General Motors arguably "hasn't been the world's largest car company in 10 to 15 years," suggested the automaker's "car czar," Bob Lutz, during a Tuesday night dinner. "We were a conglomerate of four to five regional companies with relatively little to do with each other. No wonder Honda and Toyota have been cleaning our clocks." The tough-talking veteran said there may be a positive side to the threat of losing sales supremacy. It is a wake-up call for the GM team that it can no longer expect to win without putting up a real fight, Lutz said.

A number of steps are underway to improve the odds of a comeback, he added, starting with the switch to a global product development system this year. Among the goals, GM expects to halve the number of global architectures it now relies on for its varied vehicles. That could have saved $200 million just by having products like the Opel Signum and Malibu Maxx share more of their underlying components, said Lutz. The critical thing is to make sure that there is no badge engineering, he emphasized. The new GM system will reduce the number of prototypes it needs by 40 percent, said Lutz, saving up to $200,000 for each of the advanced vehicles. And GM expects the new development system to help it shave 20 percent in materials costs through the better use of economies of scale. Overall, GM is gunning for a 25-percent reduction in engineering costs and overall product development expenditures.

Under new global system, specific types of vehicles will be assigned to various regional development centers, no matter where the products will ultimately be marketed. Saturns, for example, will largely be developed in Europe, along with Opel vehicles, according to Lutz. Europe, he noted, does a better job on medium-size passenger cars than the U.S. Large trucks will be the purview of American engineers and designers. Small pickups will be handled by Brazil, while "very small cars" will go to Asia, primarily what used to be the Daewoo operation in South Korea. But Lutz stressed that while development might be focused in one country, "members of the team will look like the United Nations."