March 20, 2008 11:23AM

GM’s Car Czar

By Alexis Glick

GM’s Vice Chairman Robert Lutz is a superstar in the auto industry. He has been in the driver’s seat for the top three auto manufacturers — GM, Ford and Chrysler — and has more than a dozen brands under his belt.
 
Lutz was the mastermind behind Ford’s iconic Explorer and helped remake the Jeep Grand Cherokee. At Chrysler, he overhauled the product line with the Dodge Ram pickup truck and the retro-style PT Cruiser.

Lutz joined GM six years ago, and his new project is the Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid plug-in that can go 40 miles without gas and will be in production in 2010.

So what will Volt’s price tag look like? “I kept tell everyone we are going to shoot for just under $30,000, and then when we started adding up the prices of all of the components and the lithium ion battery pack, which is a very expensive battery pack, we aren’t going to make close to 30. I almost hate to give a range now; I am now hoping we can keep it under [$40,000].”

Lutz also talked about the new federal regulations regarding fuel-efficient cars and said technology is going to be key for developing hybrids in the future. He continued to say a consumer-driven desire for fuel-efficient cars would have made this change in car production easier.

“Starting at about 2015, when the regulations start to bite we have to put more and more of this technology in, and it’s not going to be customer driven people will say, ‘Well I don’t want to put an extra $5,000 in just to get a little bit mileage and the automobile industry is going to have to say ‘We’re sorry, you’re going to have to take this because we have to meet the law.’”

At age 76, the idea of retirement is far from Lutz’s mind and he now has a huge task in front of him: how to weather an economic slowdown.

“I’ve seen during my career a lot worse than this, this to me just looks like a minor fluctuation if you had asked met he day before yesterday, I would have said ‘Yeah, its really not looking all that good,’ but with the Fed rate cut and the good reaction to that, the stock market rebounding and so forth, I am now of the opinion we are going to get this thing stabilized.” 

Take a look at the interviews below.