As the madness swirled last week, a certain Robert Lutz was being kept well away from the PR-charged atmosphere in DC. But driving Volt/Cruze mules around in circles (instead of to the capitol) isn’t what gets you “Maximum” for a nickname. And with calls for Rick Wagoner to step down busting out all over, reporters are falling over themselves to put a quarter in the Bob Lutz quote machine. Yesterday we were treated to Lutz’s opinion that Wagoner is the “best CEO he’s worked for,” and today there’s even more hilarity in the Detroit Free Press. “These are somber, serious economic times — but it’s still hard to hang up from a 10-minute phone chat with Bob Lutz without chuckling,” writes Freep columnist Tom Walsh. And boy, he isn’t kidding. “If Congress wants a sacrifice, it should be me,” Lutz told Walsh. “I’m older and I’ve made politically incorrect remarks about global warming, so it should be me.” Unfortunately, Lutz didn’t spend the whole interview doing tongue-in-cheek corporate samurai shtick.
Wagoner initiated a review of Saturn before congress even asked for a viability plan, reveals Lutz. “We had to reassess. There’s simply not enough money to support all the brands,” says Bob in one of his few non-Lutzie-worthy quotes. Wagoner also unified purchasing into a single office, and is a “builder” not a “building occupier,” according to his enthusiastic underling. But once again, a single Wagoner decision figures centrally in Lutz’s decision to rally round the RenCen: the decision to hire Lutz himself. “Against the advice of a lot of people,” says Lutz, “Rick made an unconventional and bold move to hire me, at age 70, to come in a run product development. You talk about bold moves — that certainly was one.” Don’t you mean an “American Revolution,” Bob? Seriously, let’s polish up that act and take it on the road.
Has there been a Lutz designed product that has actually been a success? Not some flash in the pan like the Solstice, but something with good sustained sales numbers that isn’t marked at $5K over MSRP and then has $5K cash on the hood two years later with no plans for a second gen product? Has there been ONE?
Lee Iacocca came out the same way. Lutz also knows that if the other guys stay in, he just has to wait for a couple of years and he can get back in. If they actually put in new blood, not beholden to the current incestuous pool, then he is actually out.
And imagine the worst case from his point of view: he already has the money, but imagine if the new management actually turn the company around. Then he will have been shown to have been inept.
Lutz is 76?
In a word….Nooooooooooooooooooooo.
If Lutz goes the bean counters will resume control of GM’s Tech Center and kill anything worthwhile within months. I have been in meetings wherein the bean counters are about to kill something to move the program forward, Bob hears about it, swoops in and rescues the program from certain mediocrity.
Believe me, believe me, believe me from someone who has been there…until a worthy successor to Bob is found, the old guard bean counters who underfund and under-appreciate R&D believe that accounting alone can make a good car company will make GM even worse than it is now. If you ever have worked on a program that Bob is heavily involved in, you are very thankful he is there if you are a creative person. He is a great champion for R&D, Design and letting creative people have the tools, resources and budgets they need.
Sacrifice an MBA, sacrifice a Board Member, sacrifice nearly anyone near the top, but do not sacrifice the one true champion R&D has at GM.
Toyota doesn’t have a Lust er Lutz. If you’re an engineering company and not an accounting company, you don’t need one.
76 is the new 70! He’s got plenty of time and energy left in the tank (sic).
After GM gets out of C11, they’ll probably sign him to a new five-year deal.
@austinseven: You are absolutely right and that is the monster he wrestles with everyday…GM is not Honda, is not BMW , is simply not structured in a corporate culture ‘way’ to encourage R&D…it’s set up to encourage sales, accounting and ‘making the numbers’.
Before Lutz, who was the ‘product champion’ at GM? There really wasn’t one. He came along and forced a lot of the old guard to stand up and take notice about the importance of ‘great product’ begats great sales and accounting numbers etc…i.e. making the numbers depends upon making great vehicles. They are far from out of the woods yet and Bob is by no means perfect, but GM R&D without him would soon strangle under the grip of the old accounting-is-God guard. Yes they need a culture change and he is wrestling with that everyday, much like Mulally at Ford…it’s harrrrrrrrd to change corporate culture but Lutz is trying, he is making changes and I for one would hate to seem him go without a worthy successor.
The other thing about Bob is because he does so much press, because he is well-off, because he is 76 years old, he can speak his mind and create influence that someone ‘working their career’ simply cannot for fear of losing…Bob can afford to hang it out there and does for the good of the company more than most of you will ever know.
To be complete fair, Lutz has done some good at GM. Look at the vehicles that have come out under his tenure:
Cadillac CTS/CTS-V
GMC Acadia
Buick Enclave
Chevrolet Malibu
Vauxhall Insignia
Admittedly, as a CEO he would be a liability of the highest order (no quality control between his brain and mouth), but as a car person?
Well, to paraphrase Tony Soprano:
“He earns!”
Someone like Fritz Henderson should go. What’s he done for GM?
Considering that the environmentalist crowd will never forgive his “global warming is a crock of NSFW” comment in a million years, this is probably a good idea…
GM could make a car that runs on ‘Dreams’ and the environmentalist crowd would still never give them a fair chance at their business. Toyota has done such a masterful job of playing the Green Card that even Honda can’t get fair consideration from the environmentalist crowd….The only domestic OEM with a sliver of street cred with the environmentalists would be Ford and now that Bill Ford Jr is not at the helm, that may be slipping too.
>Toyota doesn’t have a Lust er Lutz. If you’re an engineering company and not an accounting company, you don’t need one
Except Toyota is routinely beaten for making cars that redefine “vanilla” with every iteration.
If you could cross-breed Lutz with a Toyota engineer, maybe we’d get a dependable saleable car that makes the pulse race just a tiny bit?
“the old guard bean counters who underfund and under-appreciate R&D believe that accounting alone can make a good car company will make GM even worse than it is now.”
Seeing as how it will be liquidated before the end of next year it is hard to imagine how it would get worse.
To be complete fair, Lutz has done some good at GM. Look at the vehicles that have come out under his tenure:
Yes, we have. Other than the Malibu, there’s nothing for mainstream North American buyers except the “meh” Cobalt. Lutz picked up the “Small Cars Are Not Worthy Of Consideration” meme that’s prevalent among his peers and kept running with it. He likes rockstar cars, which is all well and good, but rockstar cars don’t sell in recessions. He’s also responsible, if somewhat indirectly, for putting the squeeze on Opel in Europe by forcing them upmarket to make room for DaewooChevrolet, then subsequently squeezing that upmarket with Cadillac.
He’s a car person, but not a good one. He makes the cars he wants, not necessarily those that will sell, or at least float GM through troubled times.
The Lutzian one said: Wagoner initiated a review of Saturn before congress even asked for a viability plan, reveals Lutz. “We had to reassess. There’s simply not enough money to support all the brands,” says Bob in one of his few non-Lutzie-worthy quotes.
Wow, great leadership, Bob. RF has been beating that drum on this site for years now. And Red Ink Rick is finally catching on? What a genius. All we need is to bail out the company for, oh, another decade before RIR can figure out what to do with the problem.
When GM files C. 11 and Lutz is shown the door, I’m not sure what I’ll miss more: His c-c-c-clueless quotes, the pics of him looking dumbfounded or the righteous lambasting he takes at the hands of the writers and commenters on TTAC.
It’s all good.
Some of you guys are being awfully hard on ol Lutz. Doesn’t anybody remember what passed for great product ideas at GM before he got there? Do I hear Aztec? Or maybe the 32nd flavor of Cutlass? Lutz instilled a culture of exciting product at Chrysler until the Daimler fiasco. Some of GM’s latest designs are as appealing as any I’ve seen in my adult life (going back to, lets say, the mid 70s.) I think his biggest problem is that a single good car guy can only do so much within the stifling structure of GM. Too bad.
Pickupman,
“If you could cross-breed Lutz with a Toyota engineer, maybe we’d get a dependable saleable car that makes the pulse race just a tiny bit?”
Isn’t that a Honda?
For all of his faults, Maximum Bob did get the press and the people to pay attention to the Solstice, Malibu, the new Camaro (that doesn’t even exist), and other GM products. The problem is that there was no ‘Toyota’ man to deal with making the bread and butter products better and have a transition. When I go to the Pontiac showroom amd see the beautiful Solstice that won’t work as a daily driver because it has no trunk (a fault ‘Toyota’ man would have fixed), what do I step down to? Perhaps a flashy 2+2 coupe?…..nope, nothing, nada. Bob is the flash, Accounting is the cost, and nobody is covering sensib+le quality. Ironically, this is overwhelmingly what consumers want. And we wonder why GM is failing.
When I go to the Pontiac showroom amd see the beautiful Solstice that won’t work as a daily driver because it has no trunk (a fault ‘Toyota’ man would have fixed)
Mazda fixed it for you in 1990, its called the Miata, oops, I mean MX-5.
Further on the Solstice theme: why hasn’t Pontiac adopted the Solstice design language for their other cars? If you added a dash of Solstice panache to the G5 you’d have a compact coupe worth a closer look. It makes no sense what they’ve done. They develop the gorgeous (to me and Lieberman, anyway) Solstice, and yet their other big intro (G8) goes a completely different direction. Talk about design schizophrenia. GM’s branding problems in a nutshell.
From the article: Even the possible phaseout of GM’s Saturn division, he said, was in the works well before Congress demanded that GM produce a so-called viability plan by Dec. 2 to show it can become self-sufficient and pay back its loans Saturn has its best-reviewed product lineup in years, including the Aura sedan. But GM management made a proactive move to look at phasing out the brand because its sales didn’t match the critical acclaim. “We had to reassess. There’s simply not enough money to support all the brands,” Lutz said.
Spinning this slightly differently, GM examined Saturn some years ago, decided it wasn’t supportable, stripped it of its original identity (and customer base), reinvigorated it (at great expense) with a mix of badge-engineered versions of Chevy products and low-priced cars built in expensive Euros, shuffled the production and sourcing so it couldn’t be pulled aside and sold for a reasonable amount of cash and has now discovered that you can sell Malibus and Traverses in only so many thinly disguised ways and is going to review it and maybe just fold it for zilch or a lot of dealer lawsuits?
Why do these people have jobs?
And, psarhjiniian, I believe you’re pretty much right on the money in your assessment of Lutz.