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With a dozen first-class engineers, Ed Cole for four years designed and discarded scores of wooden mockups. He tried everything: front engine with front-wheel drive, front engine with rear-wheel drive, rear engine with front-wheel drive, but he always returned to rear engines with rear-wheel drive. By the spring of 1956, when Cole's team produced a prototype power plant and suspension, he disguised it with a German Porsche body shell. One of Cole's friends recalls the scene that day at the Chevy Engineering Center. "Ed jumped in the car as if his pants were on fire. The speed limit at the test center is 25 m.p.h., but Ed sped around at 80. We kept closing our eyes and praying. Then he pulled up, and he could barely talk. He said three words: 'This is it.' "
"You've Got Something." Still he had to lick the biggest problem: winning approval from G.M.'s top management. In July of 1956, Ed Cole got a much freer rein to press the project: Chevy Boss Tom Keating moved up to head all G.M. passenger-car divisions, and Ed Cole replaced him as the Chevrolet general manager, became a G.M. vice president.
For another year Cole labored over his baby. Not only did he design thousands of parts, but he had to get cost estimates for each one from hundreds of suppliers —without springing the secret. His sales strategy was to outflank corporate channels, sell the small car directly to G.M.'s hard-reigning president, Harlow Curtice. But sharp, inquiring "Red" Curtice was a tough man to sell. To do it, Cole would have to present him with a prototype car and an argument virtually without flaw—at a carefully selected time when the market was just beginning to ripen. Cole well knew that Curtice could ask him hundreds of questions—and if he did not have all the answers, Curtice would veto the idea right there.
One day in September of 1957, Ed Cole casually asked Red Curtice out to take a look at something new at the G.M. Technical Center. With a knowing wink, Cole lifted the canvas protecting the clay mockup. Red Curtice stood back, his blue eyes narrowing. Then he peppered Cole for two hours with questions. There were many obvious problems.