JOHN HERLITZ INTERVIEW
from Dana Waterman for the book Chrysler Concept Cars 1940-1970 I came to Chrysler on July 13, 1964. I came straight out of college at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, but my association with Chrysler goes back to when I was about 13 and I started sending sketches to Chrysler, and they were nice enough to send me back studio drawings and advice on where to go to school and what to do to prepare for a career. Between my junior and senior year at Pratt, I took an internship at General Motors, but you could just smell the politics in the place. I had received so much help and mentoring from Chrysler, and we had always had Chrysler products in the family, and the company was just coming out of a ditch at that point. Simply put, I figured the opportunities were greater here. So, I signed on with Dick Macadam in the Plymouth studio. The first program I got to work on was the 67 Barracuda program. I did a proposal - there were three different cuts that we were taking at that program: we had a complete reskin of the Valiant, we had the fastback Valiant, the successor to the 64, and the proposal I worked on was a totally new design. The company went so far as to investigate the purchase of a foreign manufacturer to build that design in January, but financially, it just wasn't in the cards. So, it ended up with Dave Cummins & Miltantonick interpreting the design over the Valiant underbody. We made a fiberglass model of the original which we targeted for the Chicago Auto Show, but McCormick Place burned down on the eve of the show! We did get to use it though at the New York Auto Show where it debuted as the Barracuda Formula SX concept car. That was my first design; I got a lot of help from the studio and from the clay modelers. I quickly learned to appreciate the value of the clay modelers, their hands, and their eyes. If you can get them excited about the design to where they really like it, they'll work their butts off to make it happen. Great modelers have an ability to know what will work and what won't right at the onset. The first major production car body that I had a large role in designing was the all- new '70 Plymouth Barracuda. But, like any automotive design program, one person doesn't do it all; it's really a team effort and although I'm credited with the body design, Neil Walling did the front grille and lamp workout and Fred Schimmel helped me immensely with the rear end design. The 'Cuda and its sister car, the Dodge Challenger, were Chrysler's first "clean sheet" entries into the muscle car segment. They were designed to take the entire passenger car engine lineup including the ferocious 426 CID Hemi. A '70 or '71 Hemi equipped 'Cuda or Challenger convertible can command a price upwards of $250,000 because they're so rare. It's amazing! The next production design program that I had a major influence on was the '71 Satellite, Road Runner & GTX coupe program. I tried to get the surfaces to appear to be molded out of one piece, so that there was no break between the fenders and the hood, and the roof, and so on. Unfortunately, the muscle-car market went sour, and it only ran two years. I still have one, a black one – it's in storage right Now. I did manage the development of one show car back in the '69 time frame, and it was a Road Runner, a concept car or show car, that Arden Price was actually the designer of. It started life as a four-seat convertible, but finally, we took it down to a two-seat convertible. We shortened the wheelbase, but it was the original body style, the 68-body style; we took the windshield down to six-inches in height. That was the only concept car that I directly worked with. It was a bright yellow model and it was shown in the New York Auto Show and the Chicago Auto Show; I'm going to say it was about 1969. Chrysler's show cars were rarely, if ever, built in-house; in my time, they were primarily modified production cars like the Diamante - if Diran Yazejian identified that one as a revised yellow jacket, he would know, because he was in the studio at the time. The Diamante was pretty much developed in the Dodge studio. I believe that car still exists, but I don't know who has it. It was used as a show car; Bill Brownlie, I think, had a heavy hand sponsoring the project. So we went to the outside shops; Synthetex was one of them, down in Romulus, and ASC was another. The Rampage pickup was done by Hank Carlini, one of Lee lacocca's associates. He did some other cars for us, the New Yorker that came off the Volare four-door sedan. We called it the Fifth Avenue. Those are the kinds of programs he got into. Now Don De La Rossa had a tie-in with Metalcrafters, in Newport Beach. He had a couple of study cars done out there, one of which looked like a little Mercedes convertible but it was built directly on the mechanicals of the K-car. That was a two-place car which kind of set the stage for what would be the Maserati TC which came later on, but that kind of introduced the company to Metalcrafters. From there on out, we almost virtually single-sourced everything to Metalcrafters they did such a good job. They were committed to growth and we provided them the technology to do those concept cars; we introduced them to CATIA, got them up and running on CAD. We would do the designs and just send the data to them along with an exterior clay model and they would build the car. The interiors were 100% CATIA and Alias data; no interior models. So, we've been in lockstep with them all the way right up to this day; and, last year, we signed a contract with them to keep the competition from doing any business with them. The only people who can go in there now are Mitsubishi, potentially Hyundai, and, of course, Mercedes-Benz. The company owns the contract, and it's in our best interests to keep it going. We essentially have our own custom body and engineering shop. What we were frightened to death of, when the new management took over at Ford, was that they would just go in there and buy the place. They would have bought all the technology we'd worked so hard for fifteen years to put in place. But, fortunately, Metalcrafters liked us, they liked working with us, they trusted us, had a good working relationship with us, so they were content to sign a contract with us. When Ford saw what we did with Metalcrafters, they essentially did the same thing with Special Projects, Incorporated, out in Plymouth. But, because of the size of Ford Motor Company, they have the capability of sourcing around the world. I think Ford of Europe still does work with Ghia. I think they bought them while De La Rossa was still at Ford. The actual designers of the concept cars deserve the credit and the modelers, too. In one case, the Formula SX that I worked on, the real key modelers on that were Al Germonprez and Jack Avoledo who are still with us. During the 70's, there was very little, if anything, done in the way of show cars, as there was just no money in the company to fund anything like that, so all concept car activities came to a screeching halt. However, I believe Jeff Godshall was involved with the Chrysler/GE electric car during the late '70's. I think Colin Neale left Chrysler in about '76 and then who had Interiors? Good question ... well, let's see - Tom Bingman had Interiors. After Tom retired, then I took on Interiors. I wasn't unhappy; it was good learning experience. Macadam had put me in interiors as a manager back in '76, I think it was and he said, "There's never going to be another head of Design in this Design Office that doesn't have experience in both Exterior and Interior," So, he said "choose your poison, you can stay where you are and be limited in your career, or you can take the jump into Interiors and expand your potential." My initial assignment under De La Rossa after Roy Axe left in March of '81 was Exteriors, and Tom Gale had Interiors. That would have been in October of 1981. Hal Sperlich had told Don, "In the planning for Tom and John, make sure that you rotate them at some time;" that statement was made six months after we'd been on the job so Don goes and does it immediately. That's why I ended up running Interiors for about four years, and Tom had Exteriors until he was promoted in '85. He became Vice President at that time. Don retired and Tom was promoted and I took over as Exterior design director, reporting to Tom. We also brought on Trevor Creed at that time to take over Interiors. He came from Ford, born and bred in Ford of Europe, and had come to the United States just a few years earlier. Now they wanted to send him back to Ford of Europe, and he didn't want to go back to the English culture, so he was available. Trevor is a very progressive guy and a good thinker. He's not one for the pomp and circumstance of old England. He came along great. We formed a culture in the Design Office that he was very much a part of. So, when I made my retirement announcement, Tom and I spent a lot of time talking about it and we agreed unanimously that Trevor was the guy for the job. Some time ago, Phil Gavie became Chief Engineer of Design Office; we had a heck of a time getting him into that chair because he didn't have a degree. Phil was a tremendously competent guy, really competent, and energetic too, but we had a real slugfest with Human Resources getting him over the hump and into the chair. I kept telling Phil, "This is a real battle," and he told me, "Well, you know, there's another executive in the industry who doesn't have a degree either," and I said, "Who's that?" and he said, "Alex Trotman!" so I used that. I still live in disbelief that we were able to do all of this, the advances in design practice, creating a complex like this tech center, because we were really foundering at the time we put this building together. We had these state & municipal bonds that were subsidizing the place; 18 percent bonds, I think they were, but it worked, it absolutely worked. Then, we slimmed down, and moved to the platform teams. The platform team organization just happened to fit the building perfectly, although they did not figure in the planning of the building. We know we wanted adjacencies, but we started the building layouts way back in '86, three years before the platform team organization took place. That was really Castaing's brainchild, the platform teams, and it worked extremely well. He did a lot for the company especially early on. Under Bob Lutz, the Chrysler culture really flourished through the late '90s and we became the industry role model for efficiency, new ways of doing business and leading edge product design. As far as our union with Mercedes goes, I think start-up problems were inevitable, but having said that, I still believe that the vision is correct given the global automotive circumstances. It's just going to take time and perseverance. I think I probably will get into consulting of some sort in retirement; there's been a number of approaches, conversations l've had with a number of people. It won't be anything to compete with what Chrysler is doing, but there are a lot of things that the supplier side of the industry needs to understand about design. And, SEMA is a big deal now, about a $17 or $18 billion dollar a year industry, and it's all cottage-industry automotive stuff. I don't think I particularly want to get back into straight automotive design; I've done that, gotten that out of my system. But as far as systematically protecting design intent, from the time it comes out of the company, the OEM, and is lodged with the supplier to take it through and execute it, that's where the ball sometimes gets dropped and it's because there's a lack of design sensitivity in the supplier community. The supplier isn't supposed to change the data, but they will sometimes. They'll change it because, "gee, it's easier to do it this way, dontcha know," without necessarily coming back to the OEM and telling them that's what they're doing. With the advent of computer data that "wasn't" supposed to happen any more-and it was a big help-but they still do it from time to time. Or, presented with math data, they'll just go with the data, and they may not have the capability of understanding if there happens to be a flaw in the data. They may not see it, because they're essentially folks that are not attuned to design sensitivity. That's where I think I might be of help to them. Outside suppliers now do a great deal of designing for us; they do all the seating and a lot of the interior design features. Instrument panels and door trim panels we still pretty much develop in-house. In that case, where we've got the design responsibility, we'll bring their people in and they work right in the studio with us. That's a way of getting around the problem of design intent getting lost once it gets out of the company. There's a lot of efficiency in getting it done outside if you can make it work. In the final analysis, that's the best way to do it. but, it takes a lot of time to get it working right. In all fairness, many of the suppliers have come to the party. They are building their own design staffs - any supplier worth his salt who we'll do business with has to have his own design staff capable design staff. One of the problems that some have is that they've got little design pockets all over the place. And the problem is that there's no integration between the pockets. Something I could probably help them with is to pull together the design groups into a singular focus to manage their worldwide enterprise, which is what many companies are all about these days. They'd be a lot stronger if they could consolidate their design processes. I think. But there always has to be this period of negotiation, the process of negotiation back and forth between the OEM & the supplier and that dialogue has got to happen in order to protect the aesthetic integrity of the vehicle. We don't really have die models any more. We have the master math data and we play that back into the milled clay model - any time there's a change – it's re- milled. This gives us a chance for visual evaluation and then we have what we call "light machines" to prove out the surface of the milled model. The light machine looks like the section of an aircraft fuselage, with fluorescent tubes on the inside surface, which puts reflection lines on the surface of the model. Diran Yazejian invented it, the old perfectionist; And, what's fascinating - the shape correlates directly to the math data which looks almost like a topographical map, and that's exactly what the light machine lines look like. You have a hard copy of the math data and you can hold that up and visually compare it with the light lines on the model. You can look at the data lines and see if there's some sort of a deviation from what you see on the model. We took the concept to Advance Manufacturing and they were so taken with it that they have had all die shops construct them, and every assembly plant has one, just to make sure the sheet metal isn't wandering off standard. They have the hard copy math data and the light machines right in the plants. At design approval time, we've gotten to the point now that on the last-generation Neon, the final buy-off was done on a photo-realistic image - rotating around a large, full-size screen. This substitutes for the holographic image, until we can get that far. It's like looking into a room where the car is being rotated well. We try to keep backgrounds to a minimum to avoid distraction and visual chatter on the surface of the vehicle. This really works; there was a case when we were doing a rotational image of the Neon when Bob Eaton asked, "What happened to the windsplit on the hood?" and we couldn't see it there so we went back to the data and sure enough, the windsplit had been ironed out and we had to add it back in, on centerline. That was the first time we did a Sr. Management body surface approval without a model in the room. Since 1987, which would have been the Portofino, we've done about 50 or 55 concept models. I think that's been a great thing to do. Each one has a different story, a different strategy, a different slant - the Portofino was really the first look at cab forward. It was spawned by the fact that Taurus had come out with aero- styling in 1986 and on the fifth floor at Highland Park, they all went "har har" but it took off, and it stayed up. Hal Sperlich got hold of Tom and me and said, "Look, you fellows have got to do something to rewrite our program and tell us where we've got to go." Wow! that doesn't happen very often! So we had this model, the Portofino, done out in California and we said, "Why don't we just start there, and we'll use that model and frame a story around the virtues of cab-forward design. So we did that, and showed the car in Frankfurt in '87, and then at the Detroit show in January and the response was so great that Tom and I just about flipped. We were asked, "if we can do concept cars like that – why can't we do production cars like that?" So with full management support, we were off and Running. Portofino was a Metalcrafters car - they had excellent modeling facilities there. they had their own glass-bending facilities, their own stamping presses, they can do slow-press stampings with Kirksite dies – they're fully facilitated, the best in the world. Great engineering job. Neil Walling had charge of Pacifica at the time; Tom Tremont was studio chief, reporting back to Neil who was in charge of Advance Design operations. Much of our concept design work was done back in Highland Park because Pacifica had such a small staff they could only handle one or two cars per year. When resources were scarce, we would give out competitive assignments to the different production design studios and to the advance studio so that everybody got a chance to work on them – it was great for the designers, that's really how the PT Cruiser was born. A young guy by the name of Brian Nesbitt finally came up with an answer for Bob Lutz's quest for a '37 Ford – he said, “We're not going to say that publicly, we'll say the role model's a '36 Plymouth." But that was a tough car to execute for production; it was easy to do the sketch of the exterior and the interior but the real problem was the front-wheel drive. The front-wheel drive pushes the nose of the car out and all the ancillary systems come off the front of the engine so you couldn't get the classic long dash-to-axle relationship. The wheels ended up being underneath the A-pillar and we had this huge moose nose out in front. So I said to Lutz, “Look Bob, unless you can break loose Engineering support from the Small-Car Platform Team to get in there and re- engineer the engine box on this thing, I'm afraid we don't have a program - this is a show-stopper." Well, we got the required help and they went at it and once they solved the engine packaging, Brian Nesbitt came up with a formula for the body shape that hit the 'bull's-eye'; the sheet metal on the Cruiser body is beautiful. Strategically, in the long term, I think we have to get back some capability in rear- wheel drive; all of the top-end cars in the world are rear-wheel drive. There's just something about rear-wheel drive that people seem to like; it's both psychological and physical owing to the more balanced weight distribution of rear drive cars, there's less under-steer. I think we'll not step away from front-wheel drive in the minivans & mainstream sedans where it is so important, but it's different for top- end cars. When the market speaks, it's wise to respond. |