BRITISH INVASION; Detroit's brawny new look seems all-American. But many hot designers hail from across the pond.(car designers)

Byline: Keith Naughton (With Sarah Sennott in London)

Nestled away in England's bleak industrial Midlands, General Motors car designers toil in obscurity in a nondescript studio. Unlike the automaker's Detroit design center--a postmodern architectural marvel--GM's Coventry studio is a plain box crammed with stylists carving away on clay models. But these works in progress are not tiny European runabouts. They are massive Cadillacs, SUVs and muscle-bound sports cars. How can reserved Brits create the radical rides Americans crave? Well, don't try to look for an answer inside this top-secret studio. NEWSWEEK tried and was turned away. "It is not a place," explains GM chief designer Ed Welburn, "where we take tour groups."

Not since the Beatles arrived has an American art form been so thoroughly co-opted by its Anglo-Saxon forebears. Some of the wickedest whips at last month's Detroit auto show were the work of blokes named Simon and Trevor. The sinewy new Corvette? GM's Coventry studio chief Simon Cox worked on that. The macho GMC Graphyte SUV? That's Cox, too. How about Chrysler's hip-hop hit, the 300C? That was created under the direction of chief designer Trevor Creed, who went to art school with Fleetwood Mac's Christine McVie. The British influence on Detroit design has become so pervasive--and coveted--that Ford is even shipping its all-star designer J Mays to London to soak up the English esthetic. Who's replacing him in the United States? You guessed it, a Brit named Peter Horbury. "The Brits are doing a better job designing American-looking vehicles than the Americans," says auto consultant John Wolkonowicz of Global Insight.

What gives Englishmen the knack for American cars? "It often takes an outside pair of eyes to see the design culture of a country more clearly," explains Horbury, who transformed Volvo's bricklike cars into stylish studies in Swedish design. Mays, an Oklahoma native who sprinkles his speech with Brit-speak like "bloody" and "in actual fact," says English designers see America's love of large as an expression of exuberance rather than vulgarity. "When you have a foreigner coming in," he says, "they tend to have a more optimistic interpretation of that country's culture."

But it's not as if British designers simply ape American culture. There is a certain restraint to their designs that hints at their heritage of elegant Jags and Triumphs. Cox, one of the principal architects of Cadillac's new look, pushed to make the edgy styling less severe. The result: each new Cadillac looks less like a stealth fighter and more like a sharply tailored tuxedo. Cox used the same sugar-and-spice formula with the Graphyte concept SUV, which has a defiant stance, but doesn't overwhelm. "I felt this was an opportunity to stamp home that SUVs have got to change," says Cox. "Maybe there is a degree of European conservatism in that." ...