Former GM president Lloyd Reuss dies

DETROIT — Lloyd Reuss, a mechanical engineer who rose to become General Motors president in the early 1990s, died on Friday. He was 86.

Reuss, a classic company man with sharp political instincts, was the father of Mark Reuss, GM’s current president and head of the automaker’s regional and international operations, global product development programs, quality and design.

Mark Reuss posted the news of his father’s death on Facebook.

Lloyd Reuss became GM president on Aug. 1, 1990, as part of incoming Chairman Robert Stempel’s executive team.

The pairing of Stempel and Reuss, two “car guys” with engineering roots during a period when top GM executives often rose through the finance staff, was heralded as the start of a new era at the automaker.

Instead, Reuss, an inveterate believer in GM’s longtime market dominance and industry influence, was demoted less than two years later, in April 1992. And he and Stempel, the first engineer to become GM’s chairman and CEO since the 1950s, were pushed out in the fall of that year when GM’s board, led by lead outside director John Smale, decided to clean house across the company’s top ranks.

Reuss left GM during a restructuring prompted by the boardroom uprising brought on by the Persian Gulf War, GM’s falling U.S. sales and market share, and staggering losses of $30.3 billion from 1990 through 1992. Analysts had warned for years that GM was too big with too many plants and brands, too insular and too sluggish for the number of cars it was selling — many near copycats of one another — and that it should slim down fast before it was too late.

Lloyd Reuss was born on Sept. 22, 1936, in Belleville, Ill., and graduated from the University of Missouri with a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering in 1957. He served two years in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a first lieutenant and joined GM as an engineer in training in 1957. He moved to the Chevrolet division as an engineer in December 1959.

“When I started, you didn’t say you were from General Motors,” Reuss told Automotive News in 2011. “You said you were from Chevrolet. The escalators even ran faster at Chevrolet than other parts of the company.”

In 1970, Reuss was named project engineer for the Chevrolet Vega. The model was intended to be GM’s answer to small cars being imported by Asian automakers but flopped because of quality problems.

That didn’t stop Reuss from advancing. The protege of longtime GM President Jim McDonald was named general manager of Buick and a GM vice president in late 1980.

It was at Buick where Reuss perhaps enjoyed his glory days.

He was named chief engineer of Buick in 1975 following one of the worst sales years in history. In 1983, the division set an all-time sales record. After his team traveled the world to benchmark the best auto plants, Reuss convinced GM’s top brass to invest some $300 million to modernize the automaker’s aging Flint, Mich., operations in the early 1980s to create what became Buick City — modeled after Toyota City in Japan.

“His small, tense body was always on the alert,” automotive analyst Maryann Keller wrote in her 1989 book, Rude Awakening: The Rise, Fall, and Struggle for Recovery of General Motors. “He rarely unbuttoned his three-piece suit jacket, and his smooth, hard voice carried the tone of an unrelenting salesman.”

In 1987, Reuss was named executive vice president in charge of GM’s vast North American operations. He was in position to move even further up the ladder as the nine-and-a-half-year tenure of CEO Roger Smith neared an end.

Reuss and Stempel advanced at GM in near lockstep. In 1986, for example, both men were named the same day to the company’s powerful executive committee and board.

Under Smith, GM had made major investments in technology and advanced manufacturing that backfired, including factory robots that often didn’t work right. Smith also launched the Saturn brand, another attempt to build a competitive small car even as the company’s market share fell.

Still, Ford Motor Co., GM’s smaller rival, posted higher profits than GM in 1986 and 1987.

Stempel, then the company’s president, was appointed CEO by GM directors in 1990. Reuss was named president but was not given the COO title — which Stempel held when he was president under Smith.

At his first public appearance as CEO on Aug. 1, 1990, Stempel brought along a group of executives, including Reuss.

Reporters covering the event formed a pool to bet on the number of times “team” or “teamwork” would be mentioned at the inaugural news conference as a way to mark a break from the Smith era. In their 1994 book, Comeback: The Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry, authors Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White put the total at 27.

Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait the next day reverberated through the economy and slammed U.S. vehicle sales. The invasion prompted the U.S.-led Gulf War against Iraq early in 1991. Gasoline prices soared, car sales slowed, and GM began running deficits.

By then, Reuss, regarded as an eternal optimist throughout the automaker’s ranks, was widely criticized for holding long meetings that accomplished little and for a reluctance to make decisions.

The Stempel-Reuss team didn’t survive. Jack Smith, who succeeded Reuss as president and later Stempel as CEO, was credited with turning GM from financial ruin in the early 1990s back to profitability.

When Reuss was fired, his son Mark, then a GM engineer in Flint, got the word from his mother.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Mark Reuss recalled in an October 2012 interview with Bloomberg News. The younger Reuss opted to stay at GM, eventually heading the company’s Holden unit in Australia, North American operations and global product development.

After Lloyd Reuss’ sudden retirement at age 56, almost a decade before the usual GM executive retirement age, he became active in charitable activities in the Detroit area.

Reuss had always been active in engineering societies, and in one of his charitable endeavors, he became the executive dean of Detroit’s Center for Advanced Technologies at Focus: HOPE — a position he used to promote engineering and manufacturing programs for inner-city residents.

“His retirement from GM was the beginning of a glorious period in his, and others’, lives,” then-editor Peter Brown wrote in a 1997 column for Automotive News.

In 2006, Reuss received a Distinguished Service Citation Award from the Automotive Hall of Fame.

“Lloyd Reuss’s unconventional career, which spanned from Big Three leadership to a nonprofit’s fight for social change,” the museum said at the time, “is proof that the most trying circumstances can lead to great things.”