At Chrysler, Iacocca stopped production of some large models to advance the fuel-efficient subcompact Dodge Omni and Plymouth Horizon. He assembled an inner circle filled with former Ford colleagues, including Harold Sperlich, head of new-car development, who had jumped to Chrysler a year before Iacocca did.
After helping to develop Chrysler’s K-car, Sperlich used its chassis and front-wheel-drive mechanics as the foundation for the minivan -- “Detroit’s most successful vehicle of the 80s,” Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White wrote in “Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry” (1994).
“I always asked myself, ‘what would Lee do?’ when faced with tough choices,” Jim Press, a former co-president of Chrysler, said late Tuesday by phone. “He was a true visionary and the last authentic automotive tycoon, a tough-minded but big-hearted man of action. I’ll miss our visits.”
GM Takeover
By 1984, Iacocca was riding high. Chrysler’s profit that year was $2.4 billion, and Iacocca’s autobiography, co-written by William Novak, soared to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list weeks after its Oct. 15 release, with Bantam Books printing the millionth copy by mid-December. It spent 88 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.
By 1987, Chrysler’s footing was sturdy enough for Iacocca to consider taking over General Motors. He revealed in his second book, “Talking Straight” (1988), that he and Allied-Signal Inc. Chairman Edward Hennessy Jr. discussed a joint $40 billion hostile takeover of GM before abandoning the plan because of potential financing and legal complications.
“In the end,” he wrote, “I concluded that it might be easier to buy Greece.”
Iacocca stepped down on Jan. 1, 1993. His successor, Robert Eaton, would lead Chrysler into its $36 billion sale to Germany’s Daimler-Benz AG in 1998 -- a “merger of equals,” the companies called it -- to create DaimlerChrysler AG. Iacocca opposed the merger and said supporting Eaton was “one of the biggest mistakes I made in my life.”
Kerkorian Bid
When DaimlerChrysler sold Chrysler in 2007 to New York-based Cerberus Capital Management LP, Iacocca claimed validation for his point of view. “Daimler screwed Chrysler royally,” he wrote in Businessweek.