He’s Passionate About Cars--but He Uses a Jet
Though he has managed to parlay his passion for automobiles into a $700-million-a-year transportation conglomerate by selling thousands of Cadillacs, Toyotas, Hondas, Saabs and Sterlings, megadealer Roger Penske doesn’t spend much time in cars these days.
Penske’s turbo-charged life style requires a Learjet and a bevy of helicopters. They help keep him in close touch with his company’s 4,750 employees, who are scattered among 302 facilities in 37 states. That’s especially true during the spring and summer race season, when Penske often finds himself shuttling between race tracks all over America.
“The problem with most automobile dealers is that they get complacent,” reported Penske from Miami one day last week before he headed toward Indiana for the Indianapolis 500 car race. “But you have to work just as hard to sell 1,000 cars as you do to sell 5,000.”
Penske, 50, is, perhaps, best known for his brief but flashy career in the early 1960s in sports car and Grand Prix racing--a sport that eventually provided him with the avenue to mix business with pleasure.
Penske’s continuing interest in racing following his retirement in 1964 led to the purchase of a racing car tire distributorship and to friendships with dozens of auto industry executives, including John Z. DeLorean, then head of GM’s Pontiac division.
The one-time aluminum siding salesman continued to buy distributorships and companies in the automotive and energy areas--capped by his 1983 purchase of the Hertz truck leasing operation from RCA Corp. But it wasn’t until he purchased the giant Longo Toyota dealership in 1985 that Penske catapulted into the ranks of the nation’s 10 largest megadealers.
Besides Penske, two others ranked in the top 10 by Auto Age magazine--Val Strough Inc. of Oakland and Key Royal Inc. of Birmingham, Ala.--also operate dealerships in California.
But Penske, who likes to exploit his reputation as a racing perfectionist in business circles, is moving to distinguish his dealership by pouring more than $10 million into development of a new 20-acre site scheduled to open near the present Longo dealership in El Monte this fall.
Besides a modern showroom boasting computer terminals for each salesman, the new facility will have 100 service bays and a 54-stall body shop.
“We feel that the California market is the best market, from the standpoint of long-term opportunity,” said Penske, whose Red Bank, N.J., company also owns Cadillac, Honda, Saab and Sterling franchises in Bakersfield, Los Angeles and Downey. After all, he added “the state is already the eighth-largest car market in the world.”
