To the casual observer, large piles of car parts are trash. But to an engineer looking to improve automotive design, they are a treasure. Such was the case at General Motors’ Competitive Assessment Center in Warren, MI, in the late 1980s.
“There were enough parts from disassembled cars on tables to fill three football fields,” recalls Paul Tres, principal and founder of ETS Inc., a plastics engineering consulting firm. “The place was nicknamed Mona Lisa because the parts were hung up like paintings for competitive analysis.”