Creative solutions can save a lot of money, and if you happen to be building light-duty and heavy-duty pickup trucks for GM, those savings can run into the millions of dollars. Josh Cable of Industry Week magazine recently toured GM's truck assembly plant in Fort Wayne, Ind., and he discovered that when heavy-duty production was brought to the light-duty pickup plant in early 2010 (due to the bankruptcy reorganization), the team on site had to figure out how to incorporate heavy-duty production on a line that wasn't big enough to handle the larger truck lengths.

The biggest challenge was how to fit the bigger, heavier-duty trucks (which now would inlcude duallys) in paint booths that were only long enough to hold the shorter, lighter-duty full-size. The solution was as simple as swapping long beds to regular cabs and short beds to extended cabs, then matching them back up with the right vehicles later in the assembly process. Likewise, painting dually long-bed boxes was solved by restructuring the process so painting could be done partially disassembled.

These less traditional methods likely saved GM tens of millions of dollars in redesign and retooling costs at the Fort Wayne plant, and they ultimately helped GM invest that “found” money someplace where they more desperately needed it. For more details and information about the Fort Wayne truck plant in this article, click here.

We're not sure if we had anything to do with it, but the body of jury members that chooses the North American Car of the Year and North American Truck of the Year has recently announced it will change the criteria for the latter award.

As you recall, the jury, made up of 50 U.S. and Canadian journalists, got into some hot water this year by awarding the Land Rover Range Rover Evoque (from a few other unibody crossover finalists) as the North American Truck of the Year. That didn't make a lot of sense to many of us who know about and care about such things, not the least of which the actual definition of a “truck.”

Now they've announced they are changing the name of the award to the more appropriate North American Truck/Utility of the Year, and they've also decided to include more than just half-ton models. The rationale for keeping the heavy dutys out in the past was the idea that those vehicles were typically used for commercial use. (Do I smell elitism or just ignorance?) We didn't think that made much sense two decades ago when they invented the award, and it certainly doesn't make much sense now, so we're happy to see the change.

Still, we have concerns. If the jury didn't have members on the selection committee that should have brought up this issue long ago, what confidence should we have the jury will have anyone who knows how to judge or compare anything other than cars and crossovers? I suppose we'll have to wait and see and hope for the best.

The criteria change is a good first step, but the proof will be in next year's finalists and eventual winner to be announced at the 2013 Detroit auto show.