Auto industry icon Iacocca dies at 94
Lee Iacocca, the automobile industry executive who helped launch the Mustang at Ford and saved Chrysler from bankruptcy, and whose cunning, ingenuity and swagger made him one of the most successful salesmen of his generation, died Tuesday at his home in the Bel-air area of Los Angeles. He was 94.
The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his daughter Lia Iacocca Assad.
For a vast swath of the American public, Iacocca was the face, the voice and the symbol of the car business in Detroit at its most resourceful and industrious. The hard-charging Iacocca, an immigrant’s son who rose to a vice presidency at Ford at 36, first gained broad renown in 1964, when he helped take the company to a new level of stylishness and panache with the Mustang sports car.
Iacocca’s career continued to skyrocket. He became company president, only to be abruptly fired in 1978 by Henry Ford II, the grandson and namesake of the auto company’s founder, in what was often chalked up to a clash of egos and personalities.
Almost immediately, Iacocca rebounded as chairman of Chrysler. He was widely credited with saving the company from bankruptcy by persuading Congress in 1980 to approve federal loan guarantees of up to $1.5 billion.
Chrysler, which had been the straggler among Detroit’s Big Three, came roaring back as Iacocca closed factories, dismissed tens of thousands of employees, slashed executive salaries, persuaded suppliers to accept delayed payments and wrung concessions from labor unions. He cut his own salary to a dollar a year.
In addition, he boosted sales by introducing the fuelefficient K-car line and the minivan, which would lead the auto industry in sales for years. He restored profitability in what has been described as the biggest individual corporate save in U.S. business history. Under Iacocca, the company paid back its loans — $1.2 billion and interest — in 1983, seven years before they were due.
“We at Chrysler borrow
money the old-fashioned way. We pay it back,” a beaming Iacocca said at a news conference.
At a time when the country was shifting out of a period of economic malaise, Iacocca seemed a straightshooting leader brimming with self-confidence. Media coverage portrayed Iacocca as an industry savior, and he added to his allure through aggressively cocksure TV commercials promoting Chrysler cars — and, in the process, himself.
As the advertisements began airing in late 1980, few could forget the image of the 6-foot-1 Iacocca, with aviator glasses perched atop his nose, pacing the floor of a Chrysler assembly-line factory, shaking a finger at the camera and declaring, “If you
can find a better car, buy it!”
Lido Anthony Iacocca was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 15, 1924. His parents, Nicola and Antoinette, had immigrated to the United States from Italy.
He completed a bachelor’s degree at Lehigh University in three years and, after graduating in 1945, won a fellowship for graduate study in engineering at Princeton University.
In August 1946, he arrived in Dearborn, Michigan, as an engineering trainee at Ford. Throughout the 1950s he worked his way up through the company and eventually caught the attention of Robert S. Mcnamara, the future defense secretary, who was then the company’s vice president in charge of all car and truck divisions.
In 1960, Mcnamara became president of Ford. Iacocca replaced him as vice president and general manager of the Ford car and truck divisions.
Iacocca saw that younger buyers were beginning to dominate the market. The design and appearance of a new model was critical. Cars coming off the Ford assembly lines had to be more than reliable, efficient and functional. They had to look good, what Iacocca described as “a car you could drive to the country club on Friday night, to the drag strip on Saturday, and to church on Sunday.”
The result was the Mustang.
In its first year, the Mustang sold 418,812 models, a record for Ford products, and it generated $1.1 billion in profits for the company. The Mustang was a phenomenon — it made the cover of the major newsweeklies and had a pivotal cameo in the police drama “Bullitt” (1968).
Buoyed by the continuing success of the Mustang, Iacocca earned a series of promotions that culminated in his appointment as Ford’s president in 1970.