For those of you who don’t know, Mike Simcoe is GM’s Global Design Director.
Some background about Mike…after earning is degree in industrial design from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Mike Simcoe left Australia and headed to the UK where he obtained a job at Ogle Design. While at Ogle, his design portfolio included everything from baby strollers to helicopters. In 1983, he returned down under where a friend convinced him to accept a job on the design team at Holden where he initially worked on vehicle interior design.
Simcoe rapidly made a name for himself at Holden and was named senior designer in 1985 and chief designer at Holden in 1987. He came to the US for the first time in 1990 and before he returned to Oz in 1992, he conceived the Buick Sceptre concept.
He flew under the radar back at Holden for a few years until 1998. Things changed in 1998 when the Commodore Coupe concept was revealed. It morphed into the ‘01 Holden Monaro. Simcoe recalls, “That’s the one project that changed things for me, and made me really visible to GM. It was purely an inside design job where we knifed and forked a coupe together out of the Commodore sedan.” Although the plan called for vehicle profitability with sales of just 4,500 coupes, when production ended in 2005, the Monaro had sold 55,000 units. The curiosity of GM management was piqued by what they were doing down under
Bob Lutz visited Holden, where he was Simcoe and his team working on the Commodore VE, “The first from-the-ground-up production car Holden had ever done,” Simcoe says. It was also the car that was so appealing to Lutz that it became the basis of the Pontiac G8. (The Monaro had been translated into the Pontiac GTO.)
In this video, Mike Simcoe narrates a 3:48 second walk around of some of the 2008 Pontiac G8 exterior design cues.
[Video Source: Car Buyer's Notebook]