Southfield, Mich. -- A new Cadillac generation began rolling off General Motors Corp. assembly lines this month -- and at least one tough critic is impressed.

"I have never seen more effort from top executives of every GM division," said Art Baker. "Things are going very well."

Baker's ringing endorsement -- he is chairman of United Auto Workers local 652 -- signals an auspicious start for the $561 million plant in Lansing, Michigan, and its controversial methods for turning out Cadillac CTS luxury sedans.

The world's No. 1 automaker has struggled for years to cut manufacturing costs. Now it's building Cadillacs from modules, parts that were pre-assembled by outside suppliers, in a move the company hopes will shave vehicle costs by hundreds of dollars.

"This is revolutionary for General Motors," said David Cole, a manufacturing expert and president of the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Aside from boosting profitability, General Motors aims to reverse a trend that has seen its U.S. market share slide to 28 percent from about 50 percent in the late 1970s. General Motors' immediate goal, when the CTS arrives at dealers on Jan. 2, will be to attract sales from BMW, Audi and other automakers.

General Motors proposed building a modular assembly plant in 1999 to make wider use of less-expensive outside supplies, a method the automaker already uses to cut costs in Argentina, Brazil, Germany and elsewhere.

Modules or Scrap Heap?

Union labor costs General Motors nearly $50 an hour, including benefits; the cost for non-union suppliers may be half as much. Fearful that modular meant a loss of union jobs, UAW leaders initially opposed General Motors' plans.

To avert a union showdown, General Motors stopped talking about modules in public, though it never abandoned the idea. Instead, General Motors proposed building the assembly plant in Lansing, a city where auto jobs had shrunk by two-thirds from a peak of 29,0000 in the 1970s.

Lansing, about two hours by car from Detroit, is the home of Oldsmobile, a General Motors brand that's going on the scrap heap in 2004 because of its lost appeal among motorists.

So UAW leaders agreed to soften their previous stance that parts and modules in final-assembly plants had to come only from domestic suppliers with union workers.

Cadillac International

The Cadillac CTS engine, for example, comes from a General Motors plant in the U.K. Germany's Getrag Gmbh in Ludwigsburg is furnishing manual transmissions while automatic transmissions are being built by General Motors in Strasbourg, France.

The UAW's Lansing local and the automaker agreed that vehicles built in the new plant will require no more than 19 hours of labor, according to Cole, compared with the usual 30 hours in other union factories that make luxury vehicles.

The Lansing plant's cost also came to a quarter of the $2 billion General Motors spent building its Saturn assembly complex in 1986 in Spring Hill, Tennessee. At full capacity, Lansing will employ 1,500 workers, half the workforce of many auto plants.

Using robots and flexible tools that can be adapted for other operations, Lansing's assembly line can accommodate four or even five model variations from the same basic chassis used by the Cadillac CTS.

Labor on Board

If CTS sales lag, production can thus shift to a proposed sport-utility built on the same chassis. "Given the lower capital investment for the plant, the potential return on assets for General Motors could be very strong," said Cole. He says the venture will put "real pressure on Ford and DaimlerChrysler."

With the Lansing UAW local on board, General Motors workers in Lordstown, Ohio, may be more likely to accept a modular plant if the automaker decides to build one there in 2004 or 2005, when its current generation of small cars ceases production.

Local union leaders are practical. While the new assembly techniques require fewer union workers, they keep factories from closing even as General Motors shrinks its workforce through attrition, retirements and buyouts.

"The mood is very positive here," said the UAW's Baker.

With labor and management in rare agreement, consumers now must answer the big question: Will the Cadillac CTS find a market?

GM may do a lot of things right but the bean cutters win out too often..the beaucracy...waters down the design..and often kills the quality of materials probably through payoffs..you never know..

This new module concept will truly benefit GM as time goes on..

Basically the quality of the vinyl and the leather will improve...as should the quality of seats (rocking or ripping) and the switchgear could use an improvement as well..

Pay more for it..no thanks..its not really that important what my butt sits on....but produce better quality at the same price or lower..

These guys are so stupid..

the cars a dog..the women of this world are not going for the new edge..JMO..

good thing its modulular and adaptable..

Who gets paid to design the bodies of these cars?

The car deserves it's own stable at this point. It survived the 70's gas crunch, the 80's interest rates, and the 90's "knock off" cars pretending to be real sports cars! All the while, the Corvette audience of real buyers has gone up dramatically.

Both the car, and people who buy it, deserve better. Economies of scale can be had overnight - they can also be lost overnight, too. I want to see better quality from the C6 - not more excuses for why things went wrong. The C5 is a very good "starting point" for something very special. The real Corvette heyday has yet to come. But, only if GM wakes the heck up.

This car has the potential to be soooo much more than what it is right now. The possibilities are endless.

Of course, I'm a radical in this case. I say that one of the so-called prototype concept designs that were shown in the New C5 Corvette Video should be made RIGHT NOW! Why wait 5-10 years for awesome looking concepts! Nuts! Go for it right now. Put the entire market on its ears. The prototype drawing that I saw was certainly something that I would/could drive every day and never get tired of the appearance.

It simply looks like a corvette that would get made 10 years from now - so why not make it next year instead. Why wait. If it were up to me, this car would be the best looking, best designed, best-executed, best-appointed, and least faulty $50,000 "true" sports car on the market - bar none. For starters, I'd bring back the "name" ZR. My first run would be the ZR-5. The 5 would designate the first number in the three-digit horsepower rating. So, the ZR-5 would actually be the first modern production 500hp C6 Corvette with a standard Street Indy Suspension that would be easily adjusted on the fly to the full Indy Suspension. Most of this is already doable now, so R&D costs for this new suspension platform should be practically none existent.

I would also build a team of designers and engineers who's sole objective in life would be to produce the first street legal, Corvette LeMans Prototype. They would be instructed to design something unique, but to also take their styling cues from the LeMans Audio Prototype and the LeMans Cadillac Prototype. Mercedes did this with their CLK. Their going airborne on the track twice in one season with poor aerodynamics not withstanding, the design of the Prototype CLK is absolutely beautiful to look at.

Now of course, the Prototype Corvette would be priced just above the Viper ACR ($80-$95), and you would need at least a regional SCCA license (or, instruction time/track time equivalent) to buy one, but the idea hear is the peak the interest and imagination of the market towards the more affordable ZR-500 Indy. One day when you eat all your spinach and grow up, you will be ready to trade your ZR-500 in for a brand spank'in new Corvette Prototype. Or, Corvette P700.

Of course, this denotes a 700hp street legal prototype.

Each remake of the Corvette Prototype Car would go up 35hp from the previous version. This way the P-Cars would be around for a long time before reaching the 1000hp mark. Which in and of itself would be yet another Corvette milestone.

I wish I could run the Corvette project for 5 years. I'd make Corvette owners and stock holders very happy people.

sounds good..

If the C6 gets 400 hp and is 2800 lbs..I'll be satisfied....

But your vision seemed cool too...

The power of the "people" has proven throughout human history to be the second most powerful force on earth. I wonder then, what would happen if a cadre of hard core C5 owners were to "march on GM (of course in our cases it we be cravan on GM) asking GM to build us a real C6 ZR-500 and a real C6 P700?

I bet you that if our forces (shear numbers) were strong enough and our message was clear enough, that we would get something out of the deal well worth dropping another 50-60 grand on! I'm certain of it.

People: just imagine a real C6 Prototype 700 sitting in your garage. Or, maybe a C7 Prototype 800. Or, maybe a C7 ZR-600!

Imagine a blending of these two pictures zooming down the freeway: