Farewell To The First New Car I Ever Purchased

The 1998 Oldsmobile Intrigue

Last night I said goodbye to the first new car I ever bought, a 1998 Oldsmobile Intrigue GL sedan. Almost exactly twelve years ago my then fiancé (now wife) and I went shopping to replace her well-used Ford Bronco and wound up with this Olds, which served as her daily driver until it was replaced last week.

So much has changed since the Olds came into the family. It’s not surprising that the dealership from which we bought the car, Bellevue Cadillac Oldsmobile, is no longer in business. What I didn’t expect back then was that the Oldsmobile brand wouldn’t last either. GM made no secrets of the fact that the Intrigue was going to lead Oldsmobile’s fight to recapture market share from imports like Toyota, Honda, and even more upscale Acura and Lexus. Thanks to GM’s strategic ADD and need for instant gratification, though, this plan was dead even before the Civic-targeted Alero and Lexus ES-level Aurora hit the market. And though I almost cringe to say this…when the old white boys club of GM named a woman as the president of the Oldsmobile division, just about everyone knew entire brand was dead-car-walking.

In my humble opinion, the Intrigue always struck me as a mixed bag. I wrote in a 1999 owner’s report published by Edmunds that I felt the Intrigue was one of the best-looking cars to come out of GM in years — muscular without resorting to tacky styling gimmicks and add-ons to which GM was prone. The tried-and-true pushrod 3.8L V6 engine might have only put out 195 horses, but I found it torquey enough to push the car from naught-to-sixty in just over seven seconds. While the steering’s heavy feel was obviously by design to trick drivers into thinking the car was sporty, I enjoyed its very direct, not too numb, and strong on-center nature. Given the factory optional “Autobahn Package”, which added uprated 16-inch tires and a larger stabilizer bar, handling proved great for a front-driver.

It didn’t take long for me to be struck by the ghastly build quality. I noted in the Edmunds report that my wife’s car had experienced many of the same foibles as their long-term tester, including sagging kick panels, several NVH sins and interior panel gaps that were as uneven as rural highway pavement. If memory serves, I wrote something to the extent of “my wife and I plan to drive the wheels off this car, but I’m concerned that will happen sooner rather than later.”

To be quite honest, I’m damn surprised that twelve years later the car still runs. Chalk much of it up to the fact that when I signed the title last night to its new owners, it only had 80,461 miles on the odometer. Thanks to the low miles and regular servicing, the car’s only major break-down was due to a simple leaking OEM battery at less than two years old. Other than that the issues have been limited to common GM issues: replacing the leaking plastic intake manifold, swapping out three out of four window regulators after they snapped, changing the bad vent blend door, and turning or fitting new front rotors at double the rate of any other vehicle we have ever owned.

At the end of the day, the Intrigue was a good and very reliable car that could have been the basis of a truly great car given some investment on GM’s part in engineering out some of the rough edges. Maybe even with those extra hours and bucks in development, Camry might have still required fewer hours to fix failed parts. A Maxima would have been more fun to drive. An Accord would certainly have brought more money, although when I advertised the Intrigue for $2500 on Craigslist, I was surprised when it took less than five hours for someone to come and buy this Jade Green sedan with only 80,461 miles.

I can’t say that I’m sad to see it go, but maybe that’s just because looking at the Intrigue through the backup camera from the heated/ventilated seats of my wife’s new Hyundai Genesis makes it look like an outdated appliance. It worked…actually far longer than I expected, but like so many American cars of the day, the sum of its cheaply-engineered parts-bin components failed to establish a true emotional connection with even a nostalgic gearhead like me.

Toyota’s Uphill Battle — With Stuck Throttle And No Brakes

In the last week or so it seems I get more questions about Toyota from readers than I do requests for sweets from my children. Whether it’s about the sticking accelerator recall, the Prius braking issue, the five-speed automatic transmission software maladies, or the effect of all these on Toyota’s long-term health, there is no lack of interest out there in getting good answers.

There are two big factors at play that the evening news and even automotive magazines don’t want to talk about (and, of course, I will). The first has something to do with the demographics and psychographics of Toyota and Lexus buyers — they aren’t, on average, “car people”. Indeed, I’ve long referred to Toyotas and Lexus vehicles as “cars for people who don’t like cars”. Obviously this is a gross generalization, as I’m a die-hard car guy and when I’m not piloting something stupid like a Corvette, Ferrari, Triumph, or old truck, I’m driving my kids to school in an ’06 Avalon. The prime market for Toyota, however, has been people not looking for a vehicle for fun or to fulfill an ego need, but rather as a safe, reliable, ergonomic appliance to get them reliably and economically from point A to point B.

Consequently, Toyota and Lexus owners generally don’t have a good understanding of automotive technology and/or history from which to draw conclusions regarding the current issues. While the Toyota (and especially Lexus) ownership group compares well to competitors’ in terms of academic and professional success, these are not people who are going to research issues within context of the industry. They just want to know a) if there is a problem that affects them, b) if it does when it can be fixed, and c) if the car is safe to drive until said solution can be implemented. If any part of the explanation isn’t clear…which it has not been, then the problem is compounded.

This is just half of Toyota’s dire big picture situation, though.

The other factor is that Toyota and Lexus have reached leadership positions in their respective classes based almost entirely on the image of quality. People haven’t been buying Camrys, Siennnas, ES350s, or Highlanders for their speed, luxury, handling, or sex appeal. Hell, even the Lexus LS series has been developed as a reliable, lower-cost alternative to Mercedes S-Class (with derivative styling, to boot).

So in the absence of this core value proposition, consumers have no reason to buy a Toyota or Lexus.

Talking heads have put blame all over the place — from design failure on the part of the OEM pedal supplier to an internal management structure overwhelmed by far too rapid market growth. Based on my traditional business education and years in management, I’d call these knee-jerk catch-all diagnoses (like “spastic colon” or “irritable bowel”) rather than meaningful analysis of strategic and tactical failures.

There are tremendous challenges for Toyota going forward. First, they have to identify what is actually causing all of the accelerator and braking issues in its cars, then they have to figure out how to actually fix millions of cars quickly.

Next they have to identify the source of the product management issues that led to the failures. In modern times quality is defined as the failure rate engineered into any given component, because while it is possible to make anything fail-safe, the cost to do so is unreasonable from a business case standpoint. That said, an analysis needs to be done for each failure of how the culprit system was engineered and if the malfunction can find a causal or associative relationship with a specific benefit like increased profit, better mpg, use of a preferred business supplier.

Most importantly, Toyota has to fix the self-inflicted damage done to its reputation…and it better start really quickly. Obviously this begins with solving these issues in all of its vehicles, but it also needs to include the shortcomings in its problem-reporting process, which according to Toyota Media Manager Bill Kwong completely and entirely disregards third-party collected information, even if it is a consumer complaint site with thousands of confirmed, actionable reports. Toyota will only consider and act on information reported from dealers via district managers and from the miniscule percentage of owners who use the toll-free Toyota Customer Service hotline.

Finally, what nobody else has brought up (so allow me to do so), is that Toyota must then move beyond marketing one-trick ponies. One can’t sell only on the basis of quality if quality is in doubt. As for the two cars in Toyota’s lineup that aren’t marketed based on quality alone, the Corolla and Prius: I have two words: Chevy Volt. You can’t sell only on gas mileage once these models look like Bugatti Veyrons at wide-open-throttle compared to the Chevy Volt’s 200-mpg.

At the end of the day, the moment the US Secretary of Transportation went on record saying Toyota, with its perceived primary value proposition of quality, not only now suffers severe safety issues across the majority of its product offerings, but also systematically worked to hide the problem from regulators and avoid recalls…well, this is a disaster of Andy Dick at Mardi Gras proportions. Excuses and blocking the truth is something Americans expect from Ford (Pinto and Mustang gas tanks, Explorer rollover issues, fire-starting cruise controls, Crown Vicky stuck accelerators) and GM (side-saddle gas tanks, bad steering and motor mounts in the early 1970s), but not from Toyota.

Actually, it isn’t a disaster for everyone. Ford and GM sales are up. And come to think of it, Audi has to be happy that “unintended acceleration” will no longer be associated only with its brand.

And just like Audi, Toyota can expect to spend millions of dollars and decades of time to repair the damage to its reputation. Might we suggest taking a page from Audi’s book and engineer in performance, design, ergonomics, image, luxury…and also quality. If there’s one thing that Land Rover and Fiat have proven time and time again, people will buy the least reliable vehicles on the market, provided said vehicle offers more to the driver than the perceived or actual quality of its parts.

News Sources: Toyota Only Acted After Pressure From US Regulators To Stop Sales Of Vehicles Affected By Sticking Pedals

We all thought that Toyota coming to America would show the domestic Big Three how to improve quality. Instead, it seems that Toyota has again taken the “when in Rome” approach.

It will take some time for the analysts to crunch the numbers, but Toyota’s announcement yesterday that it has halted sales of eight models due to the sticky accelerator pedal issue will have a mind-boggling economic effect. And if there ever was any question if things could get worse for the auto industry in 2010, this at least answers it for Toyota and independent Toyota dealers.

Here at The Four Wheel Drift (where we own an affected Toyota Avalon) we have written plenty of stories regarding Toyota’s recent quality woes. Specifically, the company had issues with five-speed automatic transmissions in its V6-powered front-wheel-drive Toyota and Lexus brand vehicles. The transmission problem was exacerbated by a trouble reporting process designed to keep complaints from ever being registered by Toyota corporate systems, which in turn angered customers, left dealers hanging and kept engineers from knowing the widespread nature of the issue. Even though there was an inherent risk of people getting killed by the transmission problem wasn’t nearly great enough to get Toyota to do more than a quiet TSB.

Toyota seemed to take the same approach with the sticking throttle. Reports today show that despite the new tremendous perceived danger to life and property the company was again not acting quickly or effectively. Allegedly it took a tremendous amount of pressure by US regulators to get Toyota off their kings-of-quality laurels to immediately start the process of containing and fixing this situation.

The issue that stopped production lines yesterday is indeed as serious as a Cannes Film Festival foreign language drama. “Mechanical” problems are causing accelerator pedals to either stick or return slowly from depressed to idle positions. Whether or not cars have had pedals stick in the wide-open-throttle position is not clear. Given the average Toyota owner demographics, it’s unlikely that many people will have muscle-memory reactions to shift to neutral or use their feet to lift the pedal. What we all do know is that the last thing any company wants is one of its vehicles plowing into people because of an inherent design flaw.

Toyota uses a drive-by-wire system. Instead of a cable connecting the pedal to the actual throttle in the engine bay, there is simply a throttle position sensor connected via wires from the pedal. So unlike days of old when a corroded throttle cable stuck or throttle-return spring broke, Toyota has fewer moving parts to address. At the end of the day one has to accept that Toyota probably already knows the cause…

…But like any huge corporation, Toyota needs to find the lowest cost fix. Let’s just hope the answer is something more than WD40 every 3 months or 3,000 miles. As GM and Ford have found out in the past, the company’s image can take a near permanent hit with one leaked cost-benefit analysis that concludes wrongful-death settlements are better for the company than a comprehensive fix to new and existing vehicles.

GM 100 Years Too Late For Its Claimed “First”

Corporate PR departments have a habit of making bold statements that are historically inaccurate. General Motors, one of the leaders in fudging history, let out another one today.

The release’s headline was “GM To Be First Major U.S. Automaker to Manufacture Electric Motors”. Really? That’s actually somewhat whimsical, because by the time General Motors came into existence in 1908, electric car companies were already among the major US automakers. Baker Motor Vehicle Company started in Cleveland in 1899. Also based in Cleveland, Rauch & Lang began production of its own car in 1904 after selling Buffalo Electric carriages for two years. Detroit Electric, a product of Anderson Electric Car Company, formed in 1907 — ten years before Chevrolet joined GM.

Historical factoids aside, GM has to be applauded for bringing electric motor production — as well as leadership in plug-in hybrid technology back to the US. While we all know that had electric car development not been abandoned in the years after WWI we’d be far beyond the Volt’s technology, at this point we just need to be happy that the baby steps from tiny companies over the last eight decades have turned into a large jump under the power of a now stronger corporate giant…even one that doesn’t know (or is hoping we have all forgotten) history.

Saab Gets One Step Closer to Death

Normally I wouldn’t get too bent out of shape seeing a press release spelling out that an automaker’s days were very short. I must admit, however, that reading yesterday’s notice that Saab’s Board of Directors voted in favor of liquidating the corporation’s assets I was actually kind of sad.

The weird part is that I have never owned a Saab, nor have I ever even come close to considered buying one. For the most part, I’ve never really even liked Saabs. I’ve consulted with plenty of people in the last decade where I’ve specifically told them to avoid buying a car from this manufacturer that claimed so many specialty mechanics around the country also telling Saab drivers that later products were overpriced and too prone to catastrophic failures.

For me, the last great Saab with mass-market appeal was the 9000 from the 1980s. The 9000 was not only a hot car by period standards, but also one of the first stick shift cars I’d ever driven. (At this point in my life, I can’t remember if I drove the 9000 before or after the Nissan Pulsar.)

What hits me in the soft spot is that Saab has such a long history of doing things totally different. In a world of automotive monkey-see-monkey-do, for decades Saabs were quirky. Quirky might not be for everyone, but Saab did provide options for those engineers, college professors and mathematicians who were convinced that two-strokes, front wheel drive, or bathtub design were better for humanity.

GM killed Saab’s value by emasculating the marque’s individuality. With platform and parts sharing with the likes of Subaru, Saab lost the quirky practicality image of the 1960s and 1970s, and Swedish sport-luxury image of the 1980s and early 1990s.

The company had such amazing competition history with the legendary likes of Erik “On The Roof” Carlsson piloting Saab 92, 93, 95, and 96 models to great rally finishes. Ironically, it is because of competitive failure — against Volvo, Lexus, not to mention the hoard of SUVs and crossovers that Saab’s demise is rapidly approaching.

When a company ceases to provide reliable, cost-effective and differentiated products, the options are few. GM simply didn’t see a large enough market to invest large sums reinventing Saab, something with which I totally agree. A company could have bought the line and focused on producing modern interpretations of classic Saab design ethos, but as Koenigsegg found out, that strategy is ripe with labor, dealer, supplier, and warranty pitfalls.

Although GM still claims they are looking for a buyer, the long and short of it is that the world won’t stop the presses to save a company that only sold 8,680 cars in the US during 2009 (and only 124,438 vehicles worldwide in the glory days of in 2007). Just don’t be amazed when some out there continue to speculate and miss what might have been if the company had remained just a little quirkier.

A Press Release That Sends The Wrong Message

It seems that GM is back to its old ways again — showing it is as out of touch as it is plain bad at this whole PR thing.

The company just sent a press release titled “CEO Ed Whitacre Visits Flint Assembly Plant”. Now slap me silly if I’m wrong, but it’s really bad to have a marketing message indicating that either a) the CEO (who might be new to the position, but has been the Chairman of the Board for plenty of time) has never visited one of the corporation’s larger facilities, or b) it is really uncommon in terms of the prevailing corporate culture to have a sitting CEO or Chairman actually set foot in one of its manufacturing plants.

Now I might not be GM’s type of marketing or PR professional, (which is to say I have both marketing and automobile market experience — a degree from an actual major university in Business with a concentraion in Marketing (Dean’s List thank you very much), product and corporate marketing leadership positions, and a decade of automotive journalism), but I’d suggest to the PR team that creating releases pinpointing that it has taken corporate executives far too long to witness how the company actually produces its products is a really, really bad tactic. If Whitacre had visited Flint the week after taking over as Chairman, it would be one thing, but many weeks after firing the last CEO and assuming the role himself???

Just for giggles, here’s the whole release:

CEO Ed Whitacre Visits Flint Assembly Plant
2009-12-10

Saying he just wanted to “see what’s here,” Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre spent four hours this week walking the line, visiting and talking with employees at the Flint Assembly Plant.

Whitacre, wearing faded jeans and casual brown pullover, could have passed for a member of the Flint Assembly team. However, the plant received 24 hours notice that Whitacre was coming.

“I’ve been confined to the office,” he said at the start of the visit. “I just wanted to come up to Flint and see what’s here.”

Passing on a formal business update, Whitacre chose instead to mingle and chat with the people. “If you don’t know me and I don’t know you, it’s not good. We’re in this together.”

He listened attentively as employees talked about some of the challenges and opportunities facing GM. In response, he challenged people to “step up” and take risks. “Nothing is going to happen if you don’t do the right thing.”

Questions about the viability of the company were met with another challenge. “We’re sitting in a pretty good position to pull this (recovery) off,” Whitacre said. “Not many companies get a second chance. If people are not optimistic, we will not get it done.”

Finally, couldn’t the company have edited Whitacre’s quotes? Come on now — “to come up to Flint and see what’s here” is right out of the Admiral Stockdale “Who Am I And Why Am I Here” Book of Lines That Don’t Inspire Confidence! What did he think was up there — a magic hat out which popped cars with Chevy emblems?

Yes Indeed — The Chevy Volt Really Runs!

Unlike that ’84 Corvette parked on the street in your neighborhood or that Vega next to that barn across town, the Chevy Volt actually runs. GM is taking it around Los Angeles hoping to develop some good buzz prior to showing it in ready-for-production form at the LA Auto Show.

GM is promoting the stops on its tour with video clips of the Volt in action at http://ChevroletVoltage.com

I said it the day after Bob Lutz told me about it, and I’ll say it again: the Volt is a game-changer…and likely the car that will save GM and eventually the entire automotive industry…except for the Prius (as we know it), which will certainly be a casualty of the Volt’s success.

So Long To Saturn — Its Rings Not Worth A Thing

As The Princess Bride’s Miracle Max would say, Saturn is “mostly dead”. Yesterday GM said Saturn will simply be retired, because after the deal between Penske and GM fell apart, it would take a miracle for anything else to happen.

When the Penske/GM deal for Saturn was announced many months ago, I was a tad surprised. Roger Penske has always had something of a Midas touch turning businesses into cash cows. The buyout of Saturn, however, seemed to be more of a pig than a bounty-producing bovine.

The main problem with the deal was that GM would only continue to build three models—the Aura, Vue and Outlook for Penske through 2011. At that point, Penske would need to find some other corporation to build the cars, which he thought he had (insiders claim it was Renault-Nissan). Unfortunately, that all fell through.

Or maybe it is actually fortunate. The value of a brand producing badge-engineered product lines is precisely the issue I brought up back when Saturn was put on the block. In the old days when a corporation bought out another automaker, it got the brand, one or two production facilities, the trademarks, the equipment, and workers. Now it simply isn’t that easy. Since Saturn produces not one single vehicle unique to its brand, Penske didn’t have the opportunity to buy anything that resembled a true going concern.

It’s obvious that Penske was placing the value on Saturn’s distribution network with which he had longer-range plans. Saturn’s current lineup of vehicles was no doubt a stop-gap until other foreign car lines from China, India and other countries could be imported and sold/serviced via Saturn dealers. Since importing cars is a tricky business, relying heavily on emissions and safety regulatory bodies, Penske needed some breathing room if certain brands needed more time to meet American standards.

I said it before and I’ll say it again – GM killed Saturn a long time ago by stripping its primary value proposition: autonomy. When the brand was introduced nearly twenty years ago, all of the company’s products were unique. If 1990’s Saturn were to have been shopped, it would have found a buyer.

Over the last two decades GM let Saturn lose its value. Initially it was by not replacing the original car models, and then they replaced it with badge-engineered crap. While some would argue that the current lineup of Aura, Outlook, Vue, and Sky are pretty good, there’s no escaping that all the vehicles were available with slightly altered sheet metal (actually, usually it was simply plastic) carrying other brand badges. Penske might as well have been buying the Chevy Malibu as the Saturn Aura!

Sure, there are other reasons people buy dying – or dead and buried, for that matter, automakers. It was popular in the 1980s for entrepreneurs to buy existing parts supplies of automakers leaving the US market…or the entire world, such as was case for companies like Maserati, Checker and DeLorean. Since the parts of Saturn are largely shared with other GM products, it makes this tactic a moot point.

And what about simply buying the Saturn name and brand logo for trademark value sake? C’mon – you’d be hard-pressed to find an automaker with a more ambivalent customer base less likely to buy logo apparel. I suppose Saturn is the modern brand image value equivalent of Essex or Frazer.

So Saturn will soon hit the junk bin. At the very least let’s hope that GM has figured out a better way to close-down a brand more efficiently than when it killed Oldsmobile at a cost of a BILLION dollars.

Tell you what – I’ll make GM stockholders a deal. I’ll buy Saturn…at the invoice price of a new Sky, which is the only Saturn product that (with enough development and bug fixing over a couple generations) I ever thought had any chance of being a really great car.

Come to think of it… GM is going to have to throw in an extended warranty.

Summer’s Automotive Summary

We’ve been getting quite a bit of email wondering where we have been and why we haven’t chimed in on a number of large automotive issues. The short answer has been that It has been a busy summer over here. We provide content to a number of different publications, so quite simply put, it was the Four Wheel Drift that suffered.

For all of you who were desperately waiting for our view on current events, here is a summary of where we stand on the issues.

Cash For Clunkers: With our reputation for being involved with collector cars, people assumed we’d be absolutely against CFC. They were right, but not for the reasons they figured.

The conventional wisdom circulating in the classic car and hot rod circuits is that CFC would cause the destruction of thousands of tomorrow’s classic cars…and therefore the program must be stopped at all costs.

We take a different…more pragmatic view that exposes our business backgrounds. The crushed future classics affect from CFC will be far less noticeable than from rising scrap prices prior to WWII…or from the use of salt in a particularly bad winter in the Northeast and Midwest. In other words, most of the vehicles succumbing to the CFC crushers a) are mass-produced vehicles, b) are family cars, c) consequently are less likely to be restored in twenty to thirty years as collector vehicles.

There are two big issues we do dislike about CFC. The first is that we’ve always felt that rebates simply create sales by cannibalizing future higher price/profit sales. Part of the decreased demand in 2007, 2008 and 2009 comes from the direct result of massive factory rebates in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Rebates are an ongoing nightmare for good product marketing folks who battle sales, finance and PR departments who are more focused on making numbers now so they can get their gold Rolexes from bonuses. Rebates kill the pipeline, dilute product value and image (although admittedly the CFC rebate doesn’t dilute product image like a standard manufacturer versions), and create a way for local dealers to provide vehicles at the same price as before the rebates, but without giving up any profit themselves.

The second reason we dislike the CFC program is that unlike a standard manufacturer rebate program that puts the financial burden on the corporation, the CFC program puts it on taxpayers. And before you start writing the comment regarding that the program replaces the current fleet with more fuel-efficient vehicles, that’s a total red herring. This exact same thing would happen anyway – as the current fleet ages, it is replaced with newer vehicles – all which are more fuel efficient. The difference is cost. The artificial way costs taxpayers several billion, the other doesn’t.

The bottom line is that the CFC program is nothing more than a boondoggle for auto manufacturers, dealers and scrap metal recyclers in a wrapper of good intentions paid for by taxpayer money.

GM Selling Cars Via eBay: Here’s a whole lotta nothing. Simply an official program that mimics what hundreds of dealers have been doing with varying degrees of success for nearly a decade. It would have been a real story had GM found a loophole for the anti-trust laws prohibiting manufacturer-to-consumer sales to allow such sales using eBay as the “dealer”.

New Hybrids: Yawn. Meet the new boss – same as the old boss. These are still uninspiring vehicles that struggle to get better mileage than the original Geo Metro despite delivering not much more in terms of performance, size, comfort, or enjoyment. Again people, hybrid technology is over a century old.

Seller Beware: Autoweek reported in its current issue how people consigning their classics to Kruse have reported not receiving payment from the auction house for more than six months after their vehicles sold at auction. Even scarier for vehicle sellers – there is the Washington State court opinion at http://www.courts.wa.gov/opinions/index.cfm?fa=opinions.showOpinion&filename=614185MAJ , which results from the mess created when a car consignment operation (AGS Performance) closed prior to distributing the funds received from selling a Ferrari F355 on consignment. To complicate the matter, the selling party never provided the title for his Ferrari. The courts maintained that since AGS was in the business of selling cars, it didn’t need the title to facilitate a legal sale, leaving the buyer (Hensrude) with a legal purchase and the former owner (Sloss) with only the recourse of suing AGS for non-payment on a contract.

The bottom line is that sellers of collector cars need to be very careful these days.

Porsche Panamera: If we have to read another column in a major publication or hear another enthusiast question if the four-door Panamera is a “real Porsche”, we’re going to set ourselves on fire. It was a valid question when the 914…and maybe even somewhat valid when the 928 replaced the 911 as the “top-of-the-line” model in the late 1970s, but not anymore.

Note to publications, enthusiasts and auto manufacturers: the Cayenne is the best-selling Porsche ever and no Porsche enthusiast or purist not wearing a tinfoil hat has ever cared about its affect on the brand, other than to thank it for providing the necessary cash flow to develop low-production high-performance cars like the Turbo, GT3, GT etc… More manufacturers need to ignore the purists, because if you cater to them, you get the GTO, Challenger, retro-Mustang, and new Camaro. Purists love these, but people with money don’t like them enough to buy them.

Meet The New Chairman, Same As The Old Chairman

General Motors just announced that Edward Whitacre, Jr. will be the company’s new Chairman upon the launch of a revised GM company this summer. Kent Kresa has been serving as interim Chairman.
Six board members will be “retiring”. Whitacre will join current interim Chairman Kent Kresa, Philip A. Laskawy, Kathryn V. Marinello, Erroll B. Davis, Jr., E. Neville Isdell and President and Chief Executive Officer Frederick A. Henderson as the core of the board.

At first glance, it might seem like GM is following Ford’s lead by going outside the inbred automotive manufacturing community for its grand poobah. The 67-year-old Whitacre served as CEO of AT&T and Southwestern Bell from 1990 to 2007, which at first glance brings up comparisons to Ford’s selection of former Boeing executive Alan Mullally to be CEO of its company. The primary difference here is that Mullally had significant organizational and line operations experience when he was hired to be the hands-on leader. Whitacre’s experience is mostly in turning entrenched, old-school technology companies into larger companies by purchasing new technology companies. Plus, Whitacre’s position as Chairman is more of an advisory role.

Whitacre also serves on the boards of ExxonMobil and Burlington Northern Santa Fe, which leads one to ask: is it possible to find a guy who has been involved in more old technology / old white-men’s culture companies which have seen their market share shrink due to ignoring shifts?

In other words, it seems GM went out of the auto sector to find a Chairman who is most like a brother from another mother.

This being said, we wish Whitacre luck in his role and hope he surprises the world by working with Fritz Henderson to successfully reinvent GM.