Steven Rattner, the so-called car czar for the Obama Administration during the time General Motors and Chrysler were being prepared for and passed through bankruptcy, has been talking. And he recently revealed that a paramount reason for the restructuring of Chrysler was to get a new management team. Execs running Chrysler at the time had been selected by the company’s owner Cerberus Capital management.
Rattner said that the government was looking for “one of two or three best management teams in the World.” The result was that Italian automaker Fiat took 20 percent of Chrysler and Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne is now also CEO of Chrysler.
Rattner has also said that General Motors would have been better off if it had partnered with Renault-Nissan in 2006. GM and Renault-Nissan were actually in negotiations in 2006 but both ended talks in October of that year.
Rattner added that General Motors does not need an alliance today to survive because it is in better financial shape and it has global presence.
But Rattner argued that GM’s decision not to partner with Renault-Nissan in 2006 was due to that company’s “lack of interest in change, lack of interest in fresh ideas, lack of interest in new people.” He added that this mindset led to “the bus” going “off the cliff.”
Rattner made his comments at a forum on the global auto industry that was sponsored by the Council of Foreign Relations. Carlos Ghosn, head of the Renault-Nissan alliance, also spoke. Ghosn said that when it looked like General Motors may fail, the Renault-Nissan group was scared because many of its suppliers also supplied General Motors. He said that if GM went down, “we would not have been able to assemble any single car in the United States.”