The World According to Robert Lutz

Robert Lutz is vice chairman, product development, of General Motors. He is a former president and chief operating officer of Chrysler and previously worked at BMW and Ford. He's known as a visionary car guy with an eye on performance and pizzazz. The Dodge Viper was Lutz's baby at Chrysler. His personal car collection includes a 1952 Aston Martin DB2 Vantage, "beautifully restored"; a 1934 Riley aluminum-bodied sports car built to compete at Le Mans; a Steyr-Pinzgauer Swiss military vehicle, "maybe the world's most competent all-wheel-drive vehicle"; and an aluminum-bodied Cobra. He sat down with us and talked not only about the turmoil at GM but also about MapQuest, health care and women.

On the new Corvette vs. the Porsche

Even the European publications are coming around. They're now saying some of the ultimate Porsches still slightly outperform the regular Corvette. But holy smoke, when we get the 500-horsepower Z06, it will bury all these Porsches that narrowly beat the Corvette in ride and performance but at two and a half times the price.

On marketing cars to women

Women are security-oriented, and OnStar is strongly targeted at women. It permits them to open their car if they've locked themselves out--and we have some 10,000 unlockings a week. It also has airbag deployment and automatic 911 and emergency-service notification. So OnStar has a strong feminine appeal. By and large, the same sorts of things appeal to women and men, including attractive design and good proportion. I'd say women are perhaps more sensitive to the excellence of the interior. Visibility and being able to survey the whole car from the driver's seat also tend to be more important to women, though I suspect that may be because of stature more than gender.

You have to be careful when designing a car that you don't (concluded on page 146)Robert Lutz(contiued from page 92) send signals that subliminally tell women they're less than adequate drivers. For instance, Volvo recently had a team of women design a car for women. It features such thing as a gignatic rubber bumper around the car for ease of parking. If a bunch of GM designers had put that thing on the stand and said, "Here it is, girls. We designed it because we know you don't park very well," we would have been slaughtered in the press

On MapQuest

If you follow MapQuest, you are bound to get lost. It is the worst Internet-download map service. I have never found its directions to be reliable or worthwhile.

On Driving the Wheels Off

We find that Toyota and, to some extent, Honda do a good job of optimizing a car for the envelope where most people drive 90 percent of the time. If you take a Toyota Avalon and start pushing it harder, though, things start wobbling and you get a lot of fight in the steering wheel. But that's when you're almost abusing it. You can take a lot of our cars very close to the limit, including the LaCrosse. You can basically use it as a high-performance sedan and it will retain its composure. The first to evaluate our cars tend to be the expert media--Car and Driver, Road & Track, Motor Trend, Automobile, Auto Week and so forth. They will drive the car to the limit, and their opinions shape the opinions of everyday journalists. While we would enjoy being automatically on everyone's shopping list so we wouldn't have to make dynamically excellent cars and could tune them the way Toyota tunes its cars, we don't have that luxury. We have to target the best of the best with every car we make and do it from a standpoint of vehicle dynamics at all speeds, including abusively high. We increasingly adopt the German philosophy that a car that is capable at high performance levels will be safer and more agreeable to drive at saner speeds.

On Where Detroit Went Wrong

We stopped being design-driven. We tried to create cars according to the rational-man theory, which is to make the car as roomy as possible, give people a lot of value and never mind what it looks like. Here was a fundamental error in thinking. We researched everything together. We'd get the respondents in and show them the exterior. They'd say, "Well, I don't like the outside very much." "Okay," we'd say, "but how about the inside?" They'd say, "Um, yeah, the inside's pretty nice." "Okay, the outside is a red light, and the inside is a yellow light; now let's talk about features and price." And they'd say, "Wow, now that you show me all these sun visors and cup holders and these neat seats that slide back and forth, there's a lot of stuff here. I'll give that a green light." Then we'd show them the price, and that would be a green light too. We'd say, "We got a red on the outside, yellow on the inside and two greens, which adds up to greenish yellow. We have ourselves a winner here." We erred in thinking that the judgment happens simultaneously; it happens sequentially. The first gate is "Do I like the outside of the car?" Only if that gate is a yes do they go to the dealership and look at the inside of the car.

On Reviving Chevrolet

Part of my philosophy is that there's nothing wrong with Hollywood that good movies wouldn't fix, and Chevrolet is going to get new products that are not only intriguing but represent high value with a lot of attention to perceptional quality inside and out. The last Impala had many strange design elements, and the inside was particularly noncompetitive. The new Impala was greeted with a standing ovation every time we showed it to Chevrolet dealers.

On Motivating Designers

People used to say, "Boy, the best thing Chrysler ever did was fire all those K-car designers and replace them with a new batch." I'd say, "Guess what--same guys." We didn't change a single designer there, and we haven't changed any designers here. Designers respond to management input. I'm not a designer, but I know how to articulate design and encourage and empower designers. I know how to drive them to be bolder.

On American Quality

Foreign carmakers have better reputations, but in reality, today there's no difference. If you look at Consumer Reports, you'll find that the lowly Buick Regal and Century, now called LaCrosse, are of the highest quality, which is confirmed by J.D. Power. You can turn the reputation problem around because images and perceptions have a lag effect of about five years. You have to hang tough and make superior products and probably offer superior value for a while. We'll probably price a lot of the stuff we're launching lower than we should because we have to compensate for the lack of positive image. We have to offer greater value. We are in a reinvestment phase because GM's history on design, vehicle attributes and reliability has been spotty over the past 20 years. We think we're doing the best job in our history now, but it will take time, and I would say the general press is not helping.

On Japanese Hybrids

It was a bold PR move. Senior Japanese executives I met when I was at Chrysler in 1998 said, "We're doing this because the environmental movement in Japan is so strong. I said, "Does it make business sense?" They said, "No, we're going to lose a lot of money, but we're doing something we feel we have to do." I said, "Well, good luck." We had the technology at GM. In fact, I could show you a book from 1968 called GM World of Technology that has running gas-electric hybrids. It's beyond belief. We looked at the investment, the piece cost and how many we would sell and said, "This doesn't make any sense. We can't use the shareholders' money to do cars that we'll lose $3,000 or $4,000 per car on." Look at our responsibility vis-à -vis the shareholder. We would have been declared insane. Toyota didn't look at it as a business case but as an alternative form of advertising. The demand for hybrids is so high now, Toyota is able to charge most of the additional cost. If Toyota claims the hybrids are profitable, I would tend to believe it. But for the first few years they definitely weren't. So we're late. We're going to come in with a system we think is better than Toyota's.

On Government-Subsidized Health Care

I think it was Goethe who said, "Two souls dwell within my breast." On one hand you want this to happen to level the playing field between us and the foreign companies; on the other hand I find it hard to hide my personal distaste for government schemes. In a way it would be a good thing because it would provide a base of minimal health care for everyone. In countries that have nationalized health care, superimposed on top of that are privately funded health care schemes, so people who want better treatment and don't want to stand in line for six months for a kidney operation can go private. But you have that base-level health care available for all citizens. One thing is certain, whether you like so-called socialized medicine or not: If we had it in this country, it would make American industry vastly more competitive in the international arena. That one's for sure.

On Gm As number Two

If you look at where Toyota is expanding, in Asia or Eastern Europe, its footprint is in high-growth areas. Our footprint is in stable markets. Am I comfortable with that? No. But I'd rather be number two for a while and challenge Toyota for number one again than be in an endangered and constantly declining number one position. I'd rather be a strong and resurgent number two than a sick number one--not that we're sick, but things could be better.