As Rick Wagoner rides off to whatever biz-school sinecure he's destined for, his nine years at the helm of General Motors Corp. will be evaluated in many ways and by many hands.
And yet, fairly or not, auto company chief executives are best remembered for the cars produced during their tenure. People still refer to the Cadillac Cimarron as a "Roger Smith" car, and the Ford Mustang will somehow always belong eternally to Lee Iacocca.
The four vehicles offered here are emblematic of Wagoner's time and leadership, of challenges met and opportunities missed.
They will forever be Wagoner cars.
General Motors EV1
Wagoner has said the biggest mistake he ever made as chief executive was killing the EV1, GM's revolutionary electric car, and failing to direct more resources to hybrid gas-electric research. This admission is acutely painful for green-car advocates who know GM squandered its early lead in electric-hybrid technology.
The EV1 began in the 1990s as a response to a zero-emission vehicle mandate by California's Air Resources Board. GM built about 2,500 EV1s in 1996-99 and leased them to consumers in California and Arizona.
When, finally, GM and other automakers managed to get California to soften its zero-emission mandate in 2002, Wagoner promptly canceled the program. GM ordered the cars confiscated and destroyed.
From an accountant's point of view -- and Wagoner was, first of all, a counter of beans -- the decision was correct. The cars cost far more than GM could sell them for, and maintaining a service infrastructure for the exotic cars was also expensive. Then there was the potential liability; there were reported cases of the batteries overheating.
But from a public relations perspective, the decision to haul off and crush the cars was an unmitigated disaster. EV1 advocates picketed outside GM's West Coast offices in Thousand Oaks, spammed the automaker with angry e-mails and ranted on TV news programs.
The crowning blow was the release of Chris Paine's 2006 documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" The film alleged there was a grand conspiracy among the oil companies, the government and the car companies. The EV1 saga was thus a failure of both style and substance.
Hummer H2
It is too easy to say that the Hummer H2, a civilian riff on the military's "HMMWV" (High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee), is an example of everything that was indictable and wrong about GM: an oversized, guzzling Goliath; a blundering bully of the road; rude and reactionary.
