Bob Nardelli is but one of many Chrysler Clowns

"Auto Guy" (autoguy)
07/09/2015 at 14:28 • Filed to: None

!!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! For those of us who watched this disaster in the making close-up, it was a well-deserved smack down of someone who took a step too far in trying to recast his reputation. Bob, you should’ve stayed down on the floor with your millions. We let you crawl out the door once, and instead of being grateful that we didn’t take your lunch money then, you took that as affirmation that you had actually earned it. Sometimes ego is the last thing to die.

With Bob’s reputation now hopefully back in the coffin, it’s time to point out something else: Bob Nardelli was just the most recent in a long string of bozos, incompetents, and other egomaniacal fools who failed to solve the riddle of Chrysler, both for the long and the short term.

“As thou shall live by the quirky personality, so also shall it be the albatross upon the neck that plucketh out thine own eyeballs and leaveth thee blind.”

Okay, I just made that up, but it still fits, and it probably fits Lido Anthony Iacocca better than anybody. A famous Henry Ford II castoff, Lee went on to become the him and colorful leader of Chrysler in 1978, staying with them until 1992. He helped Chrysler avoid bankruptcy, and ultimately (and very publicly) championed both the K-Car and K-Car based minivan, both of which sold well enough to help put Chrysler back on the road to financial well-being. Here’s where the albatross kicks in: Lee was a strong personality. So was the man who was all but destined to be his replacement, Bob Lutz. Bob had followed Lee to Chrysler from Ford, and was assumed to be a strong candidate to take over the Chrysler leadership. Let’s just say it didn’t work out that way. In fact, the campaign to replace Lee became darkly known as ABL: Anybody but Lutz. Gracious but clearly disappointed, Lutz stayed on as the feckless Robert Eaton, then president of General Motors Europe, was appointed as Chrysler’s new CEO. And so were sown the seeds.

I received a priceless bit of career advice some years ago: “Always hire someone smarter and better than yourself. Otherwise, you might find yourself at the top of an organization, where everybody has hired somebody 90% as good as themselves, all down the line, so you end up with nothing but lazy idiots left as the future of the company.”

Eaton was no competitor to Lee, but he was surely Lee’s best room-filling, eye-watering fart as Iacocca slammed the boardroom door on his way to Bel Air in the Chrysler jet (which he continued to have free use of for several years).

Minimum Bob beat Maximum Bob. Lutz seethed, but Bob Eaton rode the crest of the Chrysler wave for several more years. Then 1998 happened. Although still profitable, Eaton was beginning to feel the pinch of Chrysler’s lack of global scale. Chrysler was weak in Europe, and despite the nearly always strong Jeep brand, Chrysler was far from being a leader in key segments. On the other side of the Atlantic, Juergen Schrempp had his own itch for scale and profitability to scratch, and it looked like Chrysler might be the perfect stick to shove down his shorts to massage his balls. And so it happened. When the shouting was done, Juergen and Bob sat by themselves in a conference room, punching out numbers between them on a calculator to decide the stock prices. At the end of the negotiations, Jürgen drank champagne until thoroughly hammered, tossed his secretary over his shoulder, and went up to his bedroom, where he likely did to her what Bob had certainly done to Chrysler. “Co-CEO” Bob Eaton never saw it coming, and Feckless Bob slowly faded away, a good GM-trained soldier, but ultimately just a victim of another quirky personality. Have you seen the pictures of the merger negotiations? Jürgen looks like he’s ready to take over the world. Bob looks like he’s… not quite there.

The much-publicized merger of equals was over before it started. Something else though, got a lot of Schrempp’s attention, but much less publicity: Chrysler had amassed a giant pile of cash in the Eaton days. Rather than invest in new products, Eaton sat on the cash while seeking a suitor. It may be hard to believe now, but in the mid-90s, Chrysler was the most profitable automaker in the world. At the time of the merger, Chrysler head $12 billion in cash reserves. A few years later, that number was zero, with much of the money having been invested in new Mercedes-Benz products, while Chrysler continued to hemorrhage leadership and talent. When the veil was finally lifted from the “merger” fraud (it was really an acquisition), the company strategy was clear: Chrysler was to be a second-tier operation in the Mercedes-Benz Empire, merely the “23rd business unit of Mercedes-Benz,” producing second-rate cars for North America. So here’s a newsflash, Juergen: no one ever got to any position of leadership by proposing from the onset to make something worse, rather than better. And the product insults kept coming. A new suspension design for your Chrysler sedan, sir? No thanks, we’ll use this one that Mercedes doesn’t need anymore, because, you know, it’s obsolete. To the Germans. But good enough for the Americans.

Enter Mr. Affable Mustache, Dr. Dieter Zetsche. Dieter and his family moved to Michigan to staunch the blood flow at Chrysler. Dieter’s kids, now students in a southeast Michigan high school, became acquainted with Jalopnik’s former chief, Ray Wert, himself the picture of high school youth and exuberance at the time, I’m sure. I mention this not to annoy the staff, both present and past here, but to show how long the Chrysler train wreck has really been happening. Decades. I mean, really. It’s longer than the third act of a Transformers movie. So Dieter shows up, makes a lot of friends (he really is a nice guy), and mostly keeps Jürgen Schrempp in the background. Unhappy that they are saddled with a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Mercedes asks Schrempp to leave in 2006. Dieter moves back to Germany. Despite the Dieter-balm on the bloody wounds, the most technologically advanced and oldest carmaker in the world (according to some) is forced to conclude one thing: They cannot fix Chrysler.

Enter Cerberus, 2007. If there’s one thing you can say about private equity companies, it’s this: there is no shortage of ego there. In fact, Cerberus may set the all-time record for ego, considering they named themselves after the Three Headed Guard Dog of Hell. Enter Bob Nardelli. Instead of investing in product, Homer Bob deliberately went backwards. No dollar, no penny, hell, no scrap of gold was too small not to be pried from the fillings of the not quite dead Chrysler. Low washer fluid warning lights? Take them out. Take them all out. NVH improvements, painstakingly crafted and implemented for pennies to make Chrysler cars feel and sound better? Fuck our customers. They’re buying Chryslers. What do they expect?

What’s a good way to check for genuine delusion? When pure, genuine surprise is finally registered as the truth becomes overwhelmingly apparent. I think Bob Nardelli was genuinely surprised. Because Bob Nardelli was genuinely delusional.

And there you are. All caught up with Matt’s article from yesterday.

Here’s two interesting links from back in the day. There are countless more as well.

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DISCUSSION (7)

LongbowMkII > Auto Guy
07/09/2015 at 14:41

Meanwhile, we are in a 3rd act of Chrysler's demise.

ADabOfOppo; Gone Plaid (Instructables Can Be Confusable) > LongbowMkII
07/09/2015 at 15:07

Ignore the be-sweatered man in the corner. No he’s not using all the money Jeep makes to prop-up faltering Italian car manufacturing.

Look! Here’s a new Alfa! See. Everything is okay now. Nothing to see here.

Move along.

Auto Guy > LongbowMkII
07/09/2015 at 15:28

So true. All this, and it still may end badly for them.

Auto Guy > ADabOfOppo; Gone Plaid (Instructables Can Be Confusable)
07/09/2015 at 15:30

Indeed. Their product synergy seems to have stopped at “one free espresso with every Jeep you buy.”

ADabOfOppo; Gone Plaid (Instructables Can Be Confusable) > Auto Guy
07/09/2015 at 15:35

Which is why they keep losing money. Everyone knows Jeep drivers much prefer POWERTHIRST energy drinks over dainty espresso.

Auto Guy > ADabOfOppo; Gone Plaid (Instructables Can Be Confusable)
07/09/2015 at 16:00

I’ll take a Powerthirst in Shockalate, please. I now wish to be uncomfortably energetic.

ADabOfOppo; Gone Plaid (Instructables Can Be Confusable) > Auto Guy
07/09/2015 at 16:03

Fizzbitch for me.