For the first time, everything is starting to clear up showing how most all of GM’s primary leaders of the 60s,  70s and 80s turned away from following a harmonic trend that was fully set up and running smoothly inside Detroit's modern automobile industry after WW II...originally established by the very first "appearance engineer," Harley Earl. This auto pioneer's hybrid engineering department was instrumental in General Motors achieving a 50 percent market share level as well as catapulting the rest of Detroit's auto industry forward during and after the mid-century years.

Here's just one of the reason's why the largest auto maker in the world today needs to play the game by the rules: "It is a matter of record that poor styling or improperly timed styling has proved financially disastrous to some automobile manufacturers," Mr. Earl projected this viewpoint to all GM's employees in a March 1950 news story (the very article is at, answer to GM's market share plunge section).

Finally, for many reasons, especially "self preservation," GM's leaders today should want to get back on the right track and follow the more modern principles or paradigm of building, merchandizing, marketing and selling sophisticated automobiles the world over. Earl was the business leader who primarily established this more-modern paradigm and/or the new direction which was intended to keep Detroit's auto capital dominate heading into the second half of the the twentieth century. Here's a sample, "In fact we think it is impossible to predict what it might eventually mean in terms of the nation's economic progress...of America's leadership in the industrial arts...and of the great human good it will achieve."