Gerald Meyers, CEO who steered American Motors during rocky period, dies

DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY

Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes, right, and Gerald Meyers, president and CEO of American Motors, left, drive the 150,000th Jeep off an assembly line in Toledo, Ohio, in 1978. The landmark vehicle was a red Jeep CJ-7 Renegade.

Gerald Meyers once described his management style as “buck chaser.” And he was just 48 when he became one of the youngest heads of a U.S. automaker, succeeding Roy Chapin Jr. as CEO of AMC in October 1977.

An engineer with roots in finance and manufacturing, Meyers helped create the AMC Pacer and later rose to become chairman and CEO of American Motors, at one time the nation’s fourth-biggest automaker.

Meyers died on June 19 at his home in West Bloomfield, Mich., according to the Detroit Free Press. He was 94.

AMC, Detroit’s perennial underdog, formed when Nash-Kelvinator Corp. merged with Hudson Motor Car Co. in 1954, and now part of Stellantis, was routinely outflanked by its far bigger U.S. rivals.

The company — known for quirky styling and small cars that were often considered a good value — never reached the scale or profitability of the Detroit 3.

And starting in the 1970s, a period rocked by inflation and surging oil prices, the company faced a new challenge: rising Japanese imports that were less expensive and even more fuel-efficient than AMC’s lineup.

When Meyers took AMC’s reins, the company’s passenger car business, dominated with nameplates such as the Pacer, Gremlin, Hornet, Matador and Eagle, was in intensive care.

Its share of the U.S. car market had dropped from 2.9 percent in 1976 to just 1.9 percent in the early weeks of October 1977, when the new model year typically started with great marketing fanfare. The automaker was surviving on profits — about $5 million in 1977 — produced by the Jeep brand, as well as buses, postal vehicles and military vehicles.

Rumors swirled throughout Detroit and on Wall Street that the company would give up cars in favor of Jeeps and commercial trucks.

Meyers vowed to revive the company’s car business by developing and marketing niche models such as the Concord, a luxury compact.

“Everything that we do must distinguish itself as being importantly different than what can be expected from the competition,” Meyers once said. “Otherwise there would be very little reason for somebody to consider American Motors products. … ‘Me too’ is wrong for American Motors.”

With the nation in recessions in 1980 and 1981-82, depressing U.S. auto sales, Meyers looked to the industry’s 1950s and 1960s playbooks, when new vehicle designs were changed largely to make those on the road appear out of date.

“I think we should return to the day of planned obsolescence,” Meyers told Automotive News in fall 1981.

No stranger to the struggles of a small automaker, he was the rare executive atop a Detroit automaker who publicly supported Chrysler Corp.’s controversial rescue backed by the U.S. government in early 1980.

And he held no illusions about what it meant for the smallest of Detroit’s automakers to face off against the likes of General Motors and Ford Motor Co.

GM’s dealer network was “so strong they could sell the mistakes, like the Corvair,” Meyers told Automotive News in 2009.

“I try to stay out from under the giant’s footsteps,” Meyers, just weeks after being named CEO, told The Detroit News in November 1977, when asked whether AMC planned to follow GM into a key segment. “You get stepped on pretty bad.”

Gerald Meyers was born on Dec. 5, 1928, in Buffalo, N.Y.

He earned two degrees — a bachelor’s in engineering and a master’s in business — from Carnegie Mellon University and joined Ford in 1950 as a trainee. But his early automotive career was disrupted by the Korean War, in which he served in the Air Force. He joined Chrysler in 1954 and held numerous plant posts, including director of manufacturing for all of the company’s overseas factories.

Meyers joined AMC in 1962 as director of purchasing. He saw in American Motors “an opportunity for a young man to go and go fast, while my situation with Chrysler would have been limited for a while,” Meyers told the Detroit Free Press in a 1975 interview. “The sun was shining a lot brighter here.”

When he walked through the front doors of American Motors on his first day, Meyers ran into and shook the hand of George Romney, the company’s longtime CEO and chairman, who was just stepping down to run for governor of Michigan. Meyers viewed the encounter as a sign of things to come.

“I never had any ambitions in any organization except to be at the top,” he told the Detroit Free Press in July 1975. “I make no bones about my ambitions.”

He later moved to manufacturing, and in 1968 became head of the AMC Product Group — a pivotal role.

In the new post, Meyers worked closely with Dick Teague, AMC’s noted head of design. Their first task: development of the 1970 Hornet, a sedan replacement for the Rambler American, a successor to the 1950 Nash Rambler, considered America’s first successful compact car.

The unibody platform developed for the Hornet lived on for years, providing AMC with a series of notable vehicles through the 1988 model year.

The Hornet was introduced in the fall of 1969 as a 1970 model. Then, six months later, AMC surprised Detroit with the launch of the first American subcompact, the Gremlin, beating the highly touted Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto to market.

The story of the Gremlin’s creation is legendary.

Meyers had been pressing designers to explore a subcompact car and wanted AMC to be the first in the segment.

On a Northwest Orient flight from Milwaukee to Detroit with Meyers, Teague pulled out an air-sickness bag and began sketching what would become AMC’s next hit. He drew a Hornet, chopped 12 inches off behind the driver’s seat, gave it an unusual roofline, and called it the Gremlin. With reduced tooling, it made its showroom debut just 18 months later and over time racked up sales of 1 million.

In 1969, AMC CEO Roy Chapin Jr., determined to expand the company’s product line beyond cars, dispatched Meyers, vice president of product development and manufacturing, to scout out Jeep, owned by Kaiser-Jeep International. After visiting Jeep plants and reviewing product plans, Meyers recommended that AMC take a pass on acquiring Jeep. Company directors agreed.

Yet Chapin, a big believer in Jeep, particularly its potential overseas, pressed on, and in late 1969, dangled a promotion before Meyers. The catch: Meyers had to buy Jeep and fix all the problems to advance to a new post. AMC acquired Jeep for roughly $70 million in February 1970 and Meyers was named executive vice president for product in June 1972.

Later, with Meyers in the CEO role, Jeep became one of the first foreign brands to enter China by initially shipping parts there for assembly in the late 1970s, before a joint venture — Beijing Jeep — was formed in 1983.

Meyers viewed China as a low-cost place to build vehicles for export to Australia and never anticipated that the country would grow into the world’s biggest new-vehicle market.

At a meeting in June 1971 to review new car designs, Meyers didn’t care for any of the proposals from designers. Teague then proposed a wide, small car with lots of glass. He sketched what he later called a “grubby doodle” — a four-wheeled football covered in glass with a roll bar in the middle. It became the Pacer and was introduced in 1975, to initial success, with first-year sales that topped 100,000.

“We saw the Megalopolis — these urban sprawls that extend from Los Angeles to San Diego with no break,” Meyers recalled later. “And congestion, pollution, noise, energy shortages. From this we began to piece together the key ingredients for the Pacer. It wasn’t going to be just another car but a whole new method of transportation for the next decade.”

Beyond battles with the federal government over safety and emissions mandates that drove up the cost and price of cars, Meyers, as CEO, explored mergers with European automakers eager to expand abroad but with little distribution in the U.S.

In entertaining offers from foreign automakers, he called AMC’s U.S. dealer network the “last great hope to get instant distribution in volume for cars produced someplace else.”

He found British Leyland, which owned Jaguar, MG and Land Rover at the time, a particularly interesting company. But after a courtship with Peugeot didn’t materialize, French automaker Renault began investing in American Motors in 1979 and eventually took control of the crippled company in 1980 before selling it to Chrysler in 1987.

Meyers reveled at times in the challenges — quality, recruiting and employee retention, high interest rates, foreign competition — that AMC and its rivals faced.

“I disagree completely with [GM President] Ed Cole who talks about people fleeing the industry now,” he told the Free Press in 1975, when he was head of product development at AMC. “It’s a different kind of bird than before. We are coping and grappling with a lot of things that some of our predecessors never had to face. This is a very exciting time.”

He was named president and COO of American Motors in June 1977, just months before taking over as CEO.

In 1979, during an appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, Meyers pledged that every new AMC car would “not rust through under the worst conditions for at least five years,” and that the company would guarantee to repair any rust damage.

Meyers unexpectedly retired as CEO and chairman in January 1982, saying he “wished to pursue other interests and felt the time had come to turn over leadership of the company” to the new team he had put in place. While he remained on the AMC board, his resignation was the first big shakeup since the company fell under Renault control. At the time, AMC had failed to post a profit since the first quarter of 1980.

After he retired, Meyers become a consultant, specializing in corporate governance and crisis management, and a business professor at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Michigan.

He was the author of “When It Hits the Fan, Managing the Nine Crises of Business”, and co-author of “Dealers, Healers, Brutes & Saviors, Eight Winning Styles for Solving Giant Business Crises”.

In a 2000 interview with The Chicago Tribune, Meyers likened running AMC to a race horse, streaking down a straight track, failing to look from left to right.

“The way we did it in the ’70s and ’80s was crude. We had blinders on. We were fighting for a competitive advantage and didn’t know that there was a world bigger than just what you had to do right now,” Meyers told the paper. “People who didn’t fit or had unusual, outside-the-box thinking were ignored. That single-mindedness got us in trouble, all kinds of trouble, until the early 1990s when we took those blinders off.”