Alastair Sloane: GM book carries a few shocks

Robert Lutz. Photo / Supplied

Even before he rode into General Motors as the product-development saviour in 2001, Bob Lutz found himself being recruited for plots to take over the company.

This is one of the startling revelations in Lutz's book, Car Guys vs Bean Counters. The book, says an early review, gives the best-ever insider's view of a dysfunctional if polite GM culture that valued process, rules and hierarchy above all else, even above the product and the customer.

Lutz proudly wears his motto: "Often wrong, but never in doubt." As a management book, Car Guys argues that intuitive and creative product people (such as Lutz), and not bean-counters, should be running things.

He also argues that GM's fall was largely a result of a) terrible US Government policy on fuel economy, which basically gave the Japanese carmakers a free pass, and b) a mean-spirited media that revelled in being unfair to GM and its Detroit peers.

But after blaming others for GM's failure, he spends much of the book on anecdotes about its stultifying culture, which almost guaranteed mediocre cars consumers could blithely ignore.

Shortly before he started as vice-chairman in September 2001, Lutz had a look at GM's future products, holding his tongue about cars and SUVs "obviously doomed to failure".

The problem wasn't that GM design chief Wayne Cherry and his team couldn't design. It was that GM's executives determined everything, including design, and their main goal was to meet cost targets and deadlines. At his first meetings with GM's top strategy boards, Lutz found "the notable absence of any focus on the thing that matters most: the company's products".

When he got into the GM brands, Lutz found silly pictures of "homes, furniture ... and (almost without fail) a golden retriever or two, all indicative of the mood, or soul, of the brand".

"It was unmitigated hogwash."

At Buick, GM's experts had decided that to cater to the elderly, the cars would be run by voice controls. Lutz drove a prototype with an engineer.

Lutz writes: "At his urging, I asked for 'more cold air.' No, no! he said. You have to scroll verbally. First say 'climate control'. When the car says 'climate control,' you say 'blower. When the car repeats 'blower," you say 'up one.' Same with temperature'." The next morning, Lutz killed the system.