It's morning at a dark, malodorous show lounge at a Detroit casino when British-born Alan Batey takes the stage and the room springs to life. Chevrolet's global boss, a one-time Vauxhall engineering apprentice and Harvard executive program grad, launches into an evangelical pitch that boils down to good isn't good enough.
Customers, he says, demand superb vehicles and seamless service at a "value" price. As competitors race to market with sleek new models, just being "competitive" will send GM back into the ditch, he suggests in so many words.
It's made without a teleprompter – the speaker's crutch and emotional straightjacket. Batey, in dark suit and tie-less crisp white shirt, strides across the stage, his comments cued only by a few slides with pictures of Chevys.
For a car executive, he's Tony Robbins on a double espresso, describing the road to resurrection for GM – led by the revival of its most important brand: Chevrolet.
Chevy is the world's fourth-largest car brand, sold in 115 countries with 60 per cent of sales outside North America. Every seven seconds, someone, somewhere, buys a Chevy. The brand's "Find New Roads" tagline, he insists, represents a call to action, the "North Star" guiding principle. When "Chevrolet makes a move, it's going to be exciting," Batey says.
He says the future Chevy Bolt battery car with its 300-kilometre range will sell for $30,000 after subsidies, making it a car for the people, "not the rich and famous." This shot at Tesla comes off as wonderfully sassy in a usually bland car business.
What matters most about Chevy is that, without big changes there, GM cannot be successful. Nearly half of the 10 million vehicles GM sold last year wore a bow tie. Chevy is GM's rock. And despite some promising improvement, GM has a long way to go to make the Chevy brand the equal of, say, Toyota.
But GM is making progress. In the most recent J.D. Power and Associates initial quality study (IQS), four Chevy models won their segments and the division was ranked No. 7 over all and ahead of Toyota and Honda, although below Kia and Hyundai.
Going forward, Batey says, Chevy is looking to Apple as a brand to emulate. "This is a movement … to create passion and commitment for the brand," he says. "We don't want to confuse our customers; we want to simplify their lives." Chevy, he emphasizes, "is the brand for the people."
While a litany of similar promises have been made by GM leaders going back decade, none did it as well as Batey, and he's not a soul-less pitchman. He articulates four brand pillars that make sense: products, dealers, customer experience and marketing.
The most important is product. The five new Chevys being launched this year – Cruze, Volt, Spark, Malibu and Camaro – look good and we hear they've been engineered brilliantly. They appear modern and high-tech, from their common "faces" right down to their Apple CarPlay/Android Auto compatibility.
The volume car in all this is the 2016 Chevrolet Cruze – a car we're told is sleeker, lighter, roomier, more powerful, more comfortable and more tech-friendly. It will break through the clutter to become one of the three best-selling cars in Canada, we're told.
The Volt? It's part of GM's broader electrification strategy. The reinvented 2016 Volt plug-in hybrid has more range, more room, better performance and a sleeker look. The 2016 Malibu hybrid – part of an entire Malibu remake – is a mild hybrid that delivers better fuel economy and lower emissions. GM also plans to make the Spark EV available to retail customers in in Canada and other markets. And then there's the coming Bolt EV with a range of 321 kilometres. The Bolt will be priced at $30,000, subsidies included.
Then there's the Camaro, most notably the just-unveiled convertible version. The new droptop pony car aimed at Ford's recently re-done Mustang is slimmer and faster. It also has a fully automatic top with hard tonneau cover – opening and closing at speeds up to 48 km/hour or remotely with the key fob.
Batey argues that these are just the start of a product barrage that will lead Chevy to the "promise land." If done right – a big if – they might.
GM is barely more than half a decade out of the poor house and has a troubling recall/safety issue yet to fix. But the Chevy brand looks to be on the right track and in good hands. That's more than anyone has been able to say since, oh, the 1950s.
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