''I can't believe that we were so stupid,'' Lutz said of GM. ``People talk about Toyota overtaking General Motors [in global sales], as if GM were one company. But the truth is that we had not been one company for decades. We were different companies, each doing its own thing with little regard for the other. How can you run a global company like that? You can't. It was stupid. No wonder Toyota was cleaning our clock.''
The separate-but-equal approach to financing, developing, designing and manufacturing divisional cars and trucks yielded equally mediocre vehicles, higher production costs, lower vehicle quality and legions of dissatisfied customers, Lutz said. But GM waited much too long to fix what needed fixing, he said.
''The problem was right there before us all along. It was so easy to see, once we decided to look. It's not rocket science,'' said Lutz.
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