Pushing the envelope

Jim Queen, GM's Vice President of Global Engineering, discusses his company's next moves in global architectures, meeting U.S. fuel efficiency standards-and his interest in really low-cost cars.

Neither a steadily rising career path, nor corporate life over 31 years have stifled the enthusiastic engineer within Jim Queen. To prove the point, just mention Tata's new barebones Nano and its $2500 target price, and General Motors' Vice President of Global Engineering lights up like a rookie engineer about to do his first competitive teardown.

“I personally think the Nano is one of the most thought-provoking vehicles to come along in a long time,” he said. ‘Tata's engineers really, really scrutinized the car's design to provide the most value possible for the customer. They've even re-thought the use of bearings, optimizing bearing sizes and treatments for the car's performance. They went right down to the gnat's ass on much of this stuff.”