Want an indication of how volatile the automotive world is these days? On Tuesday, the government-controlled board that now runs General Motors announced it had selected a new chair for what was once the world's biggest corporation.
The man they picked, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., doesn't have a day's worth of experience in autos. Instead, he is a tough-talking 67-year-old Texan who spent his entire career in the telephone system, engineering the takeover of AT&T; by SBC Communications.
Twenty years ago, his becoming head of General Motors would have been seen as impossible. Perhaps almost as impossible as the idea of GM going bankrupt and then becoming owned mostly by the U.S. government.
But guess what.
Yet when the new chair was selected, it wasn't the top story in Detroit that day. It wasn't even the top automotive story.
That honor went to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to allow the Fiat-Chrysler merger. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg held up the merger for a day, but then the full court said go ahead.
The next day the papers were signed, and the latest incarnation of the new Chrysler Corp. was at the altar again, for her third marriage in a little over a decade. The first two, to Germany's Daimler and then Cerberus Capital Management, were essentially disasters.
Nobody will know for months, or longer, if the Fiat-Chrysler merger is a success. There is still suspicion in some quarters that Fiat merely wants Jeep -- and Chrysler's dealer network.
Others worry that American customers just won't buy Fiat products. Many still remember the quality problems of the 1980s, an era when the quip was that Fiat stood for "Fix It Again, Tony."
Fiat cars are now much improved, however, and automotive analysts were cautiously saying that the merger just might work, that in many ways, it made more sense than the misshapen alliance with Daimler. In part, Chrysler's odds seemed better because bankruptcy had stripped away unnecessary factories, employees and debt.
Both companies have something the other needs. The man now in charge of both, Sergio Marchionne, is a highly respected businessman and car guy. He impressed insiders by elevating Jim Press, the man may insiders thought should have been Chrysler's CEO under Cerberus (instead of Robert Nardelli) to the job of deputy CEO and special adviser to the Fiat chairman.
The big question mark is GM, of course. For years, experts have agreed that a large part of the corporation's problem was its provincial, insular and complacently arrogant nature.
In the past, effort after effort by outsiders to change GM's culture have failed. Ross Perot failed; Jose Ignacio Lopez failed; even John Smale, board chair in the 1990s, ultimately failed.
The system and the insiders always assumed GM was too big to fail. But it has failed, and much of the old GM has been destroyed, or is being stripped away by the bankruptcy process.
Ironically, the devastation now being visited on General Motors may just save the company. The U.S. taxpayers own most of GM now and that changes things. The new government-approved board chose Whitacre to take the reins once the company emerges from bankruptcy sometime this year.
Part of his job will be to dynamite any last vestiges of the old complacent thinking.
Gerald Meyers was the last chairman of the former American Motors Corp, which merged with Chrysler. Now a professor at the University of Michigan, Meyers described the man who took over AT&T; as blunt and brilliant.
"He isn't a lovable guy. He's not going to be your friend, but he is so often right," Mr. Meyers observed.
In short, Ed Whitacre sounds like exactly the sort of man General Motors needs if the once-mighty corporation is to have a chance of surviving past the next few years.
Not found in the car magazines
Guess what the top-selling car in the United States was last year? No, not the Ford Taurus, or the Chevy Impala or the Honda Accord. It was the 30-year-old Little Tikes Cozy Coupe, a plastic car made for toddlers to push around in.
Last year, the Cozy Coupe, which retails for about $50, sold more than 457,000 units, all of them red and yellow, all of them made in Hudson, Ohio, and none of them produced with bailout money.
Ten million have been sold since 1979. A company spokesman called them the ultimate "recession-proof vehicle," and last week, one was placed in the Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum in Cleveland.
So who says the domestic auto industry is dead?
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