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She bleeds GM. According to Wikipedia and what I've heard on the radio, her dad worked for Pontiac for 39 years, she was educated through GM's educational pipeline and worked up her entire career through GM. She's an engineer and has an MBA. It couldn't have been easy for a woman to get to where she is now in a heavily male-dominated field. To me, she sounds like she has just as much passion and cred as Bob Lutz.
That said, there are so many intangibles that make a successful CEO that it's hard to say how successful she'll be. OTOH, GM is doing very well so as long as she doesn't make any major blunders, she'll probably do fine.
Her biggest problem will be to turn around GM-Europe.
You have to wonder if it is partly a political move to try and make up for the 40 billion dollar lose the tax payer just got stuck with? Maybe soften up us who have vowed to never buy GM again.
She didn't come from the minivan and econbox wing of GM. She handled rollouts of Corvettes and Silverados (among other vehicles) As someone else said she has worked her way up through GM, fighting the 'Good Old Boys' all along the way. If she isn't a 'car person' than there aren't any left in GM
Her job as very little to do with having a passion for cars.
She operates a huge company. Her job concerns strategy and decision making. She doesn't need to know the spec of every Corvetter. She needs to be an effective leader who makes sound decisions.
This. She's now the CEO, not a design-manager.
Besides, even if she DID do a horrible job as CEO, she'd just join a group of men who have done horribly at the same job.
Yeah, no kidding! Why would you (OP) think women can't share a passion for cars, or that men have some sort of innate "appreciation" for the history of the automobile? Not many still-living Americans were around when the first car came rolling off the assembly line, so it's not like a man is any more likely to have that strong connection. And people wonder why I say women aren't regarded the same in auto-related businesses/hobbies? Sheesh.
But like a few others have said, her position is more about being a good businessperson - which a woman is perfectly capable of being, regardless of the specific industry. Although, if she weren't at least somewhat passionate about cars, why would she have been in this business for so long?
The OP stated "My impression is that women in general do not have the same passion for cars as men."
That is not sexist, that is a fact; generally, men are and always have been "more into" cars than women. That does not at all mean there are women that are not into cars, it is just more men are than women.
Anyway, her being or not being into cars has nothing to do with her position.
If she can influence the company to be more in tune with what women want and need in a vehicle.....that would translate into increased sales.
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The counterpoint to your argument is that making vehicles more appealing to women might make them less appealing to men. The impact on sales could be neutral or negative. I don't believe women buy 62% of new vehicles. I think men buy more vehicles than women and spend more money on them. So any move to make vehicles more appealing to women has to be done without hurting the appeal to men.
I see no reason by the way that any automaker can't build fine vehicles to appeal to both genders.
As for the new CEO, I don't care what gender it is. She needs to run a large complicated company. She needs to deal with a unionized labor force and a global market. Other than cultural challenges within GM, there is no reason she can't be successful.
The counterpoint to your argument is that making vehicles more appealing to women might make them less appealing to men.
Most things are appealing to both men and women. Maybe a man doesn't really care one way or the other about certain car features, but the same features are important to many women. In this example they would gain women customers without losing the male customers.
Actually, features and design isn't the main problem with GM anyway...it's long term reliability. That's something that takes many years to turn around. Reliability is important to men and women.
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