GM FYI Blog

By Nellie Lide
GM Consultant

So what does a Vehicle Line Executive in charge of performance cars actually do?

It turns out, a lot of everything. Tom Wallace is in charge of the total design, engineering, production, budget and pricing of GM’s performance cars — which include the Chevrolet Corvette, Pontiac Solstice, Saturn Sky and Cadillac XLR Roadster. Tom says a performance car is distinctly sporty with a high horsepower to weight ratio. I only know they look cool.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Tom earlier this summer as he drove home from work (it was the only free time he had to talk). I first asked him to take me through a typical day. He couldn’t. He doesn’t have typical days — not with these cars. His days range from strategic planning meetings for the the next-generation Corvette, to a meeting regarding production efficiency, to heading out to GM’s Milford Proving Grounds in Michigan to drive. Now, the days he gets to drive the cars are by far his favorite: when he’s out on the road or the track, either driving, testing, feeling, moving.

Tom can drive. And by drive I mean drive really fast. He and his two sons, Brian (35) and Tom (38) are racing enthusiasts who compete with the Sports Car Club of America. Tom races in the Detroit area and has twice won the GT1 championship at Waterford Hills Raceway.

Tom and his “boys” have restored a ’69 Camaro and an ’89 Camaro (in his youth Tom took his ’67 Camaro drag-racing). The Wallace men are currently building a new Corvette for racing. Tom says he’s not sure who owns the cars — they sort of share them. Tom told me that sometimes his job feels like a dream, because he’s working on his hobby full time.

I asked him what his proudest moment was in his 40-year career at GM. He said he had three. The first was with Buick in the late 70’ and early 80’s when his team took the Buick V6 engine and turbocharged it and got it into the product. He feels “really good” about the tons of stuff they did to that motor.

His second memorable moment came in 2002, when he was Vehicle Line Engineer for mid-size trucks. That year GM introduced a brand-new Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy and Buick Ranier — mid-size SUVs — which cut deeply into Ford and Chrysler’s mid-size SUV market share. Up until then, Tom says, the “Ford Explorer was kicking our butt,” and Tom (with GM’s full support) set out to take the lead. Tom said an SUV can’t be ugly, but even if it’s pretty, it’s still got to have the “right engineering, packaging, stance, ride, fuel economy, good size on the inside, be nimble and versatile, and wide range of options.” An SUV “has to have all those things come together in an overall balance.” And Tom thinks his team did that in 2002.

Tom’s is also proud of the teams he put together to produce the Hummer H3, the Chevrolet Trailblazer SS, and the Saab 9-7X — all within a 12-month time frame in 2005.

Tom talked a bit about how when you work on the Corvette, you have to understand the “lunatic fringe,” the car enthusiasts who are over-the-top obsessed with this car. Tom thinks they’re “awesome, so enthusiastic, so loving, so empathic and so not afraid to speak up.”

The last thing Tom told me is that he’s disappointed how the public’s perception of GM’s products lags the reality of the company’s products. He says GM and Toyota are “duking it out” over quality and that people “just don’t know how good our vehicles are.”