Bob Lutz and Bob Eaton bask in the glow of niche appeal, circa 1997 [via The NY Times‘ eulogy for Bob Lutz]. But don’t put MaxBob in a box:

“People who characterize me as a mindless muscle-car, cubic-inches fanatic don’t know my background,” he said. “I’ve always had a great fondness for relatively small and underpowered cars,” citing the 1981 Ford Cockpit, a Ghia-bodied three-wheel concept car that topped 75 m.p.g.; the European version of the Ford Escort; and the inexpensive Pontiac Solstice roadster.

With news of Bob Lutz’s planned May 1 retirement leaking to the web, the auto journalism world is falling all over itself to get his reaction. When the Chicago Tribune caught up with the man of Maximum, they asked him to describe his work at GM and compare himself to (get this) either King Midas or Jesus Christ. You know, for the purposes of journalistic inquiry. Lutz’s reply avoided the self-flattering comparisons, and revealed some of the dynamics that led him to retire:

It’s gotten a little scary. Everything has been so good since I got here [at GM] that I’ve been thinking there really is no place to go but down because not all of my ideas will succeed. No one bats 1.000. It’s been so nice that it’s been a bit disconcerting. I try to establish a climate of irreverence as well as fun. I want to talk, but I want to listen. I want people to disagree and talk me out of things, too. But I’ve gotten no resistance from anyone to anything I want to do here.

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Unnamed sources tell Reuters that the Maximum era at GM will end on May 1, when Vice-Chairman Bob Lutz will announce his retirement. Unless this is one of those Brett Favre things. Needless to say, TTAC appreciates the month of notice, and will struggle to put together a fitting tribute to the man we call Maximum.

Motor Trend reports that former PT Cruiser stylist Brian Nesbitt has been relieved of his duties as the head of Cadillac, ending GM’s post-bankruptcy experiment of putting a stylist in charge of an entire division. But MT figures that Nesbitt’s ouster isn’t as simple as a failure to perform; according to their sources, the firing was political.

The shakeup has major implications for Bob Lutz’s future at GM. He hired Nesbitt away from Chrysler earlier last decade and made sure there was a place for the PT Cruiser designer at post-bankruptcy GM. Nesbitt’s departure would indicate Lutz’s role as one of three GM vice chairmen has diminished to almost nothing… Clearly, [recently-promoted sales boss and President of North American ops Mark Reuss] is putting his own team together, and it doesn’t include Nesbitt, who was posed as the aesthetic face of the Cadillac luxury division.

Gosh, was it really just Monday that Bob Lutz was complaining about the pay problems round General Motors way? Automotive News [sub] reports that, in addition to hiring ousted CEO Fritz Henderson as a consultant, GM’s Chairman, CEO and VP for Rattlesnake Killin’ Ed Whitacre has been handed a compensation package including $1.7m in cash annually. Not to mention the $5.3 million in stock payable over three years starting in 2012, or the $2m in restricted stock. Sure, that’s not much compared to most Chariman/CEO types, but it’s not bad for a government teat-sucking, profitless wonder. Especially considering former CEO Fritz Henderson only made $950k in cash annually plus $4.2m in stock as CEO (he now makes $700k annualized as a 20 hour per month consultant). Ken Feinberg is slacking!

Don’t bogart that joint: Toyota will recall about 8,000 model-year 2010 Tacoma pickup trucks in the US. Not for unintended acceleration, or brake gremlins, but for good old cracks in the joint portion of the drive shaft, says Reuters. The front drive shafts are manufactured by Dana Holding Corp, and the affected vehicles were produced from mid-December 2009 to early February. (Read More…)

Between the tooling for the old Saab 9-5 being shipped off to China and GM “starting” the wind down process, even the most optimistic, “fuel tank is half full” members of the auto world are starting to think that it’s “game over” for Saab. Well, here’s the final nail (barring a completely audacious bid, from an equally audacious company, who want to spend millions of pounds on a damaged brand) in the coffin of Saab. The Local, a Swedish website, reports that GM are officially killing all plans to bring the new 9-5 to production. “It would be so sad that it never sees the light of day despite the fact that it’s a fantastic car,” admits GM vice chairman Bob Lutz.
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GM’s VP got a guest spot on Edmund’s Inside Line to promote his “to-do list for 2010.” The top two spots on the list are dedicated to Lutz’s resolution to “remain focused on the product above all else,” presumably because “stop repeating self” was cut by GM PR. But number three on Lutz’s list is of considerably more interest. Labeled “change minds,” Lutz uses the entry to defend the General’s “perception gap” hobbyhorse. You see, when GM accuses consumers of being too stupid to understand how great GM’s products are, they aren’t actually calling consumers stupid. In hopes of clearing up the confusion, Lutz does what any other savvy marketer would do: call the media stupid.

Let me digress for a moment and say that I’ve seen it written that GM’s marketing strategy is based on the fact that the consumer is too dumb to know what great vehicles it makes. I take huge issue with that. That’s an example of the media trying to ascribe some of the old GM arrogance where none exists.

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Autoextremist Peter DeLorenzo is an interesting figure in the auto commentary landscape. Though TTAC has often taken the pioneering car blogger to task for inconsistencies (especially during bailout mania), it’s no surprise that DeLorenzo’s ability to see things as they are comes and goes. After all, the guy is the quintessential insider’s outsider: as a former marketing and ad man, the Autoextremist is always in the Detroit tent… the only question week-to-week is whether he’s going to be pissing out or pissing in. Well, this week the deluge is headed straight for the part of the tent occupied by GM’s new CEO Ed Whitacre and his activist board. And it smells of well-aged vintage Deathwatch.

But before I get into Whitacre’s executive moves, you’re probably gathering I’m not buying “Big Ed’s” act, and you’d be right. After doing some digging around Whitacre’s previous executive life at AT&T, it’s easy to come away with a highly unflattering portrayal of GM’s “interim” CEO. First of all, the “aw shucks I’m just a country boy who has a few good ideas” persona is total bullshit. In his previous executive life Whitacre was known as an arrogant know-it-all who was never wrong, never listened to reasoned advice and who brought absolutely nothing to the table of his own on a day-in, day-out basis. Shocking? Hardly. Anyone who thinks The Peter Principle isn’t alive and well in corporate America today is kidding themselves.

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The AP reports that GM’s Ed Whitacre is reshuffling executives, turning an already-nervous RenCen on its head. Whitacre has elevated global engineering boss Mark Reuss to take charge of US operations, not an entirely surprising decision as the former Holden boss’s star had clearly been rising. Considerably more shocking was Whitacre’s decision to strip Bob Lutz of his marketing position and roll that responsibility into Susan Docherty’s Sales position. But don’t cry for the man called Maximum: Lutz will remain vice-chairman, will become “an adviser on global product development,” personally advising Whitacre on the auto industry. Nick Reilley, who has been GM’s international fix-it man, has been appointed President of GM Europe, while Diana Tremblay has been named vice president, Manufacturing and Labor Relations. “I want to give people more responsibility and authority deeper in the organization and then hold them accountable,” Whitacre said in GM’s statement, found here.

We had been hearing for some time now that GM planned to roll out its Volt EV in limited numbers and select markets, and it comes as no surprise to hear that the first such select market will be California. The Golden State is a hotbed of support for electric vehicles and, not coincidentally, one of the more affluent car markets in the world. A number of firms, from Coda to Honda have selected California as a test-bed for their high-efficiency but not-yet-ready-for-prime-time products. In California, GM is partnering with three public utility companies, and will spend some $30m of DOE-administered stimulus money to slow-roll the Volt into reality. According to GM’s release:

As part of the research and demonstration program, Chevrolet will deliver more than 100 Volts to program participants to use in their fleets for two years. Chevrolet will also utilize OnStar telematics technology to collect vehicle performance data and driver feedback that will be reported to the DOE and used to improve customers’ experiences with the new technology.

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Fritz was and is an outstanding executive, and I’m very sorry to see him go. You can argue there never is a good time for any of this, but in this case, the timing is particularly inopportune… He guided General Motors through perhaps the most difficult period in its history. I think all of us were surprised and the whole General Motors team I think is genuinely saddened over what transpired

GM Marketing boss “Maximum” Bob Lutz eulogizes his erstwhile boss at the Los Angeles Auto Show [via DetN]. Historians of the Lutzian oeuvre should note that this quote represents MaxBob’s attempt at exercising “enormous skill in the non-answering of [Fritz-related] questions.”

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“In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation,” goes a famous line in the Great Law of the Iroquois, “even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.” Though TTAC tests the thickness of GM’s skin on a daily basis, GM is ahead of the seven-generation game. The Detroit News reports that GM’s engineering staff are already working on the Volt’s third-generation hardware, although previous iterations are still being used to collect data. Meanwhile, the major challenge remain getting everything road-ready for a 2010 launch, a goal that will be reached… “barring any last minute problems.” “I did place a lot of faith in the battery companies, who said they could have them ready,” admits Bob Lutz. Oh, and there’s still one other major obstacle to overcome: the cost. Test vehicles cost “over $250,000” per vehicle to build, and a major focus of the testing process has been reducing the build cost. And despite the earlier Volt-as-sports-sedan rhetoric, the top attained speed in testing is 107 mph, although engineers say it will likely be limited to 104 mph. Though that’s faster than most EV early-adopters will take their Volts anyway, it’s also only about 15 mph faster than the much-cheaper Nissan Leaf EV, a vehicle that the Volt will have to differentiate itself from considerably to earn its estimated $10k premium over the non-range-extended EV.

Are more losses showing up on your post-bankruptcy financial statement? Are uptight Europeans and Republicans making your overseas division rescue harder than it needs to be? Is the thought of another year defined by Consumer Reports mediocrity getting you down? Good news! GM’s court jester Bob Lutz hasn’t been shipped off to chair Opel just yet, and he’s been sprinkling the autoblogosphere with his patented enthusiast-baiting niche product hints.

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Enthusiasts have been adamant that GM’s decision to sell a police-only version of its RWD global Lumina platform (Holden Statesman) creates a fantastic opportunity for GM to return the Impala to its RWD roots. Such a decision would seem to make sense from a business perspective as well, adding civilian sales volume to what otherwise would be a fleet-only platform. No such luck though. Bob Lutz tells Inside Line that the forthcoming Impala replacement (due in 2014) will be based on GM’s global FWD midsized architecture (Epsilon II). The rationale for this decision appears to be fuel efficiency: Lutz mentions the need to compete with the Ford Taurus’s efficiency achievements as a factor in the decision. By going FWD, GM also hopes to be able to shoehorn the two-mode hybrid system from the discontinued Vueick CUV into a future Impala. In addition to forgoing an opportunity to leverage the Caprice police special architecture, this decision also adds to GM’s epic midsize FWD sedan bloat. From the Malibu to the Buick LaCrosse and Regal, from Impala to the Cadillac XTS “flagship,” GM’s default decision seems to be to base all of its sedans on a single platform, making pricing and content differentiation an ongoing challenge to its product strategy. Vive le sameness!