For the first time, everything is starting to clear up showing how most all of GM’s primary leaders of the 70s and 80s radically turned away from following a harmonic trend that was fully set up and running inside the modern automobile industry... originally established by Detroit's very first "appearance engineer," Harley Earl. The appearance or look of the American automobile was mainly responsible for taking General Motors over a 50% market share level as well as catapulting the rest of Detroit's auto industry forward during and after the mid-century years. In an industry-wide push that had always thrived on going forward and progressing, GM's retrogressive CEO Roger Smith went on to epitomize the dead end role of taking General Motors, and Detroit's auto world, backwards in time. 

Discarding an already established winning business model founded by two of GM's greatest modern leaders (see what's outlined below), Roger Smith simply chose to shoot from the hip and take this company in entirely new direction. In doing so, he made one of the biggest blunders of modern business history, choosing to follow Henry Ford's long-outdated, but well-known industry paradigm established early on in the 20th century business world—creating millions of cheaply made look alike cookie cutter cars. Smith and his minion's narrow self interests and chaotic maneuverings thrust GM's design/engineering principles to be dumbed-down to such a large degree that all of this auto maker's cars of the late-80s suffered the consequences, and naturally, American customers stayed away in droves! Lacking any vision or intellectual sophistication, Smith's giant mistake set this company (in 1989, GM was America’s No. 1 company) back decades of time and also proved to be the disastrous main culprit behind why General Motors was almost bankrupted in the early 1990s. It's obvious now that Harley Earl's story coming to the surface will finally expose Smith's, and others like him, dramatic oversight. Here's one reason why: "It is a matter of record that poor styling or improperly timed styling has proved financially disastrous to some automobile manufacturers," Mr. Earl projected this viewpoint to all GM's employees in a March 1950 news story (the very article is at, HARLEY'S LA SALLE section).

Finally, for many reasons including "self preservation," GM's leaders today have already stepped back onto the right track and currently are following the more modern principles or paradigm of building, merchandizing, marketing and selling sophisticated automobiles originally instituted by Sloan and Earl:

Renowned Architectural Digest critic hits home on this article on design below