Drudgery Led GM's Lutz to Retire

As General Motors Corp. battles to stay afloat, with help from billions in government loans, the consummate “car guy,” who has spearheaded the auto maker's product revival since 2001, is easing out.

Bob Lutz, vice chairman for global product development, will relinquish his current post April 1 and remain on as vice chairman and senior advisor to Chairman Rick Wagoner until year's end. Lutz turned 77 in February.

“I've come to an age where if I don't retire now, when will I?” he says in an interview with Ward's. He quickly adds the malaise sweeping over GM and the entire industry may have played a role.

“It's sheer drudgery now, the negotiations in Washington, reducing brands and models. Others can do the job as well as I can. It's not like the auto industry the way I know and love it.”

The tall, white-haired Lutz was recruited in September 2001 by Wagoner to shake up GM's stodgy, inbred product-development group and add some pizzazz to its vehicle lineup. He had done exactly that at Chrysler, where he rose to president before retiring in 1998.

“Senior management had not been that involved in the products,” Lutz says. “They looked after the financial side and said, ‘let the guys down the line do it.’ But that doesn't work. There are too many conflicting goals. Each has its own priorities. Everything is researched, but then the vehicle no longer makes a statement. There was no control, no underlying passion.”

David E. Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) says Lutz “took the handcuffs off styling” at GM.

Much of Lutz's input remains to be seen, as GM continues to roll out new vehicles over the next several years, albeit at a slower pace than he'd like.

But he counts among the “winners” to date such vehicles as the strong-selling Chevrolet Malibu and Saturn Aura; the soon-to-arrive Chevy Camaro; the fleet of new cross/utility vehicles such as the Buick Enclave; the current line of pickups and SUVs; and the Chevrolet Volt extended-range electric vehicle coming next year.

Lutz also is credited with pushing through numerous intriguing concept vehicles and for upgrading interiors.

Lutz's biggest accomplishment at GM has been commonizing its far-flung global product-development operations from four distinct groups — North America, Europe, South America and Asia/Pacific — to work as one in developing new vehicles manufactured globally, eliminating costly overlap.

Ironically, Lutz says one of his most criticized moves, taking an existing rear-drive, midsize coupe from GM Holden Ltd. in Australia and turning it into the high performance Pontiac GTO in 2004, actually “had a huge beneficial effect” in that for the first time GM combined the efforts of two then-separate entities.

The result was the kind of hot car that Lutz, a very fast driver, hoped would give a quick punch to Pontiac. Because he had to inherit Holden's sheet metal, the GTO's lackluster exterior styling didn't match its guts, and it proved to be a sales bust.

“Was the GTO a failure? No,” he says. “We mispriced it. Initially, it was supposed to be in the low to mid-$20,000 range, but it went into the $30,000s. Now it's a cult collector car.”

By jointly developing the GTO, the seed was planted to go global, Lutz says.

CAR's Cole: “GM product development is globally integrated now, and there will be enormous economies of scale that you won't believe” when the market rebounds.

Moreover, Cole does not see GM backsliding after Lutz is gone.

“The organization is now fundamentally changed. It can't go back,” he says. “And most importantly, there's been a huge cultural transformation.”

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