August automotive exec Bob Lutz is a man of many stories. He chose one in particular to tell in front of an adoring crowd at the Petersen Museum's "Inside the Motoman Studio" -- hosted by our friend George Notaras -- that might've been apocryphal; might've been pure hokum, but it sure as hell was entertaining.

Back in the mid-'70s, one of the Japanese companies -- maybe Honda, maybe Toyota -- happened upon an ingenious way to test the quality of their cars. They would pull a car off the assembly line on a Friday and place a cat inside. (Oh, the halcyon days before public outrage at animal abuse.) On Monday, they would check the car. If the cat was dead, or close to death, that meant that no air had gotten in and that the weatherstripping had done its job. If the cat was alive, well, good for the cat, but the engineers had to try harder.

Some line workers at a GM plant had heard of this story, and thusly inspired, they tried it themselves. They found a stray cat and put it inside a Chevrolet or Oldsmobile or Pontiac at the end of the line after the last shift. They closed the door. They turned off the lights. They went home -- just like they'd heard the Japanese did. And "when they came back to work on Monday," said Lutz, "the cat disappeared."

Lutz, the car guy of car guys, told another story, and more stories -- a rare afternoon of insight from a man who usually keeps himself closely guarded. He told of his childhood growing up in Zurich, Switzerland, the son of a Swiss banker and a mother at whom he would throw temper tantrums for toy cars. One of 5-year-old Lutz's sure-fire techniques was to lie in front of a toy store, screaming. The more his mother tried to get him up, "the more loudly I screamed and stomped and the passers-by would look askance at my mother and say, 'Why are you being so cruel to that child?'"

"All right," Margaret Lutz would lament. "We'll go in and buy you a toy car."

It was usually a Dinky, sometimes a Corgi. Perhaps it was a model of a Talbot-Lago, like his uncle's T150C SS Pourtout Coupe -- a car with a beautiful tear-shaped body with exaggerated fenders, designed by Georges Paulin, one of three. Perhaps it was a model of his father's SS Jaguar 3 ½-liter kept in New York, driven when the family would bounce between the States and Switzerland, until that pesky tiff with the Germans started and they settled in Scarsdale, N.Y. Or the Aston Martin DB2 that Robert Harry Lutz ="#v=onepage&q=%22robert%20harry%20lutz%22&f=false">

, who was an executive at Credit Suisse, later drove. "It's OK to like cars," he told a young Bob, "but you've got to have a career so you can afford these cars."

Young Bob Lutz had "behavioral problems," reflected the old Bob Lutz. Young Bob Lutz graduated high school at 22, an age when most people were leaving college. Young Bob Lutz used sarcasm as a weapon against his private school teachers. Above all, Young Bob Lutz wanted to be a car designer. Dad told Young Bob Lutz, "If you want to be a car designer, get a business degree first. Then, if you still want to be one, I'll fund your studies."

"Otherwise, if this is the best you can do, I forecast a life of great hardship."

Young Bob Lutz went to University of California at Berkeley, joined the Marine Corps Reserve's 4th Marine Aircraft Wing, graduated with a 3.8 GPA, started at Opel in Europe and never looked back.

Lutz left General Motors in 2010, but he is busy serving on the boards of two distinct automotive ventures: VIA Motors and VL Automotive, the latter which he co-founded with industrialist Gilbert Villereal. It's an enterprise solely dedicated to ripping high-tech extended-range gas/electric drivetrains out of the tragic Fisker Karma and installing V8 engines instead. At VIA, he is chairman of an enterprise solely dedicated to ripping V8 engines out of the Chevrolet Express cargo van and putting high-tech extended-range electric drivetrains in them. Lutz, the lion tamer of the automotive landscape, a man who flows through and across companies with the seemingly infallible grace of a maestro, is too busy to contemplate this irony.

"The Destino is coming along."

Fisker was obligated to provide VL with the software codes that control the navigation, climate and in-car entertainment systems. Lutz and Villereal had spoken regularly with Henrik Fisker. Then, famously, Fisker imploded with the grace and subtlety of a building demolition: Henrik fell off the line, and the Destino's development was delayed by three months.

"If this was 1965," Lutz mused, "the car would be on the road ages ago." At least it gave time to develop an inset chrome grille for the Destino, a piece of jewelry that Lutz figures will really spruce things up.

Of VIA, it's in "the last software loops." Another delay, another bankruptcy, this time both stemming from A123 Batteries. Not what you want at the last minute, said Lutz. But the electrified Expresses have already passed crash tests, and its software has been checked with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, and it's about ready to go into production in Mexico. And soon, here.

Lutz spent most of 2013 recovering from a herniated disc; for nine months, he couldn't travel. He stayed in his Ann Arbor home, teleconferencing and swapping emails with his various endeavors. It was all he could do. "A wasted year," he said. "All I remember was pain." If he did travel, he drove his Cadillac ATS 2.0T, setting the cruise control at 79 miles per hour. "Cops tend to let you go if you're under 80."

And yes, he still flies. Perhaps the most notable thing about Bob Lutz is his adherence to jet propulsion: his L-39 Albatros, a Czech-made training jet that can reach Mach 0.8, "a three-dimensional crotch rocket," he said with a laugh. He flies it every two weeks. He just flew it a week ago. Not as a serious means of transportation, but as a means of blowing off steam: "I go up and bore holes in the sky, as they say."

Lutz in his younger days: flying Douglas A4 Skyhawks with the 4th Marine Aircraft Wing in 1964. Bob Lutz Archives

He told the assembled audience some more stories, stories that reflected a life well lived. He told of leading the nearly blind Herbert Quandt, savior of BMW, around auto shows and listening to the dynastic industrialist fire out commentary about cars based solely on feel. He talked about the time Bill Mitchell called Lutz to Detroit to ask what he thought of his latest design, "something that will knock you on your ass," Mitchell had growled over the telephone. It turned out to be the 1971 Buick Riviera, the infamous boat-tail, a gaudy imitator of its original masterpiece.

"Gee, Bill," said a young Lutz, "I just don't understand it."

"Well, that's OK," replied Mitchell. "If you understood it, I'd be worried."

He told of the time Max Hoffman tried to bribe him. Hoffman, the legendary importer and distributor, was a man that if you knew him vaguely, you liked him; if you knew him well, you couldn't stand him. Lutz was somewhere in between. The two would always go to the best restaurants in New York, clearly for the sole business purpose of talking BMW franchises.

Hoffman started things off subtly. "Bob, how much do you make?"

"It's none of your business," Lutz replied.

Hoffman was slightly taken aback. "Well, whatever you make," he said, "you deserve much more."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if you would be my partner, instead of my adversary, I could easily set up a Swiss bank account…part of the profit from importing BMW would be moved over to you. Nobody would ever know about it."

"Mr. Hoffman, you're trying to bribe me!"

"No, it's because you're a good boy! I like you! I want to make you successful!"

"Maxi, it's illegal!"

"Well, you know," he croaked. "I don't think so. If it's between friends…"

He mentioned, off-handedly, meeting world leaders. One year at the Paris Motor Show, Lutz met Charles de Gaulle. The latter saw his haircut and asked if Bob had been in the military. Yes, Lutz said, the Marine Corps. De Gaulle appreciated this. We respect the U.S. Marines very highly, he explained; they are as tough as the elite French forces I commanded. A Chevrolet was on the stand; alongside and also on display was a girl in a shimmering silver jumpsuit that stretched and clung libidinously. For de Gaulle, that proved to be a far more interesting point of conversation. Understandably, they switched topics.

King Juan Carlos of Spain was another; Lutz had met him while working at Ford. Carlos loved the Granada, the wagon in particular, a rare and bold choice for a man who enjoyed such profligate access in life. What Carlos really wanted was a turbocharged V6 in his Granda Wagon. So, Ford obliged. And it was Lutz who delivered it personally to the monarch. "Because if you were a king," Lutz intoned, "you got a turbocharger."

Meeting King Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias, left. Bob Lutz Archives

No matter where he went, Lutz fed the image of his mystique as a "car guy," that most capricious of motorists. "In every automobile company I found that when I got there, my reputation would cause the car guys to come out of the woodwork," he said. "Every company's got them. But in a lot of companies, they lay low. Because they're afraid the financial system is going to brand them as irresponsible. But when I get there, it suddenly becomes legitimate. Then you could empower them, and they invariably do great work."

Such is the tao of Lutz, a constant battle between the "financial guys" -- who are all in New York, he dismisses, and which, given his background, is a considerable source of irony -- and the "car guys" in the trenches of the engineering division, who just want to be left alone to do great work.

No spontaneity, that's what the problem was. Lutz was a student of the classically trained coachbuilders: the Bugattis, the Figoni et Falaschis, the Antonio Lagos, the Marcel Pourtouts. The product planners he faced at BMW and Ford and GM, they would input all kinds of data into Excel, data gleaned from market research and customer surveys and -- odious of all -- "focus groups." Market segments carved, competition analyzed. Interior dimensions and mileage targets were predetermined before the car was even defined.

This, Lutz told us, was what he battled. It was little surprise that many journalists from what Lutz referred to as the "expert media," almost all of whom are "car guys" themselves, love him to death. "Maximum Bob," they call him! The savior of the car guys! The last bastion of common sense!

One would think Lutz was happiest at BMW, which developed the New Class right when he joined. BMW had a "car guy" culture but not at senior management, where Lutz butted heads with CEO Eberhard von Kuenheim, whom Lutz described as "Machiavellian."

You see, von Kuenheim would go to a lot of high-power conferences with other CEOs. And he would always find himself pulling into a parking lot of Mercedes S-classes with their chauffeurs. He had a chauffeur too, of course. But that man was operating the only fuel-injected, 3-liter BMW in the lot. "Why aren't you guys buying our cars?" von Kuenheim would ask the assembled delegation. And they would always, time and time again, give the same response: "Well, we like something bigger, heavier, more sedate, more tank-like."

Which was a Mercedes S-class.

Von Kuenheim went back to Lutz and told him, "You know, this business of light and agile and fun-to-drive, that doesn't play well with the upper class. I think we have to be more like Mercedes."

Lutz was aghast.

"We've got the ideal customers!" Lutz shouted. "We've got the young guys on the way up! These midlevel executives, who are gonna be CEOs sometime -- they're not gonna say, 'well now that I'm a CEO, I'm gonna get a Mercedes.' They're gonna stay with BMW."

As in any situation, Lutz was damn sure of himself. And then he dropped the rally the troops quote: "We got the future, they have the present."

Von Kuenheim obliged. But Lutz wasn't long for BMW, anyway. And today, as BMW "over-proliferates its product line with a whole bunch of answers to questions nobody asked," Lutz can pretend not to be surprised, as he remembers the time when he nearly saw BMW "coming within a hair of building Mercedes-Benzes with BMW badges on them."

Lutz holds the highest loyalty to General Motors, but he admits having the most fun at Chrysler. They were the underdogs. The K-Car had served it well, but there was an atmosphere -- inherited from the AMC guys, used to doing everything with nothing -- that there was nothing to lose. And of course, Lee Iacocca was in charge.

Iacocca showed no tact; he didn't like to be second-guessed. The two argued publicly: Lutz mused that he "probably should've waited for the meeting to be over" to start the shouting. One case in point was the 1981 Imperial, which had to reflect Iacocca's taste. Lutz grimaced. A supposed return to Chrysler form, they were "really nasty cars," delayed by six months; even then, they "didn't work too well at low speeds, anyway." They were laden with bustle-back styling and "tufted velour." Iacocca was then in his 60s, and like men of his certain age, these things just spoke luxury. At the very least, they drunkenly slurred it.

"Boy, that's really old-looking," Lutz remembers saying.

"It may be old-looking," growled Iacocca, "but 60-year-olds buy this stuff up, and when you're 60, you'll be buying it!"

And yet, said Lutz, Iacocca's decision to pick Bob Eaton -- who would steer Chrysler odiously into the waiting arms of Daimler -- over Lutz to succeed him was "one of his worst decisions."

At Chrysler, Lutz claimed the Viper and the highly successful Cab-Forward LH cars as his babies. But GM is what Lutz is most known for; GM is the company he started at and the company he left. When he returned to GM again in 2001, this time as vice chairman of product development, CEO Rick Wagoner would field emails all day from people. "Lutz is crazy! He's changing everything!" Wagoner replied: "He's doing exactly what I hired him for."

Lutz smiled when he told this -- he had the last laugh, after all.

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