Inside General Motors’ New Pasadena Design Studio Where Concept Cars Are Built
Observer got a peek inside the four-month-old General Motors design studio in Pasadena, Calif.
General Motors Advanced Design Pasadena" width="970" height="638" data-caption='A Cadillac InnerSpace concept car sits on the mill plate of the studio floor inside the GM Advanced Design Pasadena. <span class="media-credit">Courtesy of General Motors</span>'>
Concept vehicles are an integral part of an automaker’s portfolio that helps it gauge everything from the public acceptance of cutting-edge design and technology to testing the bounds of materials and innovation. Many of the vehicles we see on the road today are inspired by concept vehicles, and General Motors is no exception. The Detroit giant recently opened a 140,000-plus square foot design center in Pasadena, Calif., with the aim of attracting new talent and creativity. On a tour of the four-month-old building, Observer got a brief peek inside the process the country’s largest carmaker goes through to take a car from a sketch pad to a physical running concept car and eventually to production.
GM has had a footprint in Southern California that goes back to the 1980s when it opened a design studio in Newbury Park in 1983. “There’s always been a fascination with the automotive culture and the design thinking that happens here in California,” Brian Smith, design director at GM Advanced Design California, told a select group of journalists during a tour at the new design center on July 24. “It’s very different logic to the rest of the world, and very different certainly to where GM is in Detroit.”
GM has several design studios around the world, including Warren, Mich., Shanghai (China), Leamington Spa (the U.K.), and Incheon (South Korea). Each studio acts as a sort of “listening post,” according to Andrew Smith, the executive director of Global Advanced Design at GM. Through these design studios, GM takes feedback from its key markets around the world and translates trends, consumer behavior and desires into a wide variety of vehicles and technologies that include everything from electric vehicles that we see on the road today to autonomous vehicle and eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles), both of which still only exist in concept forms.
During the tour, executives showed off a handful of the Cadillac halo concepts, including the InnerSpace, SocialSpace, and PersonalSpace eVTOL, all created by the team before they moved from Hollywood to Pasadena. The Sollei Concept, which was unveiled on July 24, was off-location. GM had a similar design studio in Hollywood but only leased the space. When that lease expired in 2021, the carmaker needed a new space to maintain its foothold in the creative and car-centric Southern California area. They chose a 149,000+ square foot building, formerly occupied by 3M, in the heart of Pasadena, five miles from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Art Center, and CalTech.
GM invested $71 million to retrofit the building to meet the needs of designers, engineers and fabricators, including cutting a massive hole in the second floor and the roof to allow natural light into the area used for clay models and the mills that shave them down centimeter by centimeter. Four massive plates sit in the open clay model area, with computerized mills nearby. Two models were being worked on and reviewed while we were on the tour, with employees using VR headsets and clay bucks to get a natural feel for a future vehicle. “We really believe in physical models,” Brian Smith said during the tour. “We can do really detailed digital visualization, but we believe in making models.”
In addition to the massive investment in retrofitting the building, GM also built nearly everything inside the new building–right down to the furniture and the sign out front. Modular plywood furniture, with different-colored cabinet doors, indicates which group each employee belongs to, whether it is design, engineering, or fabrication. A handful of concept cars, ranging from the 1989 iROC Z Concept to the never-publicly-shown tiny pickup truck, like the 2010 GMC Granite Concept, give designers something to be inspired by while they work.
Across the parking lot from the design space is a large fabrication space where employees use mills, water cutters, and other tools to craft physical concept cars and shave down huge blocks of clay used for modeling. GM plans to enclose part of that parking lot to create a secure outdoor viewing area for secret concept vehicles and install a plethora of solar panels and backup batteries to make the building net-zero emissions in the next year. The fabrication building houses everything from water cutters and massive gantry mills to fabricators working on concept vehicles that could be unveiled to the public in the next year or so, though GM declined to say if the two vehicles we saw in fabrication will ever actually make a public appearance. That’s because, frequently, the various design studios worldwide compete with one another and craft concept vehicles that are then reviewed by higher-ups at GM, and either greenlit for concept builds or held back for further development.
“This studio is really going to be responsible for pushing boundaries,” Smith said during our tour around the new space. “In this new design center, we really have the opportunity to push the boundaries into the future. I’d like to lead the company into places that are unexpected. Our job is to really support the GM mission of zero emissions, zero crashes, and zero congestion, and we’re in the right environment for that in California. It’s for early adopters and people who are ready to embrace EV and AV technology. I think that’s going to help us evolve as a design organization here in California.”