A recent issue of Wired magazine takes us into an area of the GM Tech Center that few outsiders ever see. How the writer, Carl Hoffman, and his photographer, Brian Ulrich, managed to gain access to the "teardown and benchmark" room is not mentioned but I can reveal how I got in there.

A few years ago I was writer/director of a dealer education video created around the development of three new cars. As part of the story we shot footage of that same area to show other automaker's cars stripped down, piece by piece, for comparison. Wired's fascinating article focuses on GM's use of teardowns to determine competitive manufacturing systems while learning new ways of cutting costs and forcing suppliers to lower prices. What our host emphasised, however, was the technique of benchmarking; examining and integrating successful concepts into future GM products.

And therein lies a problem. When these design and technical ideas finally appear, the opposition in many cases has moved on. Benchmarking is not exclusive to GM; others do it, as well. But I suspect GM relies too heavily on this, thus explaining why the corporation often seems to be playing catch-up when it should be the leader.