GM’s New Driving Force

Bob Lutz strode through the colorful, raucous and sometimes wacky displays at the Tokyo Motor Show last month, eyeing the low-slung roadsters, compact sedans and oddball concept cars--one of them made of plexiglass.

When the new vice chairman of General Motors Corp. travels, he studies local motoring trends intently. He didn’t care for a lot of the boxy cars and trucks at the Tokyo show, and as for the generally small cars on the road, they were attractive but wouldn’t really click in the U.S.

“There are some beautiful, sleek sedans and wagons on Tokyo streets that are ‘Japan only’--thankfully,” he said.

Robert A. Lutz is all about design. After spending his career working for all three domestic auto makers, he was hired in September to be product development czar at GM, with the title of vice chairman.

On Tuesday, Lutz assumed the added title of chairman of GM North America, solidifying his role in product development.

The world’s largest auto maker gave Lutz, 69, a simple but sweeping mandate: Make its cars look better.

In his last job with an auto manufacturer, Lutz was vice chairman of Chrysler Corp. before retiring upon its acquisition by Daimler-Benz of Germany. At Chrysler, he was considered the driving force behind such signature models as the Dodge Viper performance car, the Plymouth Prowler roadster and what became the retro Chrysler PT Cruiser.

The big question for GM, he said during an interview in Tokyo, is “why aren’t we doing better on the passenger-car side of the business?”

“It’s not a lack of quality or functionality,” he said. “But it appears to be a somewhat lack of commitment to compelling design that will really draw people into dealerships. There’s no reason we shouldn’t be doing as well as Toyota, Honda and Volkswagen.”

Lutz is renowned, even revered, for his instinct, his gut feeling, about cars. (Note that he entitled his 1998 management primer “Guts.”)

“The thing that’s most telling about him is his ability to take a quick look at a car and then describe in enormous detail all the things that are right and wrong with the design,” said David E. Davis, acting editor in chief of Motor Trend magazine and founding editor of Automobile magazine.

“It is really quite something to be around him when he does that,” said Davis, who has known Lutz since 1968. “He has an astonishing eye and an astonishing ability to retain detail.”

Auto industry veteran Donald E. Petersen used to tell how when he was chief executive of Ford Motor Co., he was shown around the Frankfurt International Auto Show in the early 1980s by Lutz, then chairman of Ford Europe. European dealers clustered around Lutz to “kiss his ring,” as Petersen put it, alluding to the stature Lutz enjoyed even then.

Lutz is as renowned for his bluntness as for his design acumen; he calls things the way he sees them.

“GM wouldn’t have brought him in otherwise,” said David Cole, head of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Bob Lutz’s history is too full of candid ways of doing things, and that’s what they bought into. His instincts are good.”

Lutz says it is just a matter of common sense and having the courage to speak out. Because he has come in as an outsider on a three-year contract, he can shoot from the hip.

Sources say that is precisely what happened when he looked at the next generation of a large sport sedan. Lutz won’t say which car it was, but a GM executive confirms it was the Pontiac Grand Prix.

“Bob came in and called it for what it was, had a couple of suggestions, and within a week it was changed,” said the executive, who has participated in meetings with Lutz.

Typically, such a process would take a few months, possibly delaying the car’s launch altogether.

“What I saw was a design that had passed through the system that nobody was really happy with, and yet nobody had, if you will, blown the whistle on it,” Lutz said, puffing on a Cuban cigar, one of several passions.

“It’s this culture of this so-called basket-weave organization, where a lot of interaction takes place between different groups within the company that are all very legitimate interests,” he said of GM’s tightly knit management structure, which critics say tends to stifle outspokenness.

“A compromise is found between engineering, manufacturing, marketing, sales and the people who defend the brand character--that is, making sure a Buick looks like a Buick and a Cadillac looks like a Cadillac--and design,” he said.

That meant GM’s design side did not enter the picture early enough or forcefully enough, and was not as much a part of the process as it should be.

“Coming in new, I said my view somewhat unfairly and in violation of the GM process, which was, ‘I don’t care how we got there, this isn’t right,”’ Lutz said.

“In a way, I hate myself for doing that: I am violating the process; I am intervening and running roughshod over these excellent people who made all these trade-offs. And yet in my new responsibility, I can’t in good conscience see that thing proceeding to the marketplace.”

Despite his straight talk, colleagues say he is managing to do his job without too much damage to the sometimes considerable egos of car designers.

“He will tell people they’re full of it, but he does it in a way that’s endearing,” said the executive who has participated in meetings with him. Lutz turns to humor frequently, often with jokes at his own expense.

“One of the aspects of Bob that I think is sometimes glossed over is the fact that he’s very good at working in large organizations,” GM Chief Executive G. Richard Wagoner told The Times. “He understands you’ve got to get most of the people behind you and you’ve got to be really presenting a vision they rally around. He’s done a good job of that already, and I think people are really enthused.”

*

In fact, it’s his plain talk that endears him to many who have worked for him. On Thursday, back from Tokyo, he met with designers at GM’s Technical Center in Warren, Mich., north of Detroit.

He noted that he was driving a GMC Sierra pickup with two power outlets in the rear-seat console. In one of his “what-were-you-thinking?” moments, he said a customer using one rear outlet would be rare, but someone using two would be virtually unheard of. In any case, the feature would not be a factor in persuading anyone to buy the vehicle.

“Well ... yeah,” was the reaction, one participant recalled.

When GM interior stylists complain that a vehicle’s inside is smaller than they would like, Lutz has been known to respond that he has never known a customer to go into a showroom with a measuring tape and find that an inch of shoulder width was given up to a competitor.

Well ... yeah, that too.

Lutz’s role is to shake things up. He is trying to turn product development meetings, which used to be highly structured and sometimes timed down to the minute, more relaxed and more of an exchange, even--perish the thought at stuffy GM--fun.

“A product-creation system was established that is very reliant on a very analytical and very quantitative approach to new-product definition,” Lutz said in Tokyo, blowing smoke rings with his Havana stogie. “Which is a good thing as long as it is leavened by an emotional, right-brain element that does something compellingly new and different with the cars. And that’s the part that’s been lacking....

“The role of design has been diminished too much in the company, to the point where in the passenger-car area, the designers are no longer at the front of the creative process,” he said. “I’m exaggerating to make a point, but they’ve been reduced to the role of putting a wrapper on a car that many other people have defined for them.”

He is quick to note that he is talking about cars , not trucks, with which GM is doing quite well, thank you, grabbing market share from competitors, especially archrival Ford.

Lutz’s presence is not all feel-good, rally-the-troops. GM insiders acknowledge that his personality can grate on some.

But Lutz’s style is “one way design could cut through bureaucratic red tape and make its way to dealerships,” said Richard Hilgert, a Detroit-based analyst with the brokerage firm First of Michigan. “I think his gut feel for style and what would sell well with the public is something GM also needed. And to combine those two together is what it’s going to take for GM’s vehicles to start evoking some type of emotion with consumers, to the point where consumers would aspire to have a GM vehicle.”

*

Lutz was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1932; he grew up mostly in Switzerland and is fluent in German and French.

His first car was a 1948 VW Beetle base model with cable-operated drum brakes, but his favorite daily drive was a 1962 Chevy Corvair Monza.

Today, he owns several classic cars and a Soviet-era jet fighter-trainer; Lutz, a former Marine pilot, sometimes flies his helicopter to his GM Tech Center office.

Lutz is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he studied production science as an undergraduate and earned his MBA. He joined GM the first time in 1963 and worked several years in Europe.

He spent three years with BMW in Germany, then worked 12 years at Ford in Europe and Detroit. He spent another 12 years with Chrysler before leaving the industry in 1998 and becoming chairman and chief executive of battery maker Exide Technologies of Reading, Pa., where he remains nonexecutive chairman.

Lutz said that to him, design falls into three categories.

There is “controlled design,” with very simple lines and graphics, almost cold and clinical, he said, citing the products of Danish audio component maker Bang & Olufson, his Porsche Design watch made by IWC and the labels of California winemaker Jordan Vineyard.

There is “sentimentalized design,” such as the label of Log Cabin syrup or California vintner Niebaum-Coppola’s black-and-gold label for its claret.

Then there is “expressive design,” such as Dodge’s Viper--or a box of Tide detergent.

Lutz cites Peugeot of France and Alfa Romeo of Italy as auto makers that get design right.

“They radically changed their design philosophy, and they’re just going from strength to strength,” he said. “Now Alfa has redone its small cars, both the sedans and the hatchbacks, and they’re just gorgeous from any angle.”

Cole, of the Center for Automotive Research, remembers a dinner with several auto executives five or six years ago that underlined what Lutz is all about. Talk had turned to tennis and golf, Cole said, recalling the reaction of a perplexed Lutz: “I just don’t understand hitting around little hard or fuzzy balls. All I want to do is drive cars.”

“That,” Cole said, “was really very telling.”

*

Terril Yue Jones is The Times’ Detroit bureau chief. He can be reached at t.jones@latimes.com.