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My sister got into multiple accidents with one. No explosions.
My very first new car was a 1974 Ford Pinto runabout bought it right off the showroom floor i was 19 years old. And then i got married so i bought another Pinto a 1980 as a second vehicle for me to drive to work, never had a problem with any of them. People boo ho vehicles they have no idea about them. Most on here we’re not even born yet when these vehicles were around.
It’s almost funny reading these comments from people who only know of Lee Iacocca from reading a few articles on the web. For those of us who were alive then and were impacted by the decisions he made, we see it very differently. We knew Iacocca as the man that had the guts to do what had to be done to save a massive company from bankruptcy. Without his determination and will Chrysler would have fallen and tens of thousands of auto workers would have found themselves unemployed and headed for personal bankruptcy.
I remember when he went to the government to secure the billion dollar loan to keep the doors open. That was an unheard of amount of money back then! Testifying before Congress was brutal and it showed everyone just how bad things really were. The fact that Chrysler paid off the loan several years early was a testament to his stature as a leader.
Did he make mistakes in judgment? Yes, he did. But the difference between Iacocca and today’s so called leaders is he owned his mistakes. He was a tough, demanding auto executive who never asked his employees to do something he himself would not do. He took no prisoners and was in it to win it. I admire that kind of person, and wish we had just a few like him today in key leadership positions.
It’s almost funny reading these comments from people who only know of Lee Iacocca from reading a few articles on the web. For those of us who were alive then and were impacted by the decisions he made, we see it very differently. We knew Iacocca as the man that had the guts to do what had to be done to save a massive company from bankruptcy. Without his determination and will Chrysler would have fallen and tens of thousands of auto workers would have found themselves unemployed and headed for personal bankruptcy.
I remember when he went to the government to secure the billion dollar loan to keep the doors open. That was an unheard of amount of money back then! Testifying before Congress was brutal and it showed everyone just how bad things really were. The fact that Chrysler paid off the loan several years early was a testament to his stature as a leader.
Did he make mistakes in judgment? Yes, he did. But the difference between Iacocca and today’s so called leaders is he owned his mistakes. He was a tough, demanding auto executive who never asked his employees to do something he himself would not do. He took no prisoners and was in it to win it. I admire that kind of person, and wish we had just a few like him today in key leadership positions.
Excellent post. Very few "leaders" today have his kind of grit. Nowadays, when a company is facing hard times/bankruptcy, the boards sell off what they can and usually sell out to some private investment group who have no interest in saving the company, only in maximizing their profit.
I don't think that getting a government loan for a failing company deserves any praise. Did Chrysler become strong and independent afterwards? Or did it keep going in and out of profitability, like it had been since the 1950's?
Even at the time, Lee Iacocca's claim to be a "car guy" was widely disbelieved. Just look at the cars his company produced. I haven't read his book, but in one excerpt he claims credit for a gas-guzzling boat because of its ride. One of those big flat cars with vague steering and rubbery suspension that we don't see anymore.
Now it's easy to criticize. But the Big Three couldn't even copy Japanese cars correctly. This was and still is because of the corporate culture, making internal politics more important than the product.
The Camry, Corolla, and Rabbit/Golf have been selling for more than thirty years. What did Iacocca produce that has such a record?
My favorite book of his, is "Where Have All The Leaders Gone?" He laments the loss of good leadership at the national level, vs. poll-following, and squawks about too many tax cuts undermining the national economy, and the infrastructure that the auto industry depended on for its success. He's a hilarious writer, making his forceful points in a most amusing manner. Great guy.
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He was the father of the Ford Mustang, the Chrysler K-Car and he was the one who started the Minivan revolution in 1983.
I don't think that getting a government loan for a failing company deserves any praise. Did Chrysler become strong and independent afterwards? Or did it keep going in and out of profitability, like it had been since the 1950's?
Even at the time, Lee Iacocca's claim to be a "car guy" was widely disbelieved. Just look at the cars his company produced. I haven't read his book, but in one excerpt he claims credit for a gas-guzzling boat because of its ride. One of those big flat cars with vague steering and rubbery suspension that we don't see anymore.
Now it's easy to criticize. But the Big Three couldn't even copy Japanese cars correctly. This was and still is because of the corporate culture, making internal politics more important than the product.
The Camry, Corolla, and Rabbit/Golf have been selling for more than thirty years. What did Iacocca produce that has such a record?
So it’s ok for the federal government to bail out all of these companies, though but not the American automakers.
Are we forgetting the exploding the gas tank? Are we forgetting the man who held people to the 2000 rule despite knowing they were producing an unsafe product?
With all I've seen around the Net about him today, I am just hoping that people don't know about that.....and it isn't a case they are overlooking it.
Nope. Never did.
Ford engineers came up with many solutions, some as cheap as $6 per unit. But it was well-known within Ford that Iacocca demanded a car under 2000 lbs. that sells for under $2000 and safety be damned.
I recall an internal memo uncovered showed that Ford execs determined the value of a life at $63k or $68k if payout was needed when Ford was rolling Pintos off the line.
Thanks for the link.
It shows that the US government no longer owns stock in GM, which is a great relief to me as a taxpayer, but has still lost eleven billion dollars out of the fifty billion we put up as bailout money. Payments of ten to fifty million have been coming in every year, but at that rate it'll take a hundred years to break even.
We've lost one point two billion on Chrysler since 2008 and have no chance of getting it back.
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