Rogerama Comes to the Waldorf

By Janice Castro

The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City routinely plays host to Presidents, Prime Ministers and tycoons. But even for that glittering hostelry, the lavish auto show that General Motors put on last week was something special. During a three-day extravaganza, punctuated by a black-tie dinner and bubbly receptions, an army of executives and engineers greeted some 16,000 invited guests: GM stockholders and workers, Wall Street analysts, suppliers, mayors, even teachers and schoolchildren. On display in the Waldorf ballrooms was a dizzying array of 24 GM cars and trucks, ranging from the rugged GMC Sierra Pickup to the sleek solar-powered Sunraycer that won the 1,950-mile World Solar Challenge race across Australia in November.

The spectacular road show and an accompanying ad campaign, which reportedly cost GM a total of $20 million, are an unabashed effort to polish up the company's rusty image during a period of declining sales and slumping profits and to bolster employee morale after a two-year wave of layoffs. Kicking off the affair with what he called a "progress report," Chairman Roger Smith, 62, asserted that GM is rebuilding consumer confidence in its cars with competitive pricing, superior technology and eye-catching style. The vehicles around him, Smith said, were proof of a "GM that can maintain its world leadership, a GM that all of us can continue to be proud of."

GM won mixed reviews for its show, which its employees dubbed "Rogerama," a reference to the splashy Motorama auto shows that the company held at the Waldorf a generation ago. Said Thomas J. Peters, a management consultant and co-author of the best-selling book In Search of Excellence: "This show is pathetic in the deepest sense of the word. GM does not have a p.r. problem, it ; has a car problem." Peters and other detractors maintain that consumers have been turned off by GM's lack of innovation and its look-alike designs, which have made it hard to tell a Chevrolet Celebrity from the more expensive Buick Century.

Although last year was tough for all American automakers, GM fared especially poorly. While GM car sales in the U.S. fell some 21%, from 4.7 million in 1986 to 3.7 million in 1987, Ford sales declined only 1%, to 2 million cars. In just one year, GM's U.S. market share shrank from 41% to 37%, while Ford's grew from 18% to 20%. Moreover, by earning more on each car, Ford continued to rack up bigger profits than its much larger rival. Through the first nine months of 1987, GM earned $2.7 billion on revenues of $75.4 billion, but Ford cleared $3.7 billion on $52.9 billion.

Smith maintains that GM will soon emerge from its painful corporate restructuring as a leaner, more efficient and much more profitable company. Since 1986 the company has eliminated nearly 30,000 salaried employees, or about 4% of its work force, and has begun closing down operations at 16 plants. But it has also invested $50 billion to build eight new plants and modernize 19 others. Says GM President Robert Stempel, 54: "That's the long- term approach. Roger could have forced us to concentrate on short-term earnings, but he didn't."

GM showed some flair with its popular Chevrolet Beretta and Corsica compacts introduced last year. Now the company is gambling $5 billion to gear up its new GM-10 cars for the more profitable midsize market. These front- wheel-drive coupe models of the Buick Regal, Pontiac Grand Prix and Oldsmobile Cutlass (a Chevrolet model is due next year) replace rear-wheel- drive versions. GM engineers have given each of the cars its own distinctive body lines.

In the long run, GM expects to rely heavily on advanced technology to turn out the kinds of cars that people want to buy. Eager to demonstrate high-tech pizazz at the show, the company unveiled five "concept" models -- futuristic versions of GMC, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac vehicles. One, the Pontiac Banshee, resembles a spaceship on wheels, with a canopy top that opens like a jet fighter's. Instead of a rearview mirror, the Banshee has a TV camera in the back of the car that feeds a picture to a dashboard monitor.

To show how its engineers are using computers to speed the process of creating new cars, GM set up a design studio at the Waldorf, where a prototype sports car called the SRV-1 was under construction. Designers explained a computerized voice-recognition system that enables a driver to operate the radio, for example, simply by saying "Turn up the music" or "Change the channel."

Impressive as these devices are, it may be some time before many of them are available in GM cars. The company is still struggling to streamline a lumbering bureaucracy that has slowed a new car's progress from drawing board to showroom. In fact, some of the new technologies that GM was showing off last week -- like the Quad 4 engine that offers eight-cylinder power in an economic four-cylinder design -- were first offered in similar form in cars built by competitors.

If nothing else, the exhibition showed that GM is confronting its complacency and is determined to become the industry's pacesetter once again. The experts are far from counting the company out. Says David E. Davis Jr., editor of Automobile magazine: "GM could turn it around with one humdinger of an automobile." Several humdingers may have been on display last week, but the real test for GM will come in thousands of dealer showrooms, not in the ballrooms of the Waldorf.

With reporting by B. Russell Leavitt/New York