From the Wiki entry
When Lutz became chairman of GM North American development in 2001 one of the first things he stated was that his new 500 hp car was going to save General Motors. His full compensation in 2008 is estimated at $6.9 million.[3]
[…]
He will retire from GM at the end of 2009. Lutz said that one reason for his decision was the increasing regulatory climate in Washington that would force him to design what Federal regulators wanted, rather than what customers wanted.[4]
The arrogance and refusal to learn, the gross overcompensation, and the ideological rigidity of the upper management class in a nutshell. And think of the management who hired and kept Lutz, paid 10x more, and the board of directors that kept that managements, and the stockholders and bondholders who didn’t care about the board. Comprehensive systems failure.
what cars did he actually design and how did they sell?
He has a long record of utter suckitude. Wiki has a summary:
One or two base hits and a lot of wild swings and a major contribution to the error count.
He also designed what’s known in France as le Jimmy Cagney car, namely the PT Cruiser. I think you are unfair to Lutz. GM brought him in to design cars that were “fun”. By GM standards he was a bird of paradise and an innovator. Big cars with big engines are what has paid Detroit’s bill for the last 30 years. So Lutz wanted to build some that were bigger still. I know of course where you are coming from, but what was he supposed to do? Build small cars where GM was going to lose money on each unit sold?
As long as there is no drastic gasoline tax, and in the absence of a lasting brutal spike in energy prices, I really don’t see how this whole small car project for the US is supposed to work. Selling Fiat Topolinos in the US? Without 5$ gasoline, good luck with that.
But he didn’t succeed at that either.
http://www.gminsidenews.com/forums/f76/gm-please-make-bob-lutz-shut-up-47822/
And after years of stupidity:
The best-selling vehicle in the U.S. is now the Honda Civic.
USA Today explains, “Not only was Ford’s F-Series pickup, a longtime sales king, passed by Honda’s Civic, the May leader, but also by three more cars — Toyota’s Camry and Corolla, and Honda’s Accord.” May wasn’t a complete loss for U.S. automakers. “The subcompact Chevy Aveo was up 44%, the compact Pontiac Vibe up 72%, and the Chevy Cobalt, up 19%.” Sales of Ford’s Focus increased by 53%. The newly redesigned Chevy Malibu sold so well that, according to GM vice president Mark LaNeve, “We just ran out of product.”
But small and midsize car sales couldn’t rescue U.S. automakers from a historic loss. According to the New York Times, May marked the first time that Asian automakers outsold all of Detroit’s big three. “General Motors, Ford Motor and Chrysler combined for a record low market share of 44.4 percent, compared with 48.1 percent for 10 Asian brands, according to the Autodata Corporation, the industry statistics firm.”
Automakers overall lost money last month, continuing a historic slide now into its seventh month. The Detroit Free Press reports, “Industrywide sales of new vehicles declined 10.7% in May.” SUV and large truck sales led the plunge, dropping off 23.6% even as car sales rose 2.4%.
But the top spot illustrates the shifting American automobile market best. The last time the F-150 was not the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. was June, 2005, “when the Chevrolet Silverado pickup took a brief lead,” according to the AP.
The Holden/GTO was an attractive car made totally useless by the absurdly high axle ratio (3.42). I remember looking at one in 2004 or 2005. Good looking, two doors to keep the grandkids in the back seat, big trunk, comfortable seats, famously reliable small-block Chevy V-8, rear wheel drive. As I was reading the gas mileage sticker (16 mpg highway), the salesman hastened to advise me,”That’s just an estimate. Don’t expect to get that much.” Deal killer. If I could have bought the car with say a 2.73 ratio or even a 3.08, I would have.
The Malibu hatchback was a nice little car saddled with a poor engine. Also annoying is the left-right reversal of the controls and gas cap from GM’s other cars. One of the Chevrolet exhibition staff at the 2007 Chicago Auto Show told me that the highly practical hatchback was being dropped because GM figured that anyone who wanted cargo space would buy a pickup or SUV instead. Shows you where GM thinking was at.
I don’t understand why among all the anonymous dead wood, among all the faceless goons that make up GM you chose to pick on a guy who is an brilliant if garish designer and a real car guy.
Because anyone who has been in charge of car design at GM for most of the last decade and leaves now claiming that the government is not letting him design what the customers want, is a serious symptom of the problem. GM actually had decent cars it could have brought to market, and it had half decent cars it could have fixed (why does Aveo have such crappy mileage?) and it could easily have been manufacturing teslas or something too and so on. Here’s the guy who over 15 first took the company that made the power for the first electric cars into bankruptcy (Exide was founded 1888) and then presided over the final collapse of GMs market share in a welter of confused and expensive moves. He’s the man who said global warming was horseshit, he said the Volt was intended for girls who don’t shave their legs, he told Amory Lovins to fuck off, he bitched endlessly about the weakest regulations, and blamed everyone but himself for his failures. The fools who employed him were the primary causes of the collapse of GM, but he was a serious symptom of the collapse of the product side of the US industry.
Lutz and the Volt.
Lutz isn’t the first auto executive who failed to transform GM. I was in junior high school when John DeLorean’s On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors was published.
i did business with chrysler once. It was interesting to see a system that made the DOD acquisitions process seem lightweight and agile.
I guess what drives me nuts about those companies is that absolutely no glimmer of understanding that they were being run poorly was ever allowed in the executive suites. They were as self-congratulatory as the Media.
Rats deserting a sinking ship after eating all the cheese.