Five questions...for Bob Lutz

— -- Q: How do you define a car guy?

A: It's a person who is not in this business just for the money. A person who would not be happy in another industry. You have to be connected with this extremely exciting artifact we call the vehicle. It's usually a person who has always been interested in cars since early youth … still as excited about them as when they were 9 or 10 years old and, therefore, has this non-analytical sort of sensing, intuitive connection to the customer.

Q: Are there car gals?

A: Sure. It's rare. It's kind of like race drivers and fighter pilots. It's not as prevalent in females as it is in males. I always have to say that is a poly-gender term. It's not just males.

Q: I would think the bean counters would hate guys like you. Aren't you costing them money?

A: No, intelligent bean counters realize the good car guy — again, a poly-gender term — has an intuitive sense of the right amount of cost that triggers more value as opposed to the mechanistic approach to cost which is "Let's take every bit of trim off. Let's take everything non-essential off the car."

Q: How often do you have to fight guys on these kinds of decisions?

A: Especially at the beginning when I said, "Look, our cars from an exterior and interior standpoint are nowhere near where they need to be. They are not competitive, and we are going to have to selectively add some costs to interiors and exteriors to get our cars to where they are at least on (customers') consideration lists again." My argument to the finance guys was: If I add $500 to the car, and (sales) incentives go from $4,000 to $2,000, aren't we $1,500 ahead? They said, "Well, yes, but that's not the way we count it." I said, "I don't care if that's how you count it. Is that reality or not?"

Q: Because you know what works intuitively, are there times you don't seek advice from focus groups of customers?

A: That was (GM's twin sports cars Pontiac) Solstice and (Saturn) Sky. I say, "Hey, guys, we can put this in a clinic, but what are we going to learn? We know it's a home run." (They replied), "Well, yeah, but the process calls for it, and we always put everything in clinics." So I said, "Let's skip one this time. We'll get it to market faster. What's not to like here?" Then, "Well, you just don't know." That's the non-car-guy reaction. They have to have numbers to feel comfortable.