How GM is shaping the future of car design, one Corvette at a time
I’m standing in a showroom at the new General Motors design headquarters outside of Detroit resisting the urge to reach out and touch something. In front of me, there’s a Corvette CX, a one-of-one experimental sports car that the automaker has meticulously handcrafted to look both silky smooth and fast as hell. As I crouch down to see just how low this low-riding car would drive, the roof of the Corvette CX lifts up in front of me and opens like the cockpit of a multimillion-dollar fighter jet.
The robotic precision of the sculpted body opening up is pure spectacle atop the shock-and-awe of the car itself. GM designed this all-electric “hypercar” to be action-movie-ready. It’s capable of running on regular roads and high-speed racetracks, with 2,000 horsepower coming from individual motors for all four wheels. The skeleton chassis and interior structure are made of ultralight carbon fiber. Wind-turbine-like fans draw air through the open-channel bodywork. And just when a tight curve might jar the nerves of the whitest-knuckled of drivers, an adjustable rear spoiler optimizes aerodynamics in real time.
The Corvette CX is an ostentatious tour-de-force of advanced engineering, design, and manufacturing that took a team of hundreds three years and undisclosed millions of GM’s nearly $70 billion market capitalization to create. So it’s a strange feeling, standing next to this singular vehicle, to be one of only a relatively small number of people who will ever actually see it up close.
This is the curious condition of the modern concept car. Long past the prime of in-person auto shows where members of the car-buying public would gawk at futuristic prototypes, the concept car of today sits physically in near isolation, more an image for social media than a social experience. Concept cars are both more and less visible now, and their long-established brand-building purpose is in question.
But as visions of the future, they are increasingly important crystal balls. During my recent visit to GM’s main design facilities, it was clear that concept cars like the CX are more than just sneak previews for thirsty car collectors. With growing competition from emergent automakers in China, the on-again-off-again embrace of electric vehicles in the U.S., and a long tail of industry-wide uncertainty connected to the Trump administration’s tariffs, the automotive industry is in one of its most dynamic periods in recent memory.
Concept cars like the CX offer car designers a concrete aspiration for what they and the company want the future of cars to look like. “If you don’t create the beacon,” says Bryan Nesbitt, GM’s new senior vice president of global design, “you just spin and spin and spin.”
A vision of the future
These conditions explain why, depending on how you count, GM released three or four versions of a concept Corvette in 2025 alone.
Under the watch of Michael Simcoe, the recently retired GM design chief, the company embarked on a multi-studio design effort to create new visions for the venerable Corvette sports car brand, which first launched in 1953. Simcoe called on three separate GM design studios around the globe to reinvent the Corvette for the age of waning internal combustion engines, increasing electric power, and not-so-distant autonomous driving.
The first to be made public came from a recently opened studio outside Birmingham, England, which revealed an all-electric version of the famed muscle car with a sharp Batmobile nose, a smooth Shinkansen windscreen, and bulbous fenders. Another version was developed at GM’s Advanced Design studios in Pasadena, California, with a more snakelike appearance and street-racing vibe.
The jet-age concept I saw up close at GM’s suburban Detroit campus, named the CX, was also adapted into a frighteningly powerful hybrid electric twin-turbo V8 race car. Painted with a bright yellow racing livery and equipped with a specialized steering wheel ready for extreme, possibly unwise speeds, it’s co-branded with the video game Gran Turismo.
These four concepts, while not wildly different from one another, suggest a range of possible new directions for one of GM’s most valuable brands, covering everything from the exterior contours to the materials in the chassis to the audible rumble a muscle car should make when it doesn’t even have an internal combustion engine.
For GM, Corvette concepts have become rare and strategic milestones in a business that primarily revolves around the incremental improvements of the model-year marketing approach. Previous Corvette concepts came out in 2009, 2002, and 1992, and each went on to influence one of the eight generations of production Corvettes sold to the general public, as well as car design writ large.
The 1992 concept included an early example of a rearview camera, now essentially a standard feature in new cars. The 2002 concept had a carbon fiber engine bay, testing lighter structural materials to boost performance. The 2009 concept’s design leaned flashy, with scissor doors and a cockpit-like interior, but did arguably more as a brand-building tool when the car was featured as one of the main characters in the 2009 movie Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Each concept is a one-off drivable piece of confidentially expensive R&D.
The four Corvette concepts released in 2025 are no different. Standing next to the CX in the executive showroom at GM’s Design West building, Phil Zak, executive design director for the Chevrolet brand, assures me the car is wholly a conceptual project. GM did have a period in the late 1980s and early ’90s when the production vehicles that went to market looked almost indistinguishable from the cars the company had put out as concepts a few years prior.
But Zak says the CX is by no means a preview of C9, the ninth-generation Corvette that is rumored to debut with its first model in 2029. Undoubtedly there’s a connection, though; the CX and the three other new Corvette concepts will influence “the formal development from an interior and exterior perspective,” Zak says. “It is the spiritual guide for where we’re going with C9.”
The concept project is also a chance to test out those future models of Corvettes, likely several years’ worth, before green-lighting their production. Simcoe says investing in the concepts gives GM something tangible to put before potential buyers as a way to gauge their interest in what could soon be on display in a dealership showroom.
“There is still a buzz that you get from being up close and personal with a really cool design,” Simcoe told me before his retirement last July. “Our object is to create that visceral reaction with customers—with people who are in the presence of these physical things, because that’s what we sell.”
The future-looking design work happening here has ramifications not only for how many people will want to buy a given car, but also for how it gets manufactured, with what materials, through what means, and for what potential end-user experience. These advanced designs and concept cars help inform a diverse range of third-party suppliers and manufacturers involved in making the raw bones of a vehicle, the technology that powers it, and the surfaces and interfaces its drivers touch.
A space for creation
Sliding through a basement door inside the bowels of GM’s half-million-square-foot design complex, Nesbitt leads me into what may be the most pristine auto mechanic shop in the Motor City. Inside are four equally pristine vehicles that just happen to be some of the company’s most famous concept cars.
One, the single-seat Chevrolet Engineering Research Vehicle of 1959, or CERV I, looks like a rocket from an early sci-fi movie; its horsepower influenced a generation of race cars. Next to it is the 1988 Pontiac Banshee concept, a devil-red arrow of a sports car with an early head-up digital display and navigation system. Down the line is the shining silver 1959 Stingray Racer, a sleek, highly contoured open-air race car that would evolve into the second generation of Corvettes that started selling in 1962.
Among these flashy and audacious cars is what might appear to a layperson as little more than a mid-to-high-end convertible from the 1940s, with chrome accents, bulging wheel fenders, and a tail that curves gently downward. It’s the kind of car that would be parked at Makeout Point in an old black-and-white movie. But despite an appearance that seems ordinary in retrospect, this car was revolutionary for its time.
The car is the 1938 Buick Y-Job, the first concept car ever created by the auto industry. It was a project of GM’s first head of design, Harley Earl, a towering figure who is credited with bringing car styling and design to the automotive industry in the late 1920s. “Before that they were really just construction operations,” Nesbitt says.
Earl used the Y-Job as a real-world testing ground for integrating new design approaches and emerging technologies into an everyday car. Among the Y-Job’s innovative ideas were hidden headlights, electric windows, and flush door handles, as well as its forward-leaning profile. It was an anomaly compared to the other boxy and bulky cars on the road in 1938, but by the mid-1940s it had set a new standard in aerodynamic forms and expressive detailing.
Unlike the concept cars to come, the Y-Job was not really a marketing tool. Aside from being an internal prototype, it was also a company car. Earl used it for daily driving, commuting from his home in tony Grosse Pointe to GM’s headquarters in Detroit, drawing curious looks along the way. The odometer reads 25,890 miles, making it more akin to a used car than a showpiece. “Earl was gauging reaction, but he was doing it in a very organic way,” says Christo Datini, manager of GM’s archive and special collections.
In Earl’s day, building out a concept vehicle was a scramble. The Y-Job was built on the chassis of a 1937 Buick, with bespoke parts and one-of-one components made by workaday tool shops and machinists temporarily diverted from the relentless demands of the assembly line. Today, GM and some of its biggest competitors have dedicated spaces where conceptual designs can be transformed from drawings to scale models and full-size vehicles all within one facility.
Leaving the Y-Job behind, Nesbitt walks out of the mechanic’s shop and across a corridor to badge through another secured door. We enter a bright, buzzing workshop where more next-gen concept cars are being built by hand. The shiny metal innards of car parts sit on rolling carts amid a team of six mechanics crowded around the skeleton of a concept car up on jacks.
They’re manually connecting hand-built door components onto the car, a four-seat Cadillac concept named Elevated Velocity. It’s been specially designed to switch between autonomous driving and human control, with a deployable steering wheel that pops out only when requested. Nearly every part of the car, from its thin contoured seats to its bold gullwing doors, was fabricated in-house. “The only thing we outsourced was the tires,” Nesbitt says.
Part of this is for secrecy’s sake. Concept cars are obvious targets for corporate espionage, with competitors sometimes nefariously eager to know what’s being developed by the other team. But Nesbitt says doing all this work in-house is its own form of knowledge building, with designers, engineers, and fabrication specialists working together to understand how to turn an idea into reality, and whether new processes or tools need to be created to make a door system or roof canopy feasible to manufacture.
“It’s the flexibility of having this all in one place that gives us operational efficiency,” Nesbitt says. “When you outsource, you don’t get any of that value.”
The idea makes intuitive sense, and it’s one that other automakers are onto. Ford’s new headquarters building, in another Detroit suburb, also brings design and fabrication under one roof, with designers able to bring a full-size clay model from a fabrication shop up an elevator and into their design studio to check lines or rethink proportions.
GM’s design facility, including the new 360,000-square-foot Design West complex that opened in 2024, is configured for open collaboration across departments: Designers and engineers sit within close view of production cars getting their final touches and more experimental designs still coalescing.
“You’ve got a whole bunch of people who are inside of the future,” says Simcoe. “They’re working with the future vision in their minds or in their sight as they’re doing production vehicles and coming up with production solutions.”
This is where the designers behind the Corvette CX concept developed the car’s look, feel, and material choices. Working alongside other specialists from across the company, they found they could reliably use carbon fiber for elements of the car’s structure and suspension. It’s also where they carved out several scaled-down potential designs in clay models, gleaning lessons and gathering feedback along the way.
It’s a process that helped quickly narrow down what could be built with existing means, what couldn’t, and how GM could start to influence its suppliers to create the kinds of parts and components it expects to need years down the line. Blurring high-end design, advanced engineering, and futuristic manufacturing, the conceptual work happening here has ramifications beyond GM to the larger auto industry.
Old guard vs. new guard
On the floor of the Detroit Auto Show in January, the Corvette CX concept sat parked on a small, spare stage, cordoned off from anyone trying to get a touch, its signature lift-up cockpit sadly closed. Amid the audible and visual noise of the show—dozens of automakers displaying further dozens of cars, four screeching test tracks, and a hodgepodge of the obscure component suppliers who build many of the bones and brains of modern cars—the CX could be easy to miss.
In the not too distant past, a concept like this would have been given star treatment, with a sparkling reveal on a grand stage, making it a central draw for visitors. Now the concept car in general is a sideshow, offering some visitors a quick photo opportunity and others a momentary double-take before they move on to see the real cars they might actually want to buy. That seems to be the true purpose of the car show today—giving consumers the equivalent of a suburban auto mall concentrated into the space of a convention center.
“Concept cars were once part of a big collective celebration that was predictable and toured around the world. That seems to be on the decline,” says Raphael Zammit, an associate professor of automotive design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, who previously worked on concept and production cars for Porsche, Hyundai, GM, and others. “They’re just too expensive these days. I think the return on investment becomes a question mark.”
The question of relevance was on Simcoe’s mind when he was developing the idea for the multi-concept Corvette project. After 42 years with GM, he’d seen the concept car evolve, and watched in recent years as conventional avenues for releasing new concepts and ideas began to disintegrate.
“The buzz was directly from traditional media, and people carrying the message through word of mouth. Now it’s instantaneous,” he says. Social media and digital coverage have come to the forefront, making the actual tangible concept car almost superfluous. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow as many people to have that physical interaction with the concept. But probably, in the end, more people see it.”
GM has experimented with gathering feedback on concepts before a physical model has even been considered. Recently, the Buick brand developed a purely digital concept called the Electra Orbit, publishing the images primarily in China, the market GM was targeting. “It got a lot of international attention,” Nesbitt says.
And that’s increasingly important, as competition in the auto industry is much more diverse than in the heyday of Detroit’s big automakers. Chinese carmakers are surging, with brands like BYD and Geely using state support to expand rapidly and carve their way into foreign markets. Big investments in technology and manufacturing, especially on the EV front, are helping some of these companies leapfrog more established auto manufacturers.
That puts the onus on the old guard to stay fresh. Part of GM’s approach has been to build on the strength of its history, playing up fan-favorite brands like Cadillac and Buick, and tentpole models like the Corvette. As a result, the concept car is taking on a new level of importance for the company. “It’s evolving more than it ever has,” Nesbitt says.
The case for physical models
While the world simultaneously embraces the visual prowess of artificial intelligence and wades through a downpour of AI slop, the view from the clay-spattered floor of GM’s design facility is that the case for physically building a concept car is still strong. The Corvette concepts of 2025 may prove to be a flag in the ground for pushing new ideas and getting physical.
For Nesbitt, who started out in the automotive industry in the early 1990s hand drawing designs with ballpoint pens on paper snagged from the office Xerox machine, the physical concept car remains a powerful creative tool. Walking down one of the impressively long hallways in GM’s new design building, he stops at a car that’s on display.
It’s a four-seat Cadillac concept from 2024, finished in an unexpected pastel yellow. The interior is accented with wood—another unexpected choice in an industry deeply in love with chrome (Nesbitt says the unusual interior reshaped the car as it was being built). In a late version of the concept’s design, the designers wanted to offer the rest of their collaborators and the company executives a better view of the unique interior and its potential to reconfigure future cars, so they cut the roof off. Beyond the interiors, everyone was taken by the now-topless exterior form. “So it’s a convertible now,” Nesbitt says.
These kinds of design changes aren’t impossible to make in the purely digital space, but Nesbitt says there’s undeniable value in being able to take a visual idea and make it physical. Granted, most of the conceptual design work done by GM going forward will never leave the confines of a computer screen. But that’s just a testament to the growing powers of digital design technologies that allow much of the refinement to happen on-screen, from aerodynamics to regulatory compliance.
“The tempo of technology integration is increasing. AI compute power is rising,” Nesbitt says.
But advances in technology won’t be enough to guide a company like GM through the current era of drastic change facing the automotive industry. Concept cars—testing grounds from the beginning—will continue to offer tangible guides for how the industry evolves, from design and engineering to manufacturing and marketing.
Nesbitt is just the eighth person to hold the reins of design for GM in its 118-year history, and he doesn’t want to be the last. Concept design, with its changing tools and roles, will continue to be part of determining the future of GM’s products, he says. They’re visions for cars, yes, but he argues they’re also visions for where the entire company, and maybe the entire industry, will go from here. He concludes, simply, “You’ve got to identify the what before you identify the how.”