Interview: Maximum Bob – Part one

Loving cars started early for Bob, and so did his facility with languages and the multi-culturalism that would so aid his career. He was born in Zürich on 12 February 1932. His American father was a Credit Suisse banker so Bob grew up speaking Schweizerdeutsch, English and later German, French and Italian.

‘At three, I could name almost every car on the road and I remember a LaSalle convertible, Delahayes, Talbot-Lagos, Alfa Romeos and later a 1938 Jaguar SS 3½ Litre in the driveway,’ he tells me. By 1940 Bob not only knew about cars; he’d crossed the Atlantic five times.

But school, disrupted by World War Two and shuffling between America and Switzerland, didn’t go well. He spent too much time drawing aircraft and cars; he wondered if he was good enough to be a car designer but ‘my father looked at my design portfolio and forecast a life of hardship’.

Bob was turfed out of one prestigious Swiss school for ‘being too interested in the daughter of the biggest industrialist in town’. He finally graduated at 22 and returned to the US to honour a promise to his father to join the Marines. ‘I want to fly jets,’ he chirpily told the recruiting sergeant before being despatched to boot camp for the infamous rigours of Marine Corps training.

‘It taught me duty, honour, commitment, courage, focus, self-sacrifice and dedication,’ Lutz says. And, significantly, not to be afraid to speak unwelcome truths to superiors…

Good results in an intelligence test took him from foot slogging to flight school. From 1954 to 1959 he flew Douglas A-4 Skyhawk, McDonnell F2H Banshee and Grumman F9F-8 Cougar attack jets from Okinawa and then in the reserves in California until 1965. He sold vacuum cleaners while studying for a Berkeley University degree in production management, achieved at 29. He followed with a top-marks marketing MBA. Captain Lutz had become ‘fascinated with the world of business, particularly the whole bundle of human psychological constructs involved in marketing’. To combine that with his passion for cars, he joined General Motors in New York in 1963. An ability to speak German triggered a transfer to sales and marketing at Opel in Germany.

And he was off, promptly making waves in a company ‘making boring cars for boring people’. By fraternising with the designers he spotted dormant projects he thought should go ahead. One was the Kadett Rallye. He fostered its production against bitter opposition and was vindicated by a year’s worth of orders on launch day alone.

He exhumed and pushed through the image-changing Opel GT ‘which had been nixed’ and provoked design boss Chuck Jordan to take inspiration from Giorgetto Giugiaro and Pininfarina, kicking off cars as elegant as the 1972 Rekord and Commodore Coupe. He rose so rapidly that GM president Pete Estes apologised for his lagging salary while saying ‘hang in there; you’re going to be taken care of’. Bob was more upset about being ordered to give up racing cars and riding motorcycles. So when BMW’s new CEO Eberhard von Kuenheim offered $200,000 a year – nearly 10 times Bob’s GM pay – he went to Munich in 1971 as Global Head of Sales and Marketing.

In just three years, Lutz would leave an indelible mark on BMW. Without him, the first 3 Series could have flopped, and the famous roundel badge, twin kidney grilles and M cars might not exist. Remember that.

First off, he canned the ‘disastrous’ replacement for the 2002. ‘It looked like a narrow box,’ says Lutz. Chief body engineer Wilhelm Hofmeister, who controlled design, insisted the car was ready to be tooled. ‘Better to melt it down and start again,’ Lutz said. He charged newly arrived design maestro Paul Bracq – who’d been repressed by Hofmeister – with creating a new shape. The result was the E21, though we know it as the very first 3 Series.

Simultaneously, Lutz stopped the two-kidney grille being ditched in favour of an open grille with horizontal bars. He encouraged the liberated Bracq to design the seminal and extraordinary E25 BMW Turbo concept car and backed – against engineering resistance – Bracq’s preferred design for the E24 6 Series. ‘Bob Lutz had an excellent sense of style,’ says Bracq.

Von Kuenheim agreed: ‘Bob could sense when you needed to change a line by a half-millimetre here and a millimetre there. He was always right.’

Shocked that BMW lacked proper design facilities, Lutz asked new Opel design boss Dave Holls – as a favour – to help equip a BMW studio. Boldly, Lutz also convinced von Kuenheim not to adulterate BMW’s famous badge by removing the outer black circle and BMW lettering. ‘Mustering all the limited tact I possessed, I explained why it was one of the worst ideas ever,’ Lutz says. Von Kuenheim relented but after that their relationship was strained.

Von Kuenheim had fired Lutz’s predecessor for prodigious corruption. Lutz found that bribes, kickbacks and cars being sold out the back door were still rampant in Munich and among the foreign distributors. He fired almost everyone in marketing and sales, and the complicit ad agency, and replaced the distributors with wholly owned BMW subsidiaries.

‘I battled bribes, threats on my life, offers of Mediterranean yacht cruises with a crew of available females, and in about two years we got it done, thus vastly improving BMW’s profitability,’ Lutz wrote in the third of his engrossing books, Icons and Idiots. Years later, von Kuenheim told Lutz it was the single most important event in BMW’s post war history, paving the way for profitable global growth.

Lutz tempted fate when he pressed Herbert Quandt, BMW’s main owner, to adopt the 3/5/6/7 model designation devised by sales manager Oskar Kolk instead of the (irrational) one Quandt proposed. ‘Mr Lutz,’ said a glowering Quandt, ‘while I admire your courage and tenacity, I must tell you that you’re pushing your luck when you take me on like that.’

To pep up BMW’s image, Lutz instigated the 2002 Turbo and 3.0 CSL and sparked the M Division by conceiving BMW Motorsport GmbH and luring Jochen Neerpasch from Ford to run it. He insisted BMW’s American ad agency use the enduring line The Ultimate Driving Machine rather than The Joy Of Driving.

But tension with von Kuenheim culminated in a shouting match over a dealer contract Lutz bitterly opposed. Lutz also knew that, with an entrenched von Kuenheim just four years older than him, he’d never reach the top spot. So when Ford beckoned in 1974, he went.

He began as head of Ford of Germany, but as Henry Ford II and others recognised his product knowledge, market nous, communications skills and mix of charisma and leadership gravitas, he was made president and then chairman of Ford of Europe.

Lutz pushed for classier-looking cars that were better engineered, better to drive, more refined…more like BMWs. I asked if he’d struggled to find enough talented engineers to deliver what he wanted. ‘The problem,’ he said, ‘was getting people who’d been building cars down to a price for umpteen years to understand that I wanted the best possible car for a reasonable price, not just the cheapest possible car.’

Again, he lauded the designers. His motivation was simple: ‘Design is the soul of the car,’ he said. ‘It’s what makes people want to reach out and touch it, what makes them say “I want that car”.’

The transformative bond he formed with FoE’s exceptional design director Uwe Bahnsen would lead to a car as different and initially polarising as the Sierra, the rounded, aerodynamic replacement for the conservative Cortina. It would revolutionise car design but Lutz had to battle hard to get board approval. Hank The Deuce hated it but backed Lutz’s intuition.

Patrick le Quément, former Design Director of Ford of Europe and later head of Renault Design, says: ‘Bob gave life to Ford’s European operations by bringing in a European car culture that had been absent. He reacted against building cars that only appealed to American executives who came and went on occasional trips and read executive summaries prepared by dogmatists.

‘The designers were taken aback by his command of design language. He quickly became our champion and his closeness to Henry Ford II led us to bolden our proposals. Bob could draw; he had natural talent. Sometimes he sent back Tipp-Exed photos with new lines. His designs were mostly classical but he was extremely receptive to better counter proposals.’

Sierra sales zoomed – after a heavily subsidised start in the UK – and it stayed in production for 11 years. Lutz lobbied for the American Ford Taurus and its Mercury Sable sibling to embrace similar styling. That drew critics. Red Poling, then boss of Ford North America, said: ‘When Ford goes bankrupt you’ll take responsibility then, because you talked Phil [Caldwell, chairman] and Don [Petersen, president] into making the Taurus have the same look.’ The acclaimed Taurus and Sable became America’s best sellers. But the Merkur brand Lutz tried to create around the Sierra XR4i flopped.

Lutz ordered the creation of FoE’s Special Vehicle Engineering, spawning the revered fast Fords that flowed from Dunton, starting with the Capri 2.8 Injection and Fiesta XR2. ‘I needed a small team that could bypass the mainstream engineering group and get things done quickly,’ Lutz says. ‘I had done the same thing at BMW when we did the M cars; you find a group of people and just liberate them. All they need is a champion.’

Rod Mansfield, the engineer tapped by Lutz to run SVE and subsequently lionised, says: ‘Bob was extremely inspirational. He was exceptionally approachable and helpful and always listened to you – not necessarily a common response for an executive in his position. I liked him a great deal: he was warm hearted and friendly, and I like to think that his greatest contribution to Ford was the introduction of SVE.’ At evaluation days Lutz always jumped into RS or XR cars first. Engineers respected his feedback, especially about suspension settings; he’d helped with the XR3’s set up. ‘His driving abilities were top class,’ says Mansfield.

After the Sierra, Lutz was promoted to the US to run International Operations but as he ruffled feathers his star wobbled. ‘My reputation was clouded when I was unfairly accused of trying to unseat Red Poling,’ he says. Ford’s HR boss branded him an ‘opinionated swashbuckler’. An aggrieved subordinate at FoE told the press Lutz was ‘a hard-nosed, cigar-chomping ex-Marine fighter pilot who ran roughshod over kind and gentle, thoughtful, people-oriented [managers like him]’.

While Lutz was back in Europe ‘fixing it’, another executive took his job in the US. Poling diverted him to Ford Trucks, a demotion as Lutz saw it. Nevertheless, he instigated a best-seller there too: the Explorer, Ford’s first SUV.

But he’d read the writing on the wall. ‘I knew that as long as Red Poling – the bean counter’s bean counter – was either president or chairman I wasn’t ever going to get a shot at the two top jobs. Poling and Petersen thought I was too temperamental or too hard on people, which I’m really not. One day while Don Petersen was playing golf he was asked what he thought of losing Bob Lutz. He took his swing, slowly cleaned his club, paused, and said “I prefer to think of it as Ford being rid of the last of the misfits.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment but really it was. I delivered results, but not in “the Ford way”.’

A fellow misfit had come calling: the brash father of the Mustang, former Ford president and CEO Lee Iacocca. He’d been at Ford 30 years until Henry Ford II fired him, saying ‘Lee, I just don’t like you’. Iacocca then made hay as Chrysler’s CEO from 1978. He’d been wooing Lutz for years; in 1986 Lutz said yes and became Chryslers’ Executive Vice President and head of Global Product Development.

Lee and Bob got off to a rocky start. In their first meeting, Lutz, eschewing the wisdom of keeping schtum, told Iacocca he shouldn’t believe research suggesting that customers didn’t like the Ford Taurus. ‘He didn’t like my smart-ass attitude and, not having had much practice, didn’t like an underling telling him he was wrong,’ Lutz says in Icons and Idiots (Iacocca, by the way, was an icon; ranked by Lutz as the best leader he ever worked with).

Yet Iacocca enabled Lutz to transform Chrysler’s cars and trucks. It needed to advance from its tired string of boxy K-car derivatives. Smaller, flexible Chrysler was ideal for go-getting Lutz. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘a corporate environment that provided fertile ground for innovation, experimentation and creativity. We often described ourselves as a band of misfits, cast off from larger, more serious companies and driven by the underdog’s desire to show our worth.’

In what became known as the Dream Team, Lutz allied with consummate design director Tom Gale and stellar engineer François Castaing. With manufacturing supremo Dennis Pawly, procurement whizz Tom Stallkamp and ‘a complicit finance good guy’ Gary Valdade they formed the Gang of Six. ‘We’d eat lunch together every day and basically we ran everything,’ says Lutz. ‘We steered committees, pushed things through, made rapid decisions, we got stuff done so fast.’ Lutz bought a helicopter to fly to work to cut commuting time.

A spate of attractive, innovative and better built cars and trucks followed: the LH Chrysler and Dodge ‘cab forward’ models, the Neon compact, the Cirrus and Stratus ‘cloud cars’ and hot rod-like Plymouth Prowler, along with the game-changing 1994 Dodge Ram, Durango, and the 1993 Jeep Grand Cherokee. And of course there was that raunchy creation of Lutz’s imagination, the Dodge Viper…

Chrysler’s reputation and sales soared. So did co-brand Jeep’s as Lutz expanded its range. Jeep sales rocketed from 200,000 a year to half a million, helping Chrysler become, for a while, the world’s most profitable car company.

With Iacocca in his late 60s and nearing retirement it seemed that Lutz, at 60, would at last accede – as many Chrysler boardmembers thought he should – to a top seat. ‘But Lee fought it vehemently,’ says Lutz. ‘I was too ambitious, volatile, unpredictable, undiplomatic, emotional, and way too prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. In short, I was way too similar to Iacocca. He instituted what he called his ABL succession programme – Anybody But Lutz.’ Later, Iacocca said not anointing Lutz was the worst decision he ever made.

So a different Bob became chairman and CEO: Bob Eaton, who’d been running GM Europe very profitably. Although Lutz was denied the throne, his power and the scope of his role were undiminished. He’d have ‘a great eight years’ as president and COO under Eaton’s chairmanship.

A Chrysler rule said Lutz should have retired at 65 in 1997. The board asked him to stay on for another 18 months. And then, in 1998, he was gone, out in an ‘expedited retirement following the so-called merger with Daimler-Benz’. He wasn’t idle for long: a bank parachuted him into Exide Technologies to straighten it out after a fraud scandal. Even so, to those who’d followed Robert A Lutz’s career with fascination, it looked as if, after 35 years, he’d no longer be a force in the car industry.

We should have known better…

Part two of our exclusive interview with Bob Lutz will be published on Friday

Main image: Taylor Castle

Acknowledgements: Bob Lutz Icons and Idiots, Car Guys vs Bean Counters and Guts; YouTube Bob Lutz interview with Adam Wadecki of Rare Classic Cars; Steve Saxty The Cars You Always Promised Yourself and BMW by Design; Road & Track; Car and Driver