2004 Chevrolet SSR

Breaking the automotive mold

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It was 1998 when GM Design Vice President Wayne Cherry started thinking about a unique "halo" vehicle to pump up excitement around the Chevrolet brand. A halo vehicle, while seldom selling in great volume itself, creates excitement and showroom traffic and boosts the image of the brand, which increases sales of other, more mainstream products.

Chevy already had one halo vehicle, the venerable Corvette sports car, born 50 years ago in 1953. But it could use another these days. Cherry's idea was a modern interpretation of a heritage truck design, inspired by Chevy's popular postwar pickups of 1947-53. In May, 1999, he assigned executive designer Ed Welburn's then-new Corporate Brand Center (CBC) all-digital studio to explore such an idea. CBC's talented team looked at several heritage-inspired truck themes before settling on an especially striking one resembling a "slammed" (severely lowered) street-rod version of the '47-'53 Chevy pickup.

A sensational shape with a retro-modern grille and wildely flared fenders, the SSR means "Super-Sport Roadster." Working on computer tubes in digital "math" data instead of traditional paper and clay, they added a retractable hardtop and sculpted it into a sensational shape with a retro-modern grille, sculpted hood, huge tires and wheels under wildely flared fenders, and a covered bed in back. Then they named it SSR, for "Super-Sport Roadster." Cherry and Welburn showed it to GM's North American Strategy Board (NASB) in August, and GM's top execs were so excited they ordered a working concept vehicle for Detroit's North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) four months away in January.

They got it done, on a Chevy S-10 compact pickup chassis, just in time for the show, and it created such a sensation that a team of engineers started planning, almost immediately, how to make it into a production vehicle. GM president and CEO Rick Wagoner loved the SSR so much that he announced it was, in fact, heading toward production, then drove the concept at the famous Woodward Dream Cruise that August. Still, the struggle to create a viable business case and win production approval lasted through the end of that year.

The next big struggle for the engineers and designers involved shrink-wrapping the concept SSR's sensuous shape over a Chevy Trailblazer chassis and powertrain (much larger than the S-10) without losing its "essence." They did a masterful job, and Wagoner showed off a yellow production-intent SSR at the '01 Woodward Cruise.