Car Guys

The gravelly voice, filtered through an erratic cell phone signal, is moving fast along I-75 somewhere north of Detroit.

“American culture is always looking for heroes,” it says. “You've got mega-stars that are car guys, and you've got mega-stars that aren't car guys. Hold on a second, I'm going to have an accident here.”

There is a pause, punctuated by what sounds like warning beeps from an adaptive cruise control system, then the unmistakable rush of air that comes with hard acceleration. The voice continues.

“Lutz is a mega-star and a car guy,” the voice says, referring to General Motors Corp. Vice-Chairman and part-time jet pilot Bob Lutz.

“Lee Iacocca's a mega-star, but not a car guy,” the voice adds, referring to the man who developed the minivan market and helped launch the Ford Mustang.

“Iacocca likes to think he was a car guy, but he's not really. Oh, (inaudible). I missed my exit.”

Welcome to the mind of a car guy: opinionated and driven to distraction.

“If these people were psychos, the psychiatrist would say, ‘I can't do anything for them,’” says David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, but not the owner of the voice. “Still, these are critically important people in the industry. These guys spend 95% of their time thinking about cars.”

How is it that a bunch of loose cannons are allowed to define the automotive landscape? Especially now, when the cost of failure can be counted in thousands of job losses and millions of wasted investment dollars?

Bona fide car guys, and those who aspire to the title, respond matter-of-factly. Without them, the industry would grind to a halt.

Lutz, whose name is synonymous with the car-guy label, illustrates this tension using his favorite Albert Einstein quote: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, GM was “attempting to run a business by process, and taking the creativity, that flair, that intuition, out of it. Because those are things that aren't measurable,” Lutz says.

“That's just going at it backwards,” he adds. “It starts with the passion.”

Focus groups and simulation software can deliver insight as never before, arming auto makers with never-ending reams of data about consumer tastes and vehicle dynamics. And as computing power increases, the reliability of this data improves, logically, in inverse correlation to the risk of error.

But risk brings reward, says Ralph Gilles, a designer whose vision helped shape the Chrysler 300 sedan.

“If you're too safe, you're just going to have vanilla,” says Gilles, vice president-Jeep and truck design studio at Chrysler. “Car guys take risks, but they see the emotional side of the business. No one needs a sports car. It's an emotional purchase, and you have to be able to pull that string inside a customer's heart. And only someone who ‘gets it’ can do that.”

According to industry lore, ‘it’ is a keen sense of style, uncanny intuition for what will resonate in the market and an almost supernatural ability to get behind the wheel and pinpoint shades of performance that escape even the most precise instrumentation.

Sounds implausible. But Cole insists car guys are “a real phenomenon.”

However, Richard Parry-Jones, Ford Motor Co.'s group vice president-global product development and chief technical officer, is skeptical. Which is odd considering he is regarded as one of the world's top vehicle evaluators.

Car guys, he suggests, arise more from hype than heroics. “They only get labeled car guys when they become prominent and known to the media,” Parry-Jones says.

“Therefore, they are usually, by definition, influential. There are lots of people who share the same characteristics who are not labeled by the media as car guys, but are just as fanatical about the product they are working on. Those people are actually the backbone of our engineering workforce.”

And for the record, Parry-Jones considers laughable the common portrayal of car guys as hell-for-leather test drivers.

“A lot of good drivers can feel everything, but they can't explain what they're feeling,” he says. “And of course that's no use to an engineer.

“An engineer has to think in as granular detail as possible what you like or don't like about the steering. It's not good to say, ‘It's a bit squirmy on center.’ Is it response? Is it time delay? Is it during the first few degrees of steering movement or the next 15 or the next 30? So a person in (the car guy) role has to be good at all the attributes, not just the classic, tail-out, oversteer, rear-wheel-drive type of limit handling.

“That's a terrible, I think, stereotype,” Parry-Jones says with a chuckle. “I'm not offended. I'm appalled.”

Within the industry, he lists Lutz, 75, and Volkswagen AG Chairman Ferdinand Piech, 70, as two undisputed car guys.

“Wolfgang Reitzle is also a legend,” Parry-Jones says, referring to the 58-year-old former BMW AG executive who led Ford's Premier Automotive Group before leaving the industry to become president and CEO of Linde AG, a Germany-based leader in industrial gases and engineering.

“It's really sad, because I'm giving names of some people of an age bracket that is not in the first flush of youth,” notes Parry-Jones, 56.

Ulrich Bez, another former BMW executive, who also helped develop the Porsche 993 during a stint with that celebrated sports-car company, makes the same observation. Old-school car guys are “dying like dinosaurs,” says the 63-year-old Aston Martin CEO, who says future car guys have a difficult time fulfilling their role.

“The environment has changed a lot,” says Bez. “Today, it's very hard for somebody to really, really be responsibly in touch (with) all areas in automotive technology.

“It's very likely that you are more in a ‘chimney,’ from a conceptual engineering point. Or you come very fast to a management (position) where you are sitting with lots of papers and figures, and you make lots of decisions on PowerPoint and paper. And at the end, you have specialists who tell you, ‘The brakes are OK. Now the suspension is good, the air conditioning, the wipers, the sound.’

Chrysler Chief Operating Officer Eric Ridenour, championed within the pentastar company as its top car guy, observes the skills of today's up-and-comers are different, not inferior.

“We went through a real lull for a while where, because of the very stringent emissions (regulations) and because of computerization, people said, ‘We can't work on cars anymore,’” Ridenour says.

“Now we're getting a revival, where the kids who are computer-literate don't even think about it. They're doing it with chips, rather than on the hard pieces. They're still wildly interested in cars.”

Back on I-75, the gravelly voice belongs to Chris Theodore, who's behind the wheel of a Jaguar XJ Super V-8. The vice chairman of niche-vehicle specialist ASC Inc., Theodore is considered the father of the Ford GT supercar.

His name also is associated with the original Dodge Viper and Fiat Turbo Spyder.

Today's harsh business climate notwithstanding, bureaucracy is a car guy's biggest enemy, Theodore suggests.

“It's hard for passion to win a war against numbers,” he says. “How many times do I have to read executives say we're going to have increased commonality? How many times do I have to hear executives say we're going to reduce our buildable combinations to 1,000? That's not part of being a car guy. Oh, I just did it again.”

Another missed exit.

Among the young Turks who have navigated these waters, according to nearly all the industry insiders contacted by Ward's, is Hau Thai-Tang.

Not yet a household name, some refer to him as “that guy who did the Mustang.” Recently appointed product development director-Ford South America Operations, the 40-year-old executive, who was chief engineer for the redesigned '05 pony car, dismisses the talk as “overblown.”

“If you're working on a Mustang, you get more than your due share of attention than if you're working on the F-150,” Thai-Tang says. “I also think the impact of the ‘car guy’ on the actual bottom line business is probably overblown, as well.”

Not so, says Michael Bernacchi, University of Detroit Mercy marketing professor. Technology aficionados, also known as “early adopters,” are influenced by personalities such as car guys when making purchase decisions, Bernacchi says.

Stuard Fischoff, professor emeritus of psychology, California State University, Los Angeles, agrees.

“With automobiles, you have so many different pumpkins in the patch, you need somebody who's going to make one pumpkin stand out from the other,” he says.

Gilles, 37, is considered another rising star. But he also breaks a stereotype because he is a designer, not an engineer.

“Because of Chrysler's concept-car process, we're very much in the equation,” Gilles says. “It's expected that designers are supposed to create new product.”

Responsible also for color and trim at Chrysler, Gilles gets his hands dirty at the helm of the auto maker's skunkworks program.

“I would hope that years from now people will look back at me and say,

‘Yeah, I guess Ralph was a car guy after all,’” he confides.

Increasingly, car guys also are found on supplier payrolls. In addition to Theodore, who once held key product-development posts with Ford and Chrysler, there is Phil Martens, president-light vehicle systems at ArvinMeritor Inc. and another former Ford product guru.

Another car guy joining the supplier ranks is Mark Hogan, now president of Magna International Inc. In 2004, Magna lured Hogan from GM where he was group vice president-advanced product development.

“Because of the breadth of our capability, we really need (a car guy),” says Hogan, whose fingerprints are on the Pontiac Solstice roadster.

The Canada-based supplier not only makes parts, it assembles vehicles at its plant in Graz, Austria.

“And I'm not the only car guy inside of Magna,” says Hogan, who serves as president.

Herbert Demel, who has been chairman of Audi AG and CEO of Fiat Automobiles SpA, as well as chairman of Volkswagen do Brasil Ltda. during his career, leads the supplier's assembly arm, Magna Steyr Fahrzeugtechnik AG and Co. KG, as well as Magna Powertrain Group, Magna Car Top Systems and its advanced car technology systems engineering and test center.

Car guys can be either gender. As proof, Hogan points to Lori Queen, GM's vehicle line executive for small/midsize trucks.

Queen, who also worked on the Solstice program, is unfazed by the term. “I've worked really hard to be ‘one of the guys,’” she laughs.

She predicts more women will join the car-guy ranks, because their participation in product-development programs portend key insights into customer behavior.

“If you look at who makes the decisions on buying vehicles; who vetoes the decision and who's the primary purchaser; 80% of every vehicle purchase decision in the United States is made or influenced by a woman,” says Queen.

Robert Davis, senior vice president-product development and quality Mazda North America Operations, says car guys are neither born nor made. But he agrees the observation skills that become so important begin as “a childhood thing.”

“It starts when you're a kid collecting model cars and reading magazines and taking lawnmowers apart with butter knives,” Davis says. “I don't know that we have instincts. Maybe we just pay attention a little bit more to the environment and look at things.”

Things and people, Thai-Tang says.

“If you look at the people we normally associate with being really strong product people, I would say that they're ‘people guys’ before they're ‘car guys,’” he says. “And that's the enabler for them to make the right product decisions. They have the ability to understand customers, understand societal trends, to get at unmet needs and anticipate consumer needs because our product cycles are so long. It takes us 3-plus years to get to market.”

So, where are the heroes from Toyota Motor Corp. and other Japan-based auto makers?

“I should say someone within our company similar to Mr. Lutz we don't have,” says Kazuo Okamoto, Toyota executive vice president-research and development, motorsports. “It's not the culture of Toyota to make somebody symbolic. But every single person in Toyota, I'm sure, is very proud of being a car guy or car woman.

Davis points to RX-8 program engineer Seita Kanai, director and senior managing executive officer of research in development in Japan, as one of Mazda's car guys. But he also acknowledges the reticence toward individualism that is inherent in Japanese culture.

“I'll complement Nissan (Motor Co. Ltd.),” Davis adds. “You can't look at the Z-car, the G-coupe and the upcoming Skyline GT and say there's not a car guy in there figuring that out. Same with Honda (Motor Co. Ltd.). The current-generation Honda Accord is a car guy's sedan. So there's somebody back there at least pulling the right kind of levers.”

Most important is that car guys are leaders, CAR's Cole says. They not only must create, they must rally the troops. And for that reason alone, they must be few in number.

“You don't want to have a whole barn full of these guys,” he says. “Then they can get in the way of one another.”

Cole is confident there will be no industry shortage of car guys, going forward. The key for auto makers, and suppliers, is identifying and nurturing them.

“I would say one of the characteristics of a car guy would be somebody who can't stop sketching ideas,” he says, recalling his days as a design instructor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

One day, to hear Cole tell the story, he invited his class to enter a design competition.

“And here came this kid up to the front of the class, and his arms were full of drawings. He said, ‘I've been getting ready for this class for quite a long time. In fact, I've been working on it all summer, and I want to show you some things. And he started unrolling these drawings on a table.”

That kid was Chris Theodore, last seen heading south on I-75 at a high rate of speed.
— with Christie Schweinsberg, in Geneva, and Scott Anderson

The List

(None of the executives named in this examination of car guys, label themselves as such during interviews with Ward's. “Because there's car guys and there's car-guy wannabes. And you never want to declare yourself a car guy because then you're probably a car-guy wannabe,” says Chris Theodore. However, they showed little hesitation nominating — or rejecting — their peers for membership in the auto industry's most exclusive club.)

Studs

Bob Lutz, GM vice chairman

“Bob Lutz is a legend in the industry.”
— Richard Parry-Jones, Ford

Ferdinand Piech, Volkswagen AG Chairman

“He stands as a unique model in the world.”
— Bob Lutz, GM

Martin Winterkorn, Volkswagen CEO

“Absolutely. He is so much into cars.”
— Uirich Bez, Aston Martin

Soichiro Honda, Honda Motor Co. Ltd. founder

“He was an engine nut, a race nut. He started with motorcycles but he had a fiery passion. There's stories about him hitting his engineers over the head with a piston!”
— Chris Theodore, ASC

Duds

Lee Iacocca, former Ford president, Chrysler Savior and industry icon.

“I just don't think so.”
— David Cole, CAR

Wolfgang Bernhard, former Volkswagen CEO and Chrysler COO.

“He has to prove himself.”
— Ulrich Bez, Aston Martin