• Detroit Free Press, Thursday, May 13, 2010 10:47 AM

General Motors North America president Mark Reuss has a new program he calls "knothole drives" that is based on his belief that every new vehicle should pass through "a small knothole of excellence" and intense scrutiny. The drives are conducted by 8 to 10 of the company's top engineers and executives, who spend several hours a week tooling around in models in development -- a concept that was "unthinkable" at the old GM, Mark Phelan writes.

"A bunch of us realized we need to have the true car people looking at our cars and the competition to see what we have to do to beat them," Reuss says. Yesterday, for example, Reuss, vice chairman Tom Stephens and other executives test drove the Chevrolet Cruze, which will compete against the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic and Mazda 3, on the winding roads around Ann Arbor, Mich. Later they compared notes in a parking lot.

"When top management takes half a day out of their schedule every week to drive our cars, you can tell they're serious about being winners," says development engineer Nichole Dean.

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