If you’re a car guy, you know who Bob Lutz is. A forty-eight-year veteran of the automotive industry, he’s been involved in the creation of some of the greatest American cars of the last few decades: The original Dodge Viper, the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1, and the Chevy Volt were all built under his hawkish gaze.

Now 79, “Maximum Bob” has officially retired from his recent post as head of product development at General Motors, but he’s not ready for the canasta tables of Miami just yet. He currently operates as the head of his own consulting firm, Lutz Communications, serves as counselor to Lotus, and somehow still found time to write a new book, Car Guys Vs. Bean Counters. During the book tour for CG vs. BC, Lutz took a few minutes to sit down and have coffee with 0-60.

0-60: Tell us how you really fell in love with cars.

Lutz: My parents always had relatively nice cars—the first car I consciously remember at age two was a 1934 LaSalle, which my dad bought new. And I had a variety of uncles who had eight cylinder Alfa Romeos and aerodynamic Talbot Lagos with [custom] bodies, so I was surrounded by great cars.

But I had a natural affinity for it, in that by the time I was three or four I was a total idiot savant when it came to cars on the highway. We’d be driving down the road and I’d say, “’32 Ford…’28 Hudson…’35 Chevrolet,” and so forth, and my mother would say, “How do you know all that?” And I’d say, “Well, I asked Dad.” It was like an encyclopedic memory—once my dad told me what make and model it was, how many cylinders and so forth, it just stuck. And I can still do all that from the sixties backwards.

Where I lost it was kind of…late sixties, through the eighties, when I was mostly in Europe, and with the advent of all the Japanese cars, all the brands multiplied and I kind of lost track of the whole thing. But it’s back now—whatever period I’m engaged in, I sort of have the encyclopedic memory back, but the period sort of early seventies through mid eighties is sort of a blank for me.

That sort of coincided with a bland time for design, too.

Isn’t that the truth! If the cars had been exciting in that period, I would have remembered better. But they were eminently forgettable, especially, unfortunately, GM products.

I’ve been reading through the book—obviously, you talk a lot in there about how GM lost their way and managed to find their way back. Apart from them, what car companies would you say are sort of on the right track, and which ones have lost their way?

That’s an interesting question, and I’m not sure I want to get in trouble over it, but I would say all three domestics are seriously on the way back. Chrysler, perhaps, in third position, because they started later. Ford has a lot of very good cars; Focus and Fiesta are very nice. I think the Lincoln brand needs a ton of work. I mean, they almost have to start over from scratch there. And as long as they do Ford clones and use Ford architectures, it’s not gonna work. They’re gonna have to make the same massive commitment to the Lincoln brand—regardless of short-term profitability—that GM did for Cadillac.

Brands that I think have…really sort of passed their peak and are kind of wandering in the wilderness right now and wondering which way to go…Honda. To some extent, Toyota. To some extent (I hate to say it because it’s one of my favorite brands and I worked for them) BMW. I just don’t see the BMW-ness in the products anymore. They’re of undistinguished styling, no real performance advantage, no real ride and handling advantage, no vehicle dynamic advantage, complicated man-machine interfaces. Unfortunately, I think they no longer seem to be as fanatical about: we’re different, we’re BMW, we’re gonna [build] way better cars.

And as far as the Japanese are concerned—who would have thought three years ago that the top-selling midsize car in the United States would be the Chevy Malibu, which it was in May, and the top-selling compact would be the Chevy Cruze. I mean, unthinkable! Unthinkable three years ago.

And my theory in this gets me to the book. I think in the days of Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda, it was a product-based and engineering-based company. And they were fanatical about engines, they were fanatical about good design, they were fanatical about vehicle dynamics. And it’s now like…it’s just another company, run by, probably, a bunch of MBAs from Tokyo University.

Once you become that global juggernaut, it becomes harder to place an emphasis on design or dynamics.

It’s not physically harder, what it is is emotionally harder. The wrong kind of people begin to rise to the top. You finally wind up having all these highly numerate, hugely analytical people in charge. For instance, in the old days, it never would have happened that Honda is on their second generation Insight, and they’re still way behind Toyota. That never would have happened in the days of old Pops Honda. He would have pulled out all the stops, and said, “We were embarrassed once by the Toyota Prius, not the second time. This time we’re gonna go way beyond them.”

You’re an outspoken guy who’s not afraid to voice your opinion, and that definitely comes across in the book. Was that sort of a stylistic choice—this is who I am, I’m just gonna write like that—or was it a desire to get your opinions out there?

No, I couldn’t have done the book any other way. And that’s—I was on an interview this afternoon with NPR, and the guy says, “Well, I notice on the book, it says ‘Former vice-chairman of General Motors.’ How come you never made CEO?” And I said, “Because, throughout my career, I think I’ve always made my opinions known, whether they were popular or unpopular, and I think frequently they were unpopular enough that boards of directors faced with a choice of, ‘We can go with this highly analytical somewhat colorless guy, but he’s stable, we know he won’t make a mistake…or, we can go with Lutz. Brilliant results, but somewhat volatile and unpredictable. Prone to saying the wrong thing. What do we pick, A or B? I think we’ll go with A.”

Guys like me almost never make it to the absolute top positions. The only way they do is if they’re the owner of the company and the founder. Which explains Steve Jobs. But a publicly held corporation, they won’t go with the Steve Jobs. They’ll say, “He’s okay, let’s put him in charge of product development or design, but to run the company, I think we need somebody of a much more stable and predictable nature.” And that ain’t me.

Looking back on things, do you think taking the government bailout was ultimately the best step for General Motors?

Oh, it was the only step. We went into the thing with about sixteen billion of cash, which for any normal contingency would have been more than good enough. But we bled four billion a quarter, Toyota bled four billion a quarter, Ford bled four billion a quarter, Chrysler, being smaller, bled three billion a quarter…they hit the ground first, we hit the ground second. Ford went in with $35 billion, which had nothing to do with foresight but everything to do with them being almost bankrupt before the problems started, and they mortgaged the whole company, which turned out to be (in retrospect) brilliant. And Toyota went in with a hundred billion in cash, so they barely felt it.

Now, there’s been a lot of stuff written lately by learned law professors who…are going on and on about, the government bailout was unnecessary, General Motors could have gone through the normal Chapter 11 procedure. What everybody forgets is, the whole United States was out of money on ’09! The banks didn’t have any money. The only entity in the United States that any money was the federal government. But the government was the last resort in this particular case.

Now, was it the right thing to do or not. I adhere to the principles of social Darwinism and let the weak fail and everything, but when you’re looking at an industry like the automobile industry, on which—directly or indirectly—one in ten Americans depends, and as some of the right-wing talk show hosts said, “Ah, the hell with them. Let ‘em go bankrupt; we can always buy Hondas and Toyotas.” It doesn’t work that way.

And if we and Chrysler had been allowed to fail, every major automotive supplier in the United States would have gone bankrupt, which would have sucked Ford down, and would have done almost irreparable harm to the Japanese. And we would have triggered an economic recession which would have made 1929 look like a Sunday school picnic.

So I think—some shortcuts were taken, the legal ethics of which can be debated, but at the end of the day, I would give the Obama administration credit for acting fast and getting the job done. And I think GM, with the success of the products, is proving it was a company worth saving.

Last question: You’ve worked for quite a few different car companies in your lifetime. If you look at all of them, and could choose one car from their current lineups, which would you pick?

It’s a Chevy Volt. Yup. Because that is the most radical departure from the status quo that I ever achieved [at] any of the companies. If you asked me to give it to you by company, well, at Opel it was probably the Opel GT, one of the first programs I had anything to do with…do you remember that? It was a two-seat sports car that looked a little like a tiny little Corvette. Ford, it was probably the ’81 Escort—the European version, not the U.S. version. Chrysler, it was arguably the most memorable was the Dodge Viper. And at GM, [other than the Volt], it would be a close race between the Corvette ZR1 and the Cadillac CTS-V, which—it’s a magic automobile! [laughing] Holy smoke! I mean, absolute magic.

And people say, how can you love both of those at the same time? One’s 630 horsepower, the other is electric—the point is, they are both superb examples of General Motors product development capability. Think about it—no other company has the equivalent of a Corvette ZR1 at anywhere near that price. You get into Ferraris and Lambos and the Lexus LFA, you’re into the $350,000 range, where it doesn’t matter. And the ZR1 will suck the doors off the Lexus on any racetrack that you want to name. And, no other automobile company has anything that’s technologically on par with the Chevy Volt. If you look at it objectively, GM wins.

[Photo via Lutz Communications]