Edward T. Welburn

He has overseen the development of recent excellent GM products, such as the upcoming 2010 Chevrolet Camaro, Chevrolet Malibu, Cadillac CTS, and Buick Enclave. Recent concepts overseen by Welburn include the Camaro Coupe and Camaro Convertible Concept, Cadillac CTS Coupe, and the Buick Invicta.

Welburn was born in December of 1950 and grew up in the Philadelphia area. His father was a co-owner of a body shop with his brothers and instilled in a very young Welburn an appreciation for automotive design. The two would spend hours drawing cars of vintage design, with Welburn tracing over the sketches his father had done of 1930s Dusenbergs and similar classics. Welburn grew intensely involved in the hobby as he grew older, and even wrote to General Motors when he was eleven asking about a future with the company as a car designer. The company replied with a helpful letter that recommended what he might study in school to prepare for such a career, and provided information about its internship program. This bid for a job, coming as it did in the early 1960s, seemed all the more remarkable given the fact that the profession was an elite one and minorities were nonexistent in such corners of the automotive world during the era.

Welburn followed the suggestions of that response, and studied fine arts and sculpture at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He won a slot in the GM internship program while still in school, and worked tirelessly from his first day forward, churning out sketches and posting them for all to see. “It was the first time somebody black was putting sketches up on the board,” he recalled in an interview with Newsweek’s Keith Naughton. “I quickly realized I was representing more people than just myself.”

Welburn was hired full-time after graduation, and spent his three years with the company in the design studio of GM’s Buick division. As a newcomer, fresh out of college, he joined the ranks at the right time, for a major shift was taking place in the design studios of the Big Three domestic automakers, with veterans suddenly forced to come up with smaller vehicles as the gas-guzzling automotive-behemoth era ended. In 1975, Welburn moved over to the Oldsmobile studio, and would spent the next two decades of his GM career there. He had a hand in the design of a top-seller during the early 1980s, the Cutlass Supreme, but also worked on a car that was a one-shot project, not for the consumer market: the Oldsmobile Aerotech. Knowing that GM was eager to make a new high-performance race car to compete with a 1,000-horsepower Mercedes model, he sketched out what became the teardrop-shaped Aerotech one day on a napkin and gave it to his boss. His design chief looked at it and said, “This is it,” Welburn recalled in the Newsweek article, but Welburn told him, “I have other ideas.” His stunned boss replied, “What are you talking about? This is it.”