This succinct Sunday September 14, 2008 Arizona Republic newspaper story below puts things into perspective on GM's 100th anniversary & birthday and who was the modern master engineer behind the success of this enduring Americana enterprise. Not surprisingly, a symbolic photo of a beautiful Harley Earl conception, a red Corvette, is displayed as the central kick-off image of this 2-page article, but also notice another photo from the piece, directly below, which blatantly symbolizes Detroit's cracker-box-on-wheel cars being pumped out to the American masses prior to Harley Earl's 1927 motordom arrival. 

These two cars are extremely similar; by 1925 Harley Earl knew Detroit's mass produced cars entirely lacked beauty, styling or modernity

This impartial newspaper story by Bob Golfen clearly points out, highlighted in green, GM's Best Designs and that 6 out of the 10 vehicles [designed and/or created by Harley Earl] being the primary success stories of this company's enduring history: '27 LaSalle, '33 Cadillac Aerodynamic Coupe, '38 Buick Y-Job, '38 Cadillac 60 Special, '55 Chevrolet Bel Air, '57 Chevrolet Cameo. Along with the original '53 Corvette, also illustrated here, please observe that the majority of this story's visual imagery are, "Harley Earl Designs!" GM's financial leaders over the last forty odd years have gone way out on a limb to make sure the historic facts on GM's real success story...stay buried: Harley Earl's world changing vision or quantum leap design/engineering juggernaut (an advanced technological operating system to mass produce quality "modern" vehicle of beauty) is primarily why GM made it into the 21st Century.

The following quote by Ivin W. Rybicki is another succinct capsulation of long-term business success of General Motors. Rybicki was a 42-year GM veteran car designer who worked under Earl and, later on, became the third vice president of GM Design from 1977-1986:  

"Harley Earl is responsible for more than half of GM's greatest 20th Century milestones. The fact this company had exclusivity of all his work and was able to capitalize off his artistic efforts and innovative engineering ideas first, is perhaps why this man's story is so controversial and a kept secret today in Detroit."

This GM Folks magazine cover, below, visually demonstrates significance of design change and/or how explosive Harley Earl's "Annual Styling Model Change" was at selling this company's product designs at the height of the American auto industry during the mid-1950s. Today, GM cycles highly important designs/brands, the Cadillac STS is a good example, in and around 5 years time! No wonder GM has such poor results in improving car sales, their products loose their freshness and become long in the tooth when design obsolescence changes are so infrequent. Essentially, GM's financial treasury office administrators (creative control bosses) feel they can't afford to take risks with regular design changes...so, rather embracing change they are fearful of changing, and thus crank out the same-old stuff year-after-year. This is exactly how and why Cadillac's brand equity capitulated in last 20 years of the twentieth century (examine WSJ chart underneath GM Folks chart). 

Although GM has literally spent "billions of dollars" to revive the Cadillac brand over the last six years, notice anemic improvement in Cadillac sales statistics results illustrated in the Wall Street Journal graph above. Again, it all has to do with GM Design's current product design philosophy running polar opposite of that of the philosophy-design-formula Harley Earl originally used to cement this entire company near a fifty percent market share for decades of time.  

In other words, why would GM management change the successful formula that worked so well for so long? Hubris, narrow self interest and the simple belief system of GM's current treasury office boys still in-charge today believing their crooked design philosophy can "make cars to sell in America" better than Harley Earl ever dreamed of. That's why General Motors has leveraged so much money and energy in sticking to the direction they've been going in now for well over twenty five years, DOWN. GM's present top leaders are in complete denial of the current reality of the market place, and will surely never get GM back on the right track. Never before in the long history of this company has the leadership team of GM been so misguided. The current CEO, Rick Wagoner, is certainly going to prove in the history books, later on, that his administration will out tower GM's most terrible years during the 20th Century when another treasury office administrator sacked GM: Roger Smith.