Word: cars
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...chauffeur-driven car were to break down, General Motors president Robert Stempel is the sort of guy who would roll up his sleeves, look under the hood and fix it himself. Coming of age in Bloomfield, N.J., in the early 1950s, Stempel toiled during the summer as a garage mechanic. After joining GM as an engineer in 1958, he designed a front-wheel-drive transmission for the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. Stempel's success with the front-wheel drive, a radical departure that later became a standard feature, accelerated his movement up the corporate ladder...
...former college-football tackle had gone as far as most "car guys" are traditionally permitted to go at GM: the presidency, serving under one of the financial executives who have dominated the chairman's job. But at the moment, Stempel, 55, is the leading candidate to succeed chairman Roger Smith, who must retire at 65 in July 1990. The prospect of an engineer taking charge for only the second time in GM's 80-year history is providing a much needed morale boost for many dealers and employees. "He can talk about automobiles," says Carl Sewell, a Cadillac dealer...
Never before has GM so sorely needed a top-notch tinkerer. As the No. 2 manager at the world's No. 1 automaker (1987 revenues: $102 billion), Stempel presides over a company suffering from a showroom full of image problems. Originally known for the distinctive styling of its separate car lines, GM took a wrong turn in the 1970s when it began building cookie-cutter cars: a Chevrolet Citation was a ringer for a Pontiac Phoenix, for example. At the same time, shoddy workmanship, especially in the notorious X-car line, sent hordes of GM devotees to Toyota and Honda...
Despite earning $1.2 million last year in salary and stock options, Stempel remains at heart a grease monkey who reads car-buff magazines, counts race-car driver A.J. Foyt among his friends and won a collection of drag-racing trophies in his youth. His one concession to corporate security: letting a chauffeur handle the 40-minute drive to work from his home in a posh suburb north of Detroit...
Stempel is bringing to market a line known as the GM-10 series, which is designed to compete with Ford's cars for young families: the Taurus, best- selling midsize car in the U.S., and the Sable. The sporty GM-10s have debuted as two-door versions of the Olds Cutlass Supreme, Buick Regal and Pontiac Grand Prix; the four-door models are expected next fall. Already, one of them, the Chevrolet Lumina, is known inside GM as a "Taurus killer." But inasmuch as four-door cars make up 75% of U.S. auto sales, analysts wonder why GM first came...