previous site) in North Hollywood,” said Brian Smith, General Motors’ design director at California Advanced Design. “We’ve got almost 150,000 square feet of building space versus the 52,000 (at the previous Advance Design facility) in North Hollywood, almost tripled in size versus North Hollywood.

“We’ve got four clay milling stations versus the one we had in NoHo, which enables us to quickly make models from data. We’ve got six modeling plates versus the three we had in North Hollywood; two build plates instead of one; and we’ve also got more digital screens: We’ve got two 16-foot LED walls, and we also have a 20-foot portable LED wall. So this gives us 100% more project capacity.”

That ain’t all.

“We’ve got full concept build capability on site, so we can go straight from sketch all the way to a running concept vehicle here. We’ve got much more collaborative spaces. And we’re within a five-mile radius of Art Center, NASA, JPL, and Caltech. So there’s a lot to be influenced by here in Pasadena and a lot we can do with local institutions and people.”

It’s practically a requirement for a major automaker to be in Southern California.

“We’ve always had a presence here in California, from Thousand Oaks to North Hollywood to now in Pasadena. There’s always been a sort of the automotive culture here in California,” said GM designer Michael Simcoe. “It’s very different to the rest of the world and certainly to where we were in Detroit.”

There’s just something about the state that makes for great design.

“If you look at the vehicles that have been designed in California, they have a very different ethos and I think it comes back to the car culture you have out here,” Smith said. “The Ciel concept is really something that has been designed for California—you know, driving through the foothills of some beautiful winery or vineyard somewhere. The climate really drives the designers to think about those kinds of concepts.”

Will great things come from this great new facility? Consider previous GM designs to have come from SoCal, some of which GM lined up for us to ogle during a tour of its new studio:

• The 2013 Cadillac Elmiraj, a coupe version of the Ciel and a precursor of the latest Cadillac Sollei convertible concept, both long and lithe and maybe would have sold like crazy. “You could sell that right now,” said Clint Eastwood, upon viewing the Elmiraj at Pebble Beach. Clint is never wrong.

• The 2010 GMC Granite CPU Concept, an ultra-snub-nosed, ultra-cute trucklet that I wanted to buy just standing next to it. No idea what Clint Eastwood might have said.

• The 2002 Pontiac Solstice, a cute and spritely two-seater convertible that actually out-performed a Miata when we tested the two side-by-side way back in the day and of which Pontiac produced just under 66,000.

• The 1992 Pontiac Salsa was a highly versatile, mightily modular crossover-ish competitor to—what, the Honda Civic del Sol? It did everything but ultimately couldn’t decide on one thing, and Pontiac never wound up doing anything with it. But from a design perspective it was exciting.

• The 1992 Corvette Stingray III was an attempt to make a California Corvette. While the shape was well received, the powertrain consisted of a V6, which Corvette buyers would never have considered.

• The 1989 Camaro IROC-Z goes all the way back to the GM Advance Design Center in Thousand Oaks, or maybe it was Newbury Park? It had elements from the forthcoming fourth-gen Chevy Camaro but looked more futuristic, with plentiful solar-gain glass and rearview mirrors that were extensions of the hood’s edges. Another fine shape from California.

So what do you think we can we expect to see next out of GM's Southern California reimagined studio? Please comment below.