Word: motors
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...After his discharge, his engineering degree in hand, he became a company man in his company town: he took an engineering job with Chrysler. At 27, armed with a night-school master's degree in engineering from the Chrysler Institute, he switched companies to design transmissions for the Packard Motor Car Co. Shortly he was in charge of all research and development for Packard. He picked up a second night-school master's, this one in business from the University of Michigan, and moved to GM as the director of Pontiac's new "advanced engineering" department...
...other holdings, which the FBI estimates at $28 million, excluding his interest in the De Lorean Motor Co. (DMC), form a motley portfolio. Since 1973 he has owned 1½% of the New York Yankees. For a decade he had owned a piece of the San Diego Chargers football franchise, but in 1976 he sold out and, he says, "took a big loss." His putative reason: drug use by Charger players. Said De Lorean: "Our youth look on them as heroes, and I didn't want anything to do with these guys in relation to their drug problem...
Callers to the plush Manhattan offices of De Lorean Motor Co. last week got only a computerized voice: "At the customer's request, 889-8900 has been temporarily disconnected...
...cars in a little more than 21 months, the Thatcher government ordered the plant shut down. With that, some of the plant's remaining 35 employees had a last fling, taking the wheel of De Lorean's cars, called the DMC-12 (after De Lorean Motor Co.), for a few turns around the premises. Hundreds of other workers in Northern Ireland stood to lose their jobs with companies that supplied the factory, a tragic circumstance for a place that has an unemployment rate of about 22%. De Lorean's project was obviously risky, but it was doomed...
There are serious doubts in the auto industry, though, that the DMC-12 will turn into a collector's item, like the Cord or the Edsel. One such skeptic is Semon ("Bunkie") Knudsen, retired president of Ford Motor Co. and mentor of De Lorean when both were at GM. Says he: "Usually you have to have cars built in really small quantities to be collector's items, perhaps 700 or less...