If General Motors Corp. needed another sign that the automaker's design strategy is working, it got one Tuesday, when two Cadillac models on the floor of the North American International Auto Show won honors for design.
Two versions of the popular CTS swept the car awards in the annual EyesOn Design contest, judged by more than 20 designers from BMW, Honda, Harley-Davidson, Toyota Motor Corp., General Motors and Chrysler LLC.
The judges named the 2009 CTS-V – a 550-horsepower sedan that goes on sale later this year – as the best designed production car, and the CTS Coupe was named best-designed concept car.
"No one had asked us for that. We just said, 'What if we did a hot two-door model of the CTS?' " said John Manoogian II, Cadillac's director of exterior design. "That was really for me a defining moment: Suddenly we realized that design had come back."
Chrysler's ecoVoyager was best concept truck and the BMW X6 won as best production truck.
BMW beat out the new Dodge Ram and Ford F-150 pickups as best designed production truck, for the BMW X6, which looks more like a crossover than a truck.
"It's not just trucks, the way we normally think about them," said Anders Warming, BMW's director of exterior design. "The segment is constantly changing."
