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"A Little Intrigue." A devoted sports-car fan, Cole also volunteered to develop the sporty Corvette when no other G.M. division wanted it. "The Corvette gave the whole Chevy Division a little intrigue, and, believe me, we needed intrigue," says Cole, who likes to use the word "intrigue" to connote sex appeal and daring. Cole still enjoys running Corvettes around Chevy's test tracks at 115 m.p.h. He also ordered a 30% speedup in the escalators of Chevy's new engineering center; engineers call them the "turnpikes."
This year Cole's Chevy Division will produce nearly 1,500,000 cars, 27% of the U.S. total and more than either West Germany or Britain made in 1958. It will gobble up more steel (4,000,000-plus tons) than Sweden makes. Its sales (retail: $3.5 billion) are double the gross national product of Ireland.
Ed Cole drives himself as fast as he can. He steps out of bed at 6 a.m., putters around his garden (orchids, Ficus, dracaena and billbergia plants), has a breakfast of cereal and fruit, hops into a black Impala hardtop. He drives the 30 miles from his home in Bloomfield Hills to his Detroit office in 35 minutes, arriving at 8:10 sharp. In a typical day Cole averages a conference almost every half hour, drives more than 150 miles to various Chevy plants, is rarely home before 7 p.m. Like any good mechanic. Cole applies preventive maintenance. He neither drinks nor smokes, carefully watches his calories and cholesterol.
For his job, Cole's salary and bonus approach $300,000. He likes to spend it, lives in a palatial $250,000 stone-and-glass lakeside house, dresses in hand-needled $175 suits that have fancy cuffs on the sleeves. With Wife Esther, Son David, 22 (an engineering student at Michigan), and Daughter Martha, 18 (a freshman at Michigan State), he shares three boats, four Chevies (one for each member of the family) and five TV-sets (two in color), which Cole watches "only to see if I can sharpen up the Chevy commercials."
For the family it is usually life without Father. Saturdays he hops out to the Chevy proving grounds, nights and Sundays he buries himself under three to four hours of homework. Any hour of day or night, dealers and customers phone him for counsel. In the middle of the night recently, a weeping woman phoned from Minneapolis, said that she was tired of living in sin. But the man refused to marry her until he got the Chevy that he had ordered for a honeymoon trip. Please, couldn't Mr. Cole do something for her? He did.
Swinging around to the dealers, Cole travels about 100,000 air miles a year. He has won their respect and hearty backing by listening to their problems, trying to correct one of their big complaints—poor assembly-line workmanship. He likes to inspect the Chevies in showrooms and on the lots, peers under hoods, checks the chrome, looks hard for water leaks. On occasion, he has flown in a team of engineers from Detroit to replace all faulty parts. Time and again, dealers give him their highest possible accolade; they bubble that "when Ed Cole talks to you, he makes you feel like you're talking to another dealer." Such loyalty will not hurt Ed Cole in the coming battle of the compacts and the swift changes ahead for the entire auto market.