Lee Iacocca and the Death of American Manufacturing

Photo by Hush Naidoo on Unsplash

The death of Lee Iacocca — credited with “inventing” the Mustang at Ford and subsequently with “saving” Chrysler — has predictably resulted in all kinds of talk about what a great “car guy,” and all ‘round business genius, he was.

I know some people feel it’s tacky or inappropriate to throw shade on the dead. It’s never made sense to me that someone who you didn’t respect in life should suddenly become sacrosanct in death.

Give him this: Iacocca was a Master Marketer; that’s beyond denial.

The Mustang?

As Iacocca described it, it was just “a re-skinned Ford Falcon.”

It would grow into a gorgeous beast of a car, but that’s not what Iacocca sold: he sold the iconography, not the vehicle. But then style over substance was always his meat and potatoes.

At Chrysler, in the 1970s, bruised and battered by the invasion of (better made, less expensive, more fuel efficient) Japanese cars that dovetailed with the Arab Oil Embargo, Iacocca did two crucial things.

He got a big-ass bailout from Uncle Sugar — which is to say: taxpayers.

And then he “beat the threat of Japanese cars” by . . . selling Japanese cars, entering into an alliance with Mitsubishi and re-badging their product as the…