President Obama's schedule for this past Monday:
1)Fire the CEO of General Motors
2)Fly to London
Can anyone imagine George W. Bush sacking the head of GM?
The Detroit News reports that, "March vehicle sales were still bad, but automakers expressed some cautious optimism Wednesday after the monthly tally showed a smaller year-over-year decline than most had been expecting and an improvement over February's dismal numbers.
"US car and truck sales totaled 857,735 units last month -- a 24 percent improvement over February's total, but 36.8 percent less than the 1,356,926 vehicles sold in March of 2008.
"Analysts had been expecting March to be much worse. Just a day earlier, some were predicting an annualized selling rate of 8.9 million units, but it came in at 9.9 million."
Rick Wagoner and Bob Lutz are today both gone from GM.
March sales saw GM dropping 48.8% over March, 2008, Toyota down 37.1%, Ford losing 43.3% and Chrysler running 45.5% behind the same month last year.
Three winners emerged in March US sales: Hyundai was up 0.5%, Kia 1% and Subaru gained 1.6%. Smart was up 42%, sounding impressive, but Smarts were just becoming available a year ago.
So: What now for Detroit?
It would have been so much easier for Mr. Obama and his auto task force chiefs Tim Geithner and Steve Rattner to throw-out Bob Nardelli of Chrysler; he's not well-known and his company, now privately-owned, has been in trouble for so many years that his being forced-out seems a foregone conclusion anyway.
But the head of GM? Rick Wagoner, who took home $26 million in 2007? Fire him?
Talk about your ultimate symbolism; as the Democratic governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm said, Wagoner was the "sacrificial lamb."
But that's not always a bad thing.
A Smart EV concept.
The company which brought the world the electric starter, the "aspirational" system of car marketing by different divisions, "import-fighter" Saturn, the EV1, Pontiac GTO, Aztek and G8, Chevrolet Corvette, Cimarron, the "economy Cadillac" and the Escalade and Hummer, so much a part of the warp and woof of America and the world, now faces a fairly certain bankruptcy.
GM's replacement CEO, Frederick "Fritz" Henderson, only had to move into Rick Wagoner's office down the hall at The Tubes, GM's Detroit headquarters.
Henderson, 51, brings the industry-standard MBA from Harvard Business School and a business administration degree from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.
Before reaching the COO position under Wagoner at The General, Henderson had a lot of overseas experience, serving the corporation in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Singapore, Korea and China.
Fritz Henderson, The General's new CEO.
Bottom line: He's yet another bean-counter. Two of the Detroit Three are still run by top executives with financial, not automotive product, backgrounds; and airplane industry financial experience in the case of Ford's Alan Mulally.
And with Bob Lutz, the mercurial chief of GM's North American product portfolio, leaving the company just a few weeks ago, one has to look pretty long and hard to find people in GM, Ford and Chrysler exec suites and boardrooms with strong automotive product backgrounds.
Which begs the question: What did Lutz know and when did he know it? Truth is, he's smart enough to have seen this all coming.
A former top exec with both BMW and Chrysler before GM, the Swiss-born Lutz green-lighted the Dodge Viper and Plymouth Prowler, small production run cars which caught the imagination of car enthusiasts worldwide; they're what the industry calls "halo cars" because they cast a nice light over the rest of a company's line-up, and in Chrysler's case, they brought people into showrooms to buy minivans, Neons and Jeeps.
Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli presents the keys to a Dodge Viper to NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson.
Lutz tried a similar tack at GM, re-badging two cars from the company's Australian division, Holden, as the "new" Pontiac GTO and the G8 performance sedan. Both were sales (and mpg) failures); nice cars at the wrong time.
Shortly before leaving GM, Lutz said the prime determinate for most people making car-buying choices is the price of gasoline, and he was the first major domestic car maker executive to publicly call for higher federal gas taxes to encourage the building and buying of high-mileage cars and trucks.
Too little too late, though. What might have been Lutz' most important achievement, the Chevy Volt "extended-range hybrid," now has little chance of production anytime soon, and even if built almost certainly won't turn a profit for perhaps years.
GM has 60 days, to June 1st, to prove their mettle to the government before Washington recalls the taxpayer loans and plunges the corporation into a "planned" bankruptcy, and Henderson has been freely using the "B" word since his ascension to CEO.
Ford's 2010 Fusion hybrid gets an EPA-rated 41mpg - Will the car be enough to keep Ford in business?
Chrysler gets 30 days, until May 1st, to merge with Fiat or perhaps another car maker or certainly face the same fate.
Ford began advertising their Focus hybrid on American Idol this week, calling the car the "highest-mileage mid-size car sold in America." But tight credit worldwide is still killing sales and the specter of taxpayer loans, billons in government lines of credit or even bankruptcy hover just down the road for the Dearborn-based company.
So as the republicans trot-out their latest disaster of a budget and party chiefs Rush Limbaugh and Fox News ask why the head of the UAW isn't being fired along with Wagoner - what happens next?