Was John DeLorean as bad as many said he was? Or as good? A man who knew him attempts a summing-up of a brilliant and controversial motor industry executive and entrepreneur. By Karl Ludvigsen
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It was too much to hope for. I’d nursed the fond expectation that when John DeLorean died, his obituaries might give the man some credit for what he’d achieved as a motor-industry executive, largely private achievements in the 1960s and 1970s that go some way, at least, to compensate for his very public defeats in the 1980s. And the first newspaper reports I saw provided factual statements about John’s death. This seemed promising. But when the Daily Telegraph headed its obituary “Dodgy car manufacturer who relieved successive British governments of £78 million of taxpayers’ money”, I knew it was cut-down time.
I can understand why the press in Britain has it in for John DeLorean. Their enmity began long before his DeLorean Motor Company failed and John was entrapped by a cocaine sting. Though he established his car factory in Northern Ireland, DeLorean made no effort whatsoever to cultivate the British press. They were kept at arms’ length from a project in which they were understandably very interested. Even worse, DeLorean hired a plant manager who had nothing but disdain for the press. This policy went hand in glove with the decision not to make the DMC-12 available in the UK until well after its launch in America, thus giving up any home-country sales opportunity. So when the DeLorean plant got into trouble, John and his people had no reservoir of press goodwill on which to draw. That reservoir is still bone-dry.
The Dunmurry plant should never have closed. As a recent TV documentary showed, it made a great contribution to the area both in employment and in bridging Belfast’s sectarian divide. The same documentary also portrayed the unseemly relish with which the new Conservative government smashed DeLorean’s dreams. The release of some export credits could have given the plant a chance to survive, but DMC was denied even this small concession. I believe that Margaret Thatcher’s view of John DeLorean was coloured by her youthful recollections of a free-wheeling Grantham entrepreneur, Denis Kendall, whose nascent car-building enterprise crashed in 1946 with debts of almost half a million pounds in the town where her father was mayor.
In fact a strong effort to keep the Belfast factory open lasted well after John DeLorean’s personal disgrace. Suppliers rallied round to try to keep it going. Many American dealers had learned how to sell the silver sports car and were keen to get more of them, albeit not at the volumes originally proposed. Some of them, to be sure, were painting their DMC-12s, a part of the process that DeLorean should never have tried to do without, environmentally friendly though it was to have a paint-free plant. Basically sound, the car was on the brink of being upgraded with a first-class turbocharging system.
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By GlobalDataNo one, with the possible exception of Walter Chrysler, was better equipped to start a car company than John DeLorean. John was one of the broadest-based and best-equipped executives ever to come down the pike. He’d been reluctant to move from little Packard to huge General Motors in 1956 “because I didn’t want to be the guy who draws the fenders, or something,” he told me in 1972. “I enjoy getting involved in marketing, in manufacturing, in engineering and what’s going on in the world, and everything else.”
Although he came up the engineering ladder to head GM’s Pontiac division and then Chevrolet, DeLorean fought hard against second-guessing his chief engineers. “You really have to work hard at not being a chief engineer,” he said, “although I’m also sure that the chief engineer doesn’t try to kid me because he knows I know a little bit about it.” No area of knowledge is more important to the leader of a car company, because engineers can easily deceive a boss who isn’t wise to their double-talk. With 44 patents to his name, John DeLorean wasn’t easily misled on technical matters.
John’s technical contributions at General Motors were manifold. He weaned GM away from X-frames, hazardous in lateral crashes, to perimeter frames with torque boxes at transition points. He was the first to tool up for disc brakes at Pontiac — though the Corporation wasn’t ready to use them. He found an ultra-simple way to give turn signals a lane-change feature without the integrating computers that some were proposing. His overhead-cam Pontiac six was America’s first in the modern era and second in the world to have a cogged-rubber-belt drive. Body-colour bumpers, now common across the industry, were a Pontiac first. John fought hard for individuality of components among GM’s divisions to keep cost down, instead of knee-jerk parts sharing that meant that less-costly cars had to carry expensive parts that suited larger, heavier models.
John DeLorean was promoted from Pontiac to head Chevrolet in 1969 at the age of 44, the youngest man ever to take charge of GM’s largest division. Then in a seven-year profitability slump, Chevy was a candidate for intensive care. Its sales of cars and trucks in 1970 were less than 1.7 million after a five-year decline of 30 percent. Back in the days when GM’s general managers had real power John revitalised the division, restoring the confidence of a demoralised organisation. Some heads rolled; he stripped three levels out of the manufacturing staff. Inventory turns were accelerated and new sales and marketing guidelines were established.
The result was spectacular. In 1971 Chevrolet sales were up to 2.8 million and in 1972 with sales of 3,060,178 units Chevy became the first vehicle marque in history to sell more than three million cars and trucks in a single year. It wasn’t a flash in the pan; 1973 sales were 3,446,162 Chevrolets. Greatly benefiting were the division’s dealers, whose profits rose 300% on average during DeLorean’s tenure. This, following his successes at Pontiac, confirmed an outstanding reputation for DeLorean among America’s auto dealers, who were to provide important support for his car-making enterprise.
In one of its least explicable actions GM promoted DeLorean out of Chevrolet after only 44 months. When he first heard hints of a possible move upstairs in 1972, he said, “I didn’t want to leave Chevrolet because we still had work to do with the division. But if I had to leave, the overseas operation was where I wanted to go.” GM trailed Ford abroad, an unfamiliar position, and John saw profitable opportunities in enabling local people overseas instead of the usual cookie-cutter approach of imposing American templates on decision-making in other countries.
But this didn’t happen. Instead John was promoted to the post in charge of the domestic car and truck divisions, a fusty bureaucracy against which he’d often struggled at Pontiac and Chevrolet. He soon found that people on the infamous 14th floor of the GM Building liked it that way. Many, from finance backgrounds, were nervous in the presence of someone who knew something about cars.
This was the environment in which DeLorean grew frustrated with his inability to influence the business, a frustration that led to internal dissension and his resignation from GM in April 1973. “Looking back now to the changes that have taken place in the auto industry,” John wrote in 1979 in his excellent and enlightening book, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, “it is even more obvious that I should have managed somehow to get the job done on The Fourteenth Floor. But I didn’t do it. And I consider that to be the biggest failure of my business life at GM.”
I was a consultant to DeLorean in his immediate post-GM years, when he set up his consulting organisation and took his first steps toward the creation of his own auto company. Finding a suitable engine for his sports car wasn’t easy. He had high hopes of Comotor, a joint Citroën-NSU enterprise that was to make rotary engines, but it never reached critical mass. Neither was a Citroën four – the engine in his first prototype – the answer. The PRV V-6 that was ultimately used was in fact a good solution, meeting US emissions requirements as it did in its Volvo version.
In setting up and running his DeLorean Motor Company, John made several crucial missteps. Ex-Chrysler Eugene Cafiero wasn’t the hands-on president that he needed. DeLorean struggled with his car’s engineering until Lotus came into the frame. John’s enterprise was scattered too widely with its factory in Belfast, engineering in Norfolk, headquarters in New York and sales operations under Dick Brown in California. Delegating, as was his style, DeLorean was too far from the crucial decision-making process in a small company that demanded — and would have benefited from — his close oversight.
Financing his dream was a nightmare for John. “At General Motors it was pretty straightforward,” he told me. “If you wanted to set up a new plant you prepared the proposal, sent the authorisation around and got all the necessary signatures, and then at the end you got the money.” He wasn’t prepared for the raising of money in the real world, especially in the wake of the very public 1976 failure of Malcolm Bricklin’s sports-car-manufacturing venture in Canada. The memory of the collapse of that gull-winged-car company was all too recent.
Thus John DeLorean was the architect of some of the flaws in his car company that contributed to its failure. Although often criticised, the car wasn’t the problem. In all some 8,800 were made during three years. Most are giving considerable satisfaction to their owners. They’ll gain succour from one mention in John’s Daily Telegraph obituary: “Meanwhile,” it said, “his gull-winged sports car has become a collector’s item, changing hands for around £18,000.” Could this mark the beginning of the DeLorean boom? After all, the explosion in Ferrari prices closely followed the death of their creator in August 1988. They don’t make them like Enzo Ferrari any more – or like John DeLorean.
– Karl Ludvigsen
Karl Ludvigsen is an award-winning author, historian and consultant who has worked in senior positions for GM, Fiat and Ford. In the 1980s and 1990s he ran the London-based motor-industry management consultancy, Ludvigsen Associates. He is currently an independent consultant and the author of more than three dozen books about cars and the motor industry, including Creating the Customer-Driven Car Company.
