Amid the stress of life and business in 2021, the automotive world lost a number of influential people who had spent their careers taking the industry to new levels. Here are some of them.
Leon Edwards, who died Jan. 16 at age 89, led the National Automobile Dealers Association at a time of legal strife as it agreed to a decade of antitrust oversight by the government rather than launch a “crippling” court fight.
Edwards, a Chevrolet dealer from Birmingham, Ala., was NADA president in 1995 when the association agreed to an antitrust settlement that called for 10 years of monitoring after the organization was accused of making illegal efforts to limit price competition in vehicle sales to consumers.
At the time, NADA leaders, including Edwards, said they opted to settle with the Justice Department rather than face litigation that they said would have cost at least $1 million to defend, according to an October 1995 story in Automotive News.
As part of the Sept. 20, 1995, settlement, NADA admitted no fault, promised not to break the law, paid no fine and agreed to the 10 years of Justice Department scrutiny.
Edwards launched his year as NADA president describing himself to Automotive News as a “negotiator” and saying he wanted to improve dealers’ relationships with automakers.
“You don’t have to ‘give ’em hell’ in speeches to deal with the manufacturer,” Edwards said. “I think you can do more by sitting down with them in a closed room and give them your side and listen to their side and trying to work out a compromise.”
Baseball star Hank Aaron was only a car dealer for seven years, but he made his mark in the showroom as well as the batter’s box.
The major league Hall of Famer, philanthropist and voice of civil rights died Jan. 22 at 86. After retiring from baseball in 1976, he became an entrepreneur, opening 17 fast-food franchises and starting Hank Aaron Automotive Group.
The Atlanta-based auto group consisted of Hank Aaron BMW, Hank Aaron Mini, Hank Aaron Honda, Hank Aaron Toyota, Hank Aaron Jaguar and Hank Aaron Land Rover.
In 2004, he was named Auto Dealer of the Year by Black Enterprise, and his group ranked No. 15 on the magazine’s Auto Dealers list in 2006, with $136.7 million in revenue.
When former New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez embarked on his own automotive adventure, Aaron advised him on auto retailing with the words, “You’ve got to put in some time with it. If you don’t, it’s not going to work.”
Aaron sold his stores and retired again in 2008.
Dave Power, who died Jan. 23 at 89, may have set out to create a market research firm with his wife, Julie, with the 1968 launch of J.D. Power and Associates. But he unleashed an auto industry mania to improve product quality and make customers and retailers happier in the process.
Power’s Customer Satisfaction Index provided a standardized yardstick that allowed an automaker, or a brand or a model, to claim bragging rights over its competitors.
Power’s widely reported research was at first scoffed at by the established U.S. industry and dismissed as favoring Power’s Japanese-brand customers, who eagerly listened to what Power reported from his surveys of recent customers.
But eventually, the Detroit 3, along with European luxury makers, embraced the intel, engulfed it and used it to change how autos were handled on assembly lines, how vehicles were designed and how customers were being treated in showrooms.
Al Maroone, the son of Lebanese immigrants who founded a dealership group that became a major building block of megaretailer AutoNation Inc., died Feb. 17 at 98.
Maroone, who grew up in a poor section of Buffalo, N.Y., with six siblings, purchased a small Ford dealership in 1955 by pooling money borrowed from his father’s life savings, from his sister’s pension and from the remortgage of his father-in-law’s house. He expanded Maroone Automotive Group in Buffalo and into South Florida.
By 1997, the group operated seven stores that generated $700 million in annual revenue, and Maroone was running it with his son, Mike, when Florida businessman Wayne Huizenga came calling to acquire the business.
In a $200 million stock deal, Maroone Automotive became part of Republic Industries, AutoNation’s predecessor. Mike Maroone eventually became the longtime COO of AutoNation, which grew into the largest dealership group in the country. Mike Maroone told Automotive News that his dad agreed to the deal to give his son a chance to help build a national platform.
In 2013, AutoNation replaced the Maroone name on the South Florida stores as part of national branding. Al Maroone told the Sun-Sentinel then, “I’ve had my name on the building for just short of 60 years. I’ve had my day in the sun.”
Freddy Tanari, a former house painter who left his mark on the yearly extravaganzas of the Detroit auto show, died March 25 at 81 after he was diagnosed with COVID-19.
Tanari was president of Convention & Show Services, the general contracting firm responsible for constructing the Detroit auto show for more than three decades. He oversaw hundreds of Detroit Teamsters who worked frantically on deadline every year to prepare the exhibition floor, with its array of lights, stages, platforms, decor, electrical wiring and stunt events, such as vehicles magically appearing on stage amid clouds of fog and glitter.
“I was always happy being a painter,” Tanari is quoted saying on the CSS website, referring to his break in the mid-1970s going to work for the display shop that handled the Detroit auto show at that time. “I loved working in a display shop.”
But after that business was sold in 1982, Tanari moved to create CSS to win the auto show contract for himself.
“It was scary,” he said of his entrepreneurial plunge. “I didn’t have two nickels to rub together.”
Japanese engineer Isamu Akasaki, who died April 1 at 92, was a pioneer in the field of semiconductors credited with the invention of blue LED light, a technology that has rapidly spread across the auto industry and in general use around the world.
Akasaki began his research at Matsushita Research Institute Tokyo in the 1960s, and continued at Nagoya University in the 1980s. For his work to create “GaN-based Blue Light–Emitting Diode,” Akasaki and two colleagues were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with a slew of other awards internationally.
LEDs have provided auto designers a semiconductor-based light source that is less expensive, emits less heat and is more flexible in its application, which now includes interior lighting, indicators and cabin display illumination, headlamps, taillights, turn signals and brake lights.
Leo Levine, the former head of public relations for Mercedes-Benz of North America who epitomized and zealously defended the brand in the U.S. for decades, died April 3 at 90 following a struggle with Parkinson’s disease.
The former race car driver for Porsche in Europe and South America, behind the wheel of the 356 Speedster, also worked as an automotive journalist in the 1950s and was an author of books on auto history.
In the 1970s and ’80s, Levine was head of public relations for what is now Mercedes-Benz USA. Under Levine, Mercedes-Benz cultivated an image as a creme de la creme brand, prolifically wining and dining the trade press to communicate a higher appreciation for Mercedes.
Levine was also known for coaching Mercedes-Benz executives on how to speak to the media, and just as importantly, how not to speak to the media.
Richard Parry-Jones, who oversaw an era of engineering improvements to Ford Motor Co. vehicles as group vice president of global product development, died in an accident on his farm in Wales on April 16. He was 69.
Parry-Jones is credited with improving the vehicle dynamics of Ford’s European cars in the 1990s, including the Mondeo and Focus. But his tenure as Ford’s chief technical officer, with 30,000 engineers under his direction around the world, also influenced the quality and performance of Fords, Lincolns, Jaguars, Land Rovers, Volvos and Aston Martins.
Parry-Jones joined Ford as a young trainee and spent his 40-year career there before retiring in 2007. He later became a trucking executive, a business consultant and finally chairman of Marshall Motor Holdings, one of the largest auto retail groups in the U.K.
Brooklyn native Carl Spielvogel, who died April 21 at 92, had already made a name for himself in business in his first career. His powerful Madison Avenue ad agency, Backer & Spielvogel, quickly collected a portfolio of top-tier accounts and missions — among them, the national introduction of Korean automaker Hyundai.
But for his second career, at age 65, Spielvogel became a car dealer.
Spielvogel was recruited in 1994 to lead United Auto Group, one of the largest auto retailers in the country at the time. The New York group had 41 franchises in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, with $615 million in sales. Spielvogel told the press that he intended to double sales in one year.
In 1996, he took United Auto public in what was the beginning of a trend for large retail groups to turn to public trading. He stepped down in 1997.
Two years later, United Auto was acquired by Roger Penske and Penske Corp. and its name changed to Penske Automotive Group.
Steve Kalafer, a New Jersey retailer who also founded a minor league baseball team and simultaneously maintained a career as a film producer, died April 21 of cancer. He was 71.
Kalafer opened his first store in 1976 at 26, a Ford dealership housed in a Mobil gas station in Frenchtown, N.J. The store had seven employees, two gas pumps, one display vehicle and no office.
The business later expanded to eight stores selling 16 brands.
Kalafer was an outspoken critic of factory strategies that he thought disadvantaged retailers. In 2016, he sold a profitable Nissan store because of what he said was “the complexity of doing business with them.”
Kalafer produced 16 short films, mainly documentaries. Three of them — More (1998), Curtain Call (2000) and Sister Rose’s Passion (2004) — were nominated for Oscars.
Kalafer also was chairman emeritus of a minor league baseball team, the Somerset Patriots in Bridgewater Township, N.J., a Double-A affiliate of the New York Yankees.
Influential Detroit investor and industrialist Mort Harris died at 101 on May 5, having stimulated auto industry activity for decades.
Harris, a decorated World War II pilot, returned to Detroit to pursue business opportunities in the late 1940s and ’50s. In 1952, he purchased the Mercier Corp., a manufacturer of metallurgical products. He also acquired Erie Coke and Chemical Co. of Erie, Ohio, the nation’s largest privately owned supplier of coke for the steel and iron industries at the time.
After years of making a fortune in real estate, trucking and other businesses, Harris participated in a small group of investors who bought a cluster of aging General Motors powertrain plants that GM believed needed more capital improvements than they were worth. The outside investors turned the plants into American Axle and Manufacturing Inc. Today, the auto supplier has 20,000 employees operating nearly 80 facilities in 17 countries, with approximately $3.5 billion in 2020 sales.
Ohio retailer Edward Connelly, a former chairman of the American International Automobile Dealers Association, died May 12 at age 93.
Connelly founded Century Motors in Cincinnati in 1965, Century Porsche- Audi in Dayton in 1969 and in 1971, he and his Ohio business partner Richard Cronin opened Leacy Motors in Wexford, Ireland. Acura Columbus, which he opened in 1986 in Dublin, Ohio, is still in operation.
He later founded Dealers and Drivers for Free Trade, a national political action committee that addresses issues of free and fair trade.
Steve Berrard, who led AutoNation Inc. in its early years, died June 7 at 66.
Berrard had been a right-hand man to AutoNation founder Wayne Huizenga in the years before the business mogul began acquiring auto dealerships under the name Republic Industries. AutoNation is now the nation’s largest new-vehicle retailer.
Berrard served alongside Huizenga as co-CEO of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company from 1996 to 1999. Before that, he had been CEO of the Blockbuster video-rental chain, which Huizenga also owned. Berrard had also worked as president of Huizenga Holdings Inc. — Huizenga’s investment vehicle — and took positions with its subsidiaries from 1981 to 1987.
After stepping down from AutoNation, Berrard continued as a director for a time but shifted his focus to running his own private investment firm.
In 2017, he co-founded and was CFO of an online trader of powersport vehicles, RumbleOn, in Irving, Texas.
Syracuse, N.Y., retailer Billy Fuccillo created a sensation across Southwest Florida when he opened Fuccillo Kia of Cape Coral in 2010, hosting oversized marketing events and booming across local TV and radio, giving away free cars, ocean cruises and even a house or two.
Fuccillo died on June 17 at 65 after a long illness.
His old-school style commercials featured him promising “huuuge” deals on new Kias, and his results were so steady that Kia referred to him as the largest volume dealer in the world. In the years following the Great Recession, he hosted live showroom events during which he televised drawings for free vehicles and other lavish prizes.
In an interview with Automotive News during the period, he explained that the cost of giving away a free house to a customer was little more than an ordinary advertising campaign — but the benefit of doing so lasted in shoppers’ minds much longer than an ad.
Carl Levin, the longtime senator from Michigan and an influential voice for the auto industry in Washington, died July 21 at 87.
The one-time Detroit auto worker and UAW member spoke up to protect the Detroit 3 and their work forces after the Lehman Brothers collapse and the Great Recession, ensuring that a federal rescue would take place.
Levin also backed the recession-era Cash for Clunkers program to stimulate new vehicle production as the industry struggled to its feet. He also pushed for an overhaul of U.S. fuel economy standards and urged the federal government to take more aggressive steps to support the sale of plug-in electric vehicles and lower their prices.
Lawrence Kull, 70, president of Burns Kull Automotive Group of New Jersey, died July 21 of leukemia and prostate cancer.
The longtime auto dealer joined his father’s Honda-Pontiac dealership in 1979 after attending the University of Vermont on a football scholarship and working for Xerox briefly. Five years later, the dealership established a management company to oversee the family’s growing collection of stores.
Kull was president of the nine- dealership group for 37 years. He was a former chairman of the American International Automobile Dealers Association and the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers.
Johan van Zyl, chairman of Toyota South Africa, died of COVID- 19 complications in Pretoria on July 30. He was 63.
Van Zyl started at Toyota in 1993 as the director for the sales and dealer network. He was named CEO of Toyota South Africa in 2003 and went on to a number of senior roles. In June 2009, van Zyl was appointed a managing officer of Toyota Motor Corp., and became CEO of the Africa Region in April 2013. In 2015, he took on the role of CEO of Toyota Motor Europe, also becoming a senior managing officer of the parent company in 2017.
He retired from his European position this year but remained as chairman of Toyota South Africa on his return to South Africa.
Melanie Walker, a rarity as a female CEO of a Japanese manufacturing company, died on July 31 at 62.
Walker was CEO of the Japanese-based automotive plastics supplier Tsuchiya Group North America and its Bloomington, Ind., business unit Tasus Corp. She was named to manage Tasus in 1994 at age 34, led it through its renaming as Tsuchiya and oversaw its expansion to five sites with nearly 600 employees.
But the company’s steady growth had a downside to her on a personal level, the CEO told Automotive News’ sibling publication Plastics News in 2014: She said the company had grown so big that she no longer had a one-on-one relationship with its employees.
“That’s why I’m so bent on no more than 200 employees [per plant],” Walker said during a visit to one of its plants, in Florence, Ala. “I want the plant managers and the management team to really know every employee.”
Gerd Klauss, a former executive with Mercedes-Benz who went on to head Audi of America and later Volkswagen Group of America, died Aug. 7 at 76.
A native of Germany, Klauss studied economics at universities in Freiberg and Bonn and at Harvard University in the U.S. He began his automotive career with Mercedes-Benz of America in 1978, and in 1992, he was named head of Audi of America.
Klauss, with a background in marketing, sought to reposition Audi down-market in the mid-1990s, to shift the brand away from directly competing at price points against German rivals Mercedes and BMW. In 1999, he became CEO of Volkswagen Group of America. He retired Dec. 31, 2004.
California Toyota dealer Fritz Hitchcock died on Aug. 14 as the result of a fall. He was 81.
Hitchcock opened his first dealership in 1971 and expanded his retail operations to include BMW, Ford, Hyundai, Toyota and Volkswagen, but eventually sold most of his holdings to focus primarily on Toyota through Hitchcock Automotive Resources in City of Industry, Calif.
He owned three Southern California Toyota stores — Toyota Hills Toyota, Northridge Toyota and Santa Barbara Toyota.
Hitchcock was a critic of U.S. tariffs on imported vehicles and an outspoken advocate for free trade in an era of public and government calls for actions to restrict the growth of the Japanese auto industry in the U.S. He co-founded the Automobile Freedom International Trade Political Action Committee, and also was chair of the American International Automobile Dealers Association.
Greg Wohlford, the union official who helped run General Motors’ COVID-19 ventilator production out of his home plant in Kokomo, Ind., died Sept. 6. He had been admitted to the hospital two weeks earlier after being diagnosed with COVID-19 and put on a ventilator.
Wohlford was in his second three-year term as shop chair of Kokomo’s UAW Local 292 and a key advocate for the plant and its workers. From April through August, about 1,000 workers there built 30,000 ventilators after GM agreed to a $490 million government contract to partner with ventilator manufacturer Ventec Life Systems.
Wohlford’s age was not revealed, but Local 292 President Matt Collins said Wohlford was in his early 60s and preparing for retirement.
John Patrick Tierney, former CEO of Chrysler Financial Corp. during the late 1980s and early 1990s, died Sept. 20 at 90.
Tierney entered the Chrysler organization through American Motors, the automaker Chrysler acquired in 1987. Tierney joined AMC in 1962 and rose through the ranks for the next 25 years to become CFO.
On acquiring AMC, Chrysler made Tierney chairman and CEO of Chrysler Financial, a role he maintained until he retired in 1994.
Robert Braner, the former CEO of Lotus Cars USA, died Sept. 27 at 83.
Braner had been a luxury-car dealer in Southern California for two decades, as owner of Beverly Hills Porsche-Audi, when he became involved in more high-level dealings with international auto manufacturers. After running a private investment company, Braner helped negotiate the purchase of Automobili Lamborghini on behalf of the Indonesian company Megatech from then-Chrysler Corp. in 1994.
Braner became CEO of Lamborghini USA Inc. And in 2006, at age 67, he was recruited as CEO of Lotus Cars USA Inc., with a plan to execute an expansion of the brand and its dealer network in the U.S. for its parent company, Proton Holdings Berhad of Malaysia.
Gene Friedman, the “Taxi King” of Manhattan, died Oct. 24 at 50. While not directly a part of the auto industry, Friedman’s path to enormous wealth inadvertently stimulated a new business channel in the world industry.
Friedman amassed a personal fortune estimated at more than $500 million by acquiring New York City taxi medallions. Medallions are the market-control documents that permit an individual to operate a taxi in the city. Friedman’s competition to accumulate 250 medallions helped inflate the price of the hard-to-obtain permits beyond the reach of would-be taxi drivers, pushing their going price well above $1 million each. That hyperinflation — making it difficult for aspiring drivers to enter the taxi business — opened the door for the runaway success of the independent freelance-driver concept of Uber and Lyft. The rise of those business platforms, in turn, ignited unprecedented new interest in connected-vehicle services, autonomous-driving technologies and robotaxis.
In his way, without intending to, Friedman helped foster demand for driving technologies of the future.
California auto racer Bob Bondurant, who died on Nov. 12 at 88, was not so much an auto industry insider as an outside influencer. His Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving in Chandler, Ariz., which he opened after a racetrack crash ended his professional circuit career, made a generation of auto industry executives, movie stars, stunt drivers, security personnel and well-heeled enthusiasts appreciate how cars are supposed to handle, speed, turn and brake. The Bondurant school graduated more than 500,000 drivers since 1968.
Bondurant himself became a kind of industry-recognized seal of approval for performance driving, a subtle layer of branding for automakers who wanted to communicate racetrack credibility. Bondurant allied himself over the years with Datsun, Porsche and Ford.
A family feud resulted in him losing the facility that operated the driving school in 2019, and his website claimed future plans were under development.
Lia Auto Group founder Bill Lia Sr. died on Nov. 13 at 85, having parlayed his middle school education to create an auto retail business with 1,500 employees and 22 locations across New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
The Brooklyn-raised Lia, from a family of 11 children, worked as a coat cutter in New York’s Garment District, and for extra income, he also sold coats at area flea markets. At 42, he invested his life savings in a Honda dealership in Delmar, N.Y. It would lead to a retail organization with sales of approximately $1 billion.
Lia continued reporting to work at the company until recently, according to an obituary published on his funeral home’s website. He also pressed his company to keep its stores modernized.
“People keep asking us for our store designs,” Lia told Automotive News in 2014, as the company finished building its 19th dealership. “We want to keep everything modern and up to date.
“It’s like the restaurant business,” he said. “If the restaurant isn’t a nice place and people don’t want to go there, it doesn’t matter how good the food is.”
Don Hudler, a General Motors sales and marketing executive who helped create and run Saturn, died Dec. 9 at 87.
Hudler moved from a comfortable executive role at Cadillac to become vice president of sales, service and marketing for Saturn, the venture created by GM in the 1980s to woo small-car market share away from the Japanese. Hudler marketed Saturn as “a different kind of car company,” and the brand earned the industry’s top spot for customer service and loyalty in its early years. He became president of Saturn in 1995 and chairman in 1997.
He left GM to become chairman of Saturn Retail Enterprises, a GM subsidiary that grew to own more than 60 stores. But when Texas regulators objected to the automaker having an ownership interest in dealerships, Hudler sold his GM stock so he could personally buy six stores in the Dallas and Houston areas.
But Saturn’s fortunes quickly declined. A decade later, when GM’s attempt to sell Saturn to Penske Automotive collapsed, Hudler told Automotive News that he was in shock that the brand he helped build had reached the end of its road.
“I never like to admit that I don’t have a plan,” he said in October 2009. “But I was stunned by it.”
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