“Of course there were some tough times,” says Thomson. “I remember being in Thailand once, turning on a Teams call late at night and being confronted by a grid of about 10 angry builders wanting to talk about drains and electrical supply. But we worked it out. That was just a low point. We’re really happy with what we have now. It’s working brilliantly.”
Easily GM Design Europe’s best-known piece of work so far is their concept for a Corvette C10 – one model beyond the C9 that is approaching production as a replacement for today’s C8. It is one of three concepts commissioned by Simcoe as a way of influencing the C9. It’s an unusual way of doing things, but the UK effort has evidently been well received across the pond.
One of the challenges for Europe is dealing with the issue of Americanness, says Thomson: “When we did the Corvette, some people thought we would just do a European car with a Corvette badge on it.
“But that would have completely missed the point. Corvette has a tremendous history; it’s the world’s most successful sports car. We had to respect that – but hopefully give it some freshness and some features that would make people think.”
The key to this new challenge of doing American cars in Europe, believes Thomson, is to recognise the things Europeans value in American design: “Everyone watches American films and TV and buys American clothes. Ideas of optimism, of confidence, of entertainment are seen a lot of American design.
“You see it in engineering projects like Nasa’s Apollo programmes. Our job is to present this from a new viewpoint and not to be stuck in a groove.”
The fact that Thomson has been involved in advanced design for much of his career – at VW, at Ford and now at GM – makes him more confident than most might be about the British studio’s job of presenting designs that probably won’t make production but will probably affect those that do
“We need a certain naivety to be valuable,” he explains. “We don’t know what a [Chevrolet] Silverado is like the Americans do. It wasn’t bred into us. We have an impression, but that’s a different thing. Our value, part of our brief, is to play the role of the customer and look at the product with fresh, questioning eyes.”