Designer and Engineer Herb Adams Is a True Automotive Legend

Herb Adams, designer and chief engineer of the one-off Vivant, earned his engineering degree at the General Motors Institute (known since 1998 as Kettering University) back when it ran a five-year work-study program that produced graduates with plenty of hands-on experience.

“I considered both styling and engineering, but as I don’t draw so well—I’m more a sculptor than a painter—I chose engineering,” he says. Judging by the Vivant’s visual charm, that choice was GM Styling’s loss.

Over the telephone, Adams and I spent an enjoyable time reminiscing about our stints at General Motors half a century ago, when we’d both been unceremoniously shown the door for doing more than was expected (or allowed). Adams was a senior project engineer and group leader on advanced engine design at Pontiac, GM’s free-wheeling performance-oriented division, which had been led by go-for-it guys like Elliot “Pete” Estes and John Z. DeLorean. Adams began the Vivant when DeLorean was in charge and automotive enthusiasm was a virtue at Pontiac.

But a major GM executive realignment in 1972 moved those and other Pontiac leaders, all of them engineers, up and out and brought in a bureaucratic GM lifer, Martin Caserio, as head of the brand. Adams had been working on a 455-cubic-inch Super Duty engine, and the whole Pontiac team was so gung-ho that manufacturing had made 600 sets of parts without formal approval. In a Friday planning meeting with the new boss, Adams—as the last-to-speak participant—suggested that since they had the parts, they go ahead and make 600 units. “No, we’re not gonna do that!” Caserio said. Adams then committed a one-word mistake. “Why?” he asked. Saying in effect, “because I said so,” Caserio decreed that all that performance stuff had no place in Pontiac’s future. Caserio reinforced that by firing Adams the following Monday.

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That wasn’t the end of his activities. Far from it. Adams estimates he has honchoed more than 75 cars through design and prototyping. And at 79, he’s still at it. Someone asked him to make a three-wheeled electric vehicle—“one of about 20 people wanting to do that,” he says—and his response was characteristically direct: “You have the money, I’ll build it for you.”

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