Interesting article, although General Motors has been doing competitive teardowns for decades
As a engineering co-op student at GM in 1987, there was a room at the engine plant where I was working where they had laid out in painstaking detail the V6 engine from the then-new new Acura Legend plus a couple of others.
Tearing competing products apart is only of value if management gives you the development resources to take the lessons learned and actually make something superior. In the case of GM in the late 80s, that didn't really happen. The product that resulted from those efforts was the 3.4-liter "Twin-Dual-Cam" V6 that only lasted a few years in production. Instead of building a great engine from the ground up to be better, they hacked together a lump that was huge, heavy, and only had so-so power and fuel efficiency.
It wasn't until GM did the so-called "high-feature" 3.6-liter V6 in the 2000s during Bob Lutz's reign as product development chief that GM really had a competitive modern engine design.
