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Associated Press
Article Launched: 11/29/2007 10:17:28 AM PST
http://www.mercurynews.com/drive/ci_...nclick_check=1

NEW DELHI - General Motors Corp. opened its first design studio in India on Thursday (29 Nov 07), a move intended to support the U.S. automaker's efforts to expand its presence in the country.

The studio in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, where GM already has a research and development center, will "contribute to the mid-cycle enhancement of existing models and the advanced design of future products," the company said.

"It will give us the ability to design vehicles in India for India to meet the unique needs of our customers across the country," Karl Slym, GM's India head, said in a statement.

The studio, which will initially have about 60 employees, comes at a time when GM is having some success after struggling for years to penetrate the Indian car market.

In the past seven months, the U.S. automaker has sold nearly 2 1/2 times the number of cars it sold in the country in the same period last year, even as overall demand for new cars was slowed by a sharp increase in interest rates.

The company introduced two new compact models earlier this year - the low-cost Chevrolet Spark, which is proving popular among young buyers, and the Chevrolet Aveo U-VA, a premium hatchback.

Previously, the company had focused mostly on sedans, although the Indian market is dominated by compact cars. The success of Spark is encouraging GM to bring more compact models for Indian roads. Currently, it produces five Chevrolet models at its factory at Halol in western India. The company is investing more than $300 million in a second plant, which is to start production in 2008.

"The opening of the GM India design studio is an important step in GM's growth in this crucial market," Slym said.

After the IT, BPO, BT outsourcing, its automotive design now. All I can say is India is a great place to be in right now.

all the best to gm.they are having some of the fabulous vehicle irrespective of the low sales vol.spark has added a spark to the sales volume.tavera is also extending the full support.magnum has picked up in all markets.hope srv and aveo tap some of the energy shed by these models in increasing the vol of sales.a design studio also can be flaunted to the customers.-maybe.
ram

A great opportunity for GM to profit from lower costs in India and for Indian designers to finally get an opportunity to work on a full car in India.

Hopefully we would be having better designed cars especially catering to Indian road now... Though the cars are nice but somehow GM cars still face that not so popular image and even for resale.

Its a good initiative which will prompt other companies to think of this as well.
after all we are the biggest pool of High Skilled resources in the world

Gr888. All major car makers are waking up to the potential offered by India. I think Mercedes Benz some sort of R&D facility here.

That is a great news for India Design Engineers. But how it is benefited by the customer of GM? They should get to the basics and train their employees to give customer the best service. Without customer satisfaction none of their indegenious designs gonna profit.

Yes they have in Pune and in Bangalore. The team in Bangalore are into Embedded software, where they are modularizing the C structures to C++ plugin components :)

GM might be using this studio for Designing Cars for the Global market. They do not have to depend this studio for their cars for the Indian Market, as long as they have designs made by Daewoo in stock. lol: