Spiking oil prices in 2006-07 caught Detroit flat-footed. They also chased the higher profit margins in manufacturing trucks and large sport utility vehicles that got miserable gas mileage. To bridge the gap, GM and other domestic automakers stripped many cars of pricey features such as plush interiors or advanced electronics-which only served to devalue the vehicles in customers' eyes. By the early 2000s, GM was suffering under the weight of a cost structure-wages, pensions, health-care costs-that made a standard GM vehicle thousands of dollars more expensive to produce than a foreign competitor's. GM turned out increasingly reliable cars, earned higher quality ratings and slowly, but surely, won back consumer confidence. She would go on to rise through the management ranks, running engineering divisions and managing an assembly plant. In 1988, a GM fellowship took Barra to Stanford to earn an MBA. Barra showed her faith by ditching the Chevette for a black Fiero her senior year. The focus on the Fiero line was quality: reducing defects, rebuilding public trust. When she started at the plant, GM and its Big Three brethren were bleeding market share to Japanese competitors such as Honda and Toyota, whose cars American consumers had come to regard as more reliable and affordable. She earned an electrical engineering degree there, interning at the plant that produced the sporty Pontiac Fiero. That oh-so-practical Chevette took her to General Motors Institute (since renamed Kettering University) in Flint, Mich., an engineering and management school that served as a sort of ROTC for GM. She grew up in Waterford, Mich., where her father worked 39 years as a GM die maker. Repeating that process-it's as simple as that and as hard as that."ĭetroit automakers owe much of their high-profile woes over the past few decades to an inability to fit together those pieces-quality, performance, efficiency, technology. We're going to have the right quality and the right performance features. We're going to put the right technology on the vehicle by segment, the way the customer wants it.
"My goal is to make sure we do that with a suite of products for customers based on their needs and wants." Later, she adds, "We're going to have beautiful, innovative designs. "Whatever happens, it's going to be a more fuel-efficient vehicle in 5, 10, 15 years," she says.
If GM wants to keep making and selling cars, it must find a way to combine the practicality that drove Mary Barra into a Chevette with the swoon she got from her cousin's Camaro.īarra understands the depth of the challenge. But in the increasingly globalized auto market, we know consumers aren't likely to buy any vehicle that doesn't deliver style and performance commensurate with its greener engine. We don't know what exactly the cars of the coming decades will look like: They could plug into wall sockets, or guzzle advanced biofuels, or run on hydrogen fuel cells or even liquefied sunlight. In charge of engineering, design and quality control for the world's second-largest automaker (after Toyota), she has arrived just in time to lead GM's product line into a very uncertain future.Īs the world warms and oil prices roller-coaster upward, automakers face the biggest overhaul of their industry since the birth of the assembly line. Today, Barra's job-and her storied employer's fate-boils down to making sure no car buyer ever wrestles with that kind of tradeoff again.īarra, MBA '90, took the wheel in February as GM's senior vice president for global product development-and became the highest-ranking woman in the automotive industry. Promotional films from the time show the car struggling to stay on four wheels as it rattles around corners at suburban speeds. Bound for college, watching her budget, she bought a Chevrolet Chevette, an affordable, boxy hatchback that the automaker marketed by emphasizing its legroom and trunk space. She plunked down a deposit on a Pontiac Firebird, the iconic hot rod of the late 1970s. When the time came to buy herself a set of wheels, Barra still had muscle on her mind. "The first vehicle where I went, 'Wow, that is cool.'" "It was just a beautiful, beautiful vehicle," she says at her office high in the tower that houses General Motors' corporate headquarters. When Barra describes it, her brown eyes widen and her cheeks flush just a touch. It was a red Chevy Camaro convertible, late-'60s vintage, driven by her older cousin. Mary Barra was about 10 when she first fell in love with a car.