The BLEEPING Best BLEEP Quotes From Our BLEEPING Auto Execs (NSFW, May Trigger Obscenity Filter)
In Once Upon a Car, Bill Vlasic artfully employs quotes gained through over 100 interviews to make readers feel like they’re “in the room.” Assuming that Vlasic has accurately reproduced the original dialogues, we learn how senior executives really talk… (Warning: Graphic language after the jump.)
Jim Farley
On seeing Ford’s historic Highland Park plant. (He hadn’t previously viscerally connected with the domestic industry’s decline:)
“What a fucking mess.”
After moving to Ford and hearing a proposal for an ad campaign:
“What should we say? We’re getting close to Toyota? People don’t believe that shit.”
After the bailouts:
“Fuck GM. I hate them and their company and what they stand for. And I hate the way they’re succeeding. Ford is back because people trust us.”
Steve Feinberg
On his timing with Chrysler:
“We really fucked that up.”
Mark Fields
“Every assignment the [Ford] company gave me was a shitty situation that had to be fixed.”
On returning to take charge of North America, to his executives:
“This has the potential to be a fucking train wreck.”
Bill Ford
After someone suggested he come to the office less often, to give Mulally more space:
“That shit will happen when my name is not on the building.”
Steve Harris
On the lack of a unified manufacturer strategy in Washington:
“This is a shitty game plan.”
Bob Lutz
In a high-level GM strategy session post-Katrina:
“Up until six fucking months ago, people were clamoring for more and more SUVs and we couldn’t even keep up with demand!”
To Rick Wagoner on a potential GM-Chrysler merger:
“Rick, we can pick up all their assets but not the fixed costs. Shit, the first-year synergies alone are like $7 billion.”
On GM’s overly complicated program for grading all of its executives:
“Holy shit…these PMPs are not worth the fucking paper they are written on.”
On GM’s meetings, that Wagoner thrived on:
“arcane, sequential, orderly bullshit.”
On the government task force:
“[They assumed] everything was fucked up. Then the big surprise was how good our manufacturing, design, and engineering really was.”
Sergio Marchionne
First words on meeting Chrysler exec Tom LaSorda:
“I know who the fuck you are. Sit down. Let’s eat.”
On Chrysler:
“You have to be brutally honest with yourself. There’s nothing worse than bullshitting yourself into oblivion.”
To the UAW, during negotiations:
“Do you think I’m fucking stupid? We need to come up with a competitive wage rate and structure here.”
Jim Press
After cattle used to introduce the new Ram pickup started humping each other:
“This is fucking unbelievable. Why in the hell did we do that?”
Jason Vines
On learning that Daimler might sell Chrysler:
“What the fuck?”
On learning that Nardelli wanted to cut his Detroit auto show budget:
“You know what? Go fuck yourself. I’m going to quit. You [Deborah Meyer, marketing exec] and these lackeys like you are what’s wrong with this industry.”
Rick Wagoner
To the press at GM’s Christmas party:
“What do you expect me to say? That I don’t give a shit about [the workers]? That I feel like shit about closing plants? We don’t do this stuff because we like it. You want me to feel bad about it? Well, I feel bad.”
Jerry York
To Kirk Kerkorian, on Ford:
“They are so fucking far ahead of [GM] it’s not funny.”
On GM’s ever-smaller projected savings from an alliance with Renault-Nissan,
“What the fuck is the real number?”
Dieter Zetsche
On Bill Ford:
“He kept telling me how shitty his management team was. I am thinking, why would I want to take the job with this shitty management team?”
During a Chrysler internal product review:
“How shitty this quality is! How can we do work like this?”
After the UAW refuses to make concessions:
“I do not fucking believe this! What do we have to do to get what GM and Ford got? Lose $10 billion?”
After selling Chrysler:
“Of course I feel like shit. But I knew it was the only decision I could make [because of the UAW’s refusal].”
Almost without exception—that exception being ever-upbeat boy scout / Ford CEO Alan Mulally (who actually hugs Bill Ford when they first meet)—executives apparently talk like sailors. Okay, even Mulally. After giving a speech:
“You couldn’t tell that I was scared shitless?”
So it appears that Ed’s proposed movie would get slapped with an R rating if it kept the dialogue real.
Why the lack of creativity? Do auto executives know no expletives other than “fuck,” “shit,” and their most common derivations? Perhaps it’s the lack of name-calling. There are no assholes, bitches, cocks, or dicks (or worse) in the book. The best that Jim Press can work up after his new boss fires him:
“Sergio is truly from hell.”
Perhaps auto executives have all learned to hate the game not the playas?
The larger question: do these words mean anything special anymore? Or in 2011 would it be more noteworthy (and indicative of bowdlerization by the author) if the book’s quotations did not frequently include such words? Does their inclusion do anything more than provide evidence that the quotations are authentic?
Michael Karesh lives in West Bloomfield, Michigan, with his wife and three children. In 2003 he received a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. While in Chicago he worked at the National Opinion Research Center, a leader in the field of survey research. For his doctoral thesis, he spent a year-and-a-half inside an automaker studying how and how well it understood consumers when developing new products. While pursuing the degree he taught consumer behavior and product development at Oakland University. Since 1999, he has contributed auto reviews to Epinions, where he is currently one of two people in charge of the autos section. Since earning the degree he has continued to care for his children (school, gymnastics, tae-kwan-do...) and write reviews for Epinions and, more recently, The Truth About Cars while developing TrueDelta, a vehicle reliability and price comparison site.
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Ya'll should work on the floor for a while or in the warehouse, my vocab went down to 15 words to communicate.