HANENBERGER: "It's not my GM anymore"

Holden’s greatest living leader Peter Hanenberger has turned his back on General Motors, the company to which he devoted his 45-year working life.

Hanenberger worked at Holden in two separate influential stints. The first time between 1976-1982 he was seconded as a young engineer from Opel and earned the nickname ‘Handling-berger’ for his key role in dramatically improving the woeful chassis dynamics of Holdens. He returned from 1999-2003 as chairman and managing director. He is now 76 and retired to his home town of Wiesbaden in Germany.

He has watched from a distance as Holden has been reduced from a complete automotive business capable of designing, engineering and manufacturing cars to selling and marketing imports.

“This was just pure mismanagement to let a company down like this,” he says.

“I just couldn’t believe it.”

The Elizabeth plant closes today and with it ends production of the locally-developed Commodore and the Zeta architecture Hanenberger was instrumental in creating.

Hanenberger, who rose to be a GM global vice-president, was also heavily involved at Opel and Saab. The former has been sold by Mary Barra-led GM to the French PSA group this year, while Saab left the GM portfolio in 2010 and went bankrupt shortly after.

“It’s not my General Motors any more,” Hanenberger told motoring.com.au during an exclusive interview in Wiesbaden.

“It’s [now] a very short-sighted company.

“For me General Motors was a global player. Today General Motors is shrinking to an American company with no foresight, which is in very bad shape, which has missed the market.

“I believe we now have a management in place with General Motors that has no foresight.

“Maybe it fits into the vision of [President] Trump; America first. But how the world is going to work also in the future is not because of America first and America only. It’s global. I think there will be no GM in the near-future,” Hanenberger stated.

He is among the last group of inspiring Australian auto industry leaders; the late Ford boss Geoff Polites who drove the resurrection of Falcon with BA and the creation of the Territory SUV; Toyota’s ‘humble truck salesman’ John Conomos and Mitsubishi’s rough, gruff but charismatic, Tom Phillips.

But Hanenberger was the presidential one. While the others enjoyed the sales street brawls, Hanenberger strode above it, allowing his sales and marketing executive director Ross McKenzie to throw punches on Holden’s behalf.

An interview with Hanenberger was always an invitation into an exciting, inventive, analytical and dynamic mind.

It still is. Hanenberger is as sharp, as passionate and as interesting as ever. He’s lost a few kilos and shaved off the mo but he looks fit and healthy. In his office he proudly shows motoring.com.au a model of VE Monaro – a Zeta derivative that was never built.

Zeta was integral to a strategy plan first developed and implemented during Hanenberger’s reign and was designed to ensure the company remained as a manufacturer for decades to come. Other aspects of the plan included a reborn rear-wheel drive small car (which never made it past the TT36 Torana concept car), an SUV and a still-born scheme to market Holden in selected international markets under its own name.

But Zeta global had foundered by the time the Global Financial Crisis struck in 2008, General Motors went bankrupt and the US tightened fuel consumption regulations.

In the end the Chevrolet Camaro was the only rebodied global Zeta model to ever be built.

Holden was also last the number one seller in the market under Hanenberger in 2002, claiming a 22.2 percent share of the market. In 2017 that share sits at seven per cent and Holden is in a distant fourth place behind Toyota.

Massive sales of Australian-built Commodore and Statesman home and abroad had bolstered Holden’s earnings while Hanenberger was in charge. GM paid $600 million for the bankrupt Korean car company Daewoo out of Holden profits, still leaving it with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.

“Big disappointments for me were that a lot of things that we had discussed -- and had written down and had strategically placed -- didn’t come true and made this company [Holden] ultimately die,” Hanenberger said.

He is plainly perplexed that his seven successors, the first of them being American Denny Mooney who saw the VE Commodore and WM Statesman into production, couldn’t maintain the company’s success. While GM head office closed Elizabeth, he believes local management created the environment for it to happen.

“It is always the leaders and the managers who let it die, survive or grow up again,” he said.

“You have to be strategic, you have to be passionate, you have to be innovative.”

Hanenberger acknowledges the worsening exchange rates and rising fuel prices that hurt large car sales as the decade went on. But he also insists that good financial management could cope with the former. After all, Holden had strong cash reserves,

A smaller V6 engine in Commodore, replacing the long wheelbase car with Torana and opting for the SUV over the traditional station wagon would have all been appropriate product initiatives for pro-active Holden management. All these moves were in Hanenberger’s strategic plan. They weren’t enacted.

“You have to be alert and have good people around you.”

Hanenberger arrived at Holden in 1999 after missing out on a couple of big GM jobs in Europe for political reasons. While some people tagged it as a retirement gig, he understood the opportunity presented to him.

“For me it was never retirement, I always had this goal that I one time wanted to run a total company. And here was my chance,” he explained.

“I think I have some pretty good vision strategy and can also implement that stuff… As a CEO I could get my strategies and dreams in place. And I knew from my stint before what the capability of Holden was, which was never fully utilised. Never.”

Hanenberger ran Holden as an island, repelling the invaders from GM headquarters. Not that he had to worry too much about their influence. His seniority and strong personality was enough to keep most Detroit managers at bay.

“I couldn’t give a shit what they thought in America,” he said.

“They were only interested in market share and sometimes interested in what we were doing in profit. Otherwise we were left pretty much alone.”

Hanenberger’s goals were simple; profit through expansion. All types of expansion. Then invest that profit in more expansion.

“For me Holden didn’t have enough product, and the second one [priority] was I wanted to get these cars they had into export. For me it was very clear the products they had could be exported and they should go on to export.

“And I knew also that the market in Australia was totally under-utilised by Holden vehicles because I knew once people had the right vehicles Australians would drive Holdens. So expansion was first my thing.

“The next thing behind that was to accumulate cash, because I had that vision… to bring new product in to make Holden sustainable and that would have been a new platform.”

Volkswagen Group luxury brand Audi was the model Hanenberger used for inspiration

“Always, a lot of people heard me quoting Audi, because to me that was a company that got out of relatively small base and became a huge player.

“Why? Because they offered fantastic technology at an affordable price and that was what Holden was all about.”

Scoff if you like. Holden as Audi? But it’s a vision isn’t it? Ask the question, what does Holden stand for today?

Going global
While Hanenberger and his US ally, GM product czar Bob Lutz, lined up the Monaro as the Pontiac GTO and plotted the Ute becoming a Chev El Camino, Hanenberger also mulled taking the Holden brand international. He saw it as a defensive measure, in case a GM customer brand dropped the Holden model in favour of something else in the GM stable.

He was especially keen on getting the brand into the Middle East, because it offered the right combination of low fuel prices and love of rear-wheel drive performance.

“It was very strong in my mind,” he revealed.

“Because at this time already you had people who were interested, who were curious about other cars, products that would be differentiating themselves from others. I could see this with the Monaro which I had here [here in Germany after he retired from Holden] for two years… The interest I had from people was unbelievable and I could have seen Holden being sold overseas as its own brand.

“But in today’s environment, I don’t know.

“Most probably that was a mistake I would have done. In this environment today, I don’t think you would have enough marketing money to support this brand in five or six different countries.”

Hanenberger drove his talented vehicle development team -- led by design chief Michael Simcoe and engineering director Tony Hyde -- hard to produce new derivatives.

The Monaro, the Crewman, chassis-cab and Adventra AWD station wagon cost cumulatively about $120 million to develop and were designed as toe-in-the water exercises to learn more ahead of a dramatic Zeta-led model expansion. But after Hanenberger left, those models died as VE rolled out and the planned model expansion stalled.

The push into export markets also fizzled. The Middle East had been worth as many as 40,000 units per annum. It had cost Holden just $20 million to develop left-hand drive engineering and tooling, and each car sale was returning nearly $10,000 in profit. You do the maths.

The beginning of the end
Hanenberger last visited Holden in 2006 and he noticed then the drive and passion he had tapped and admired so much was lacking. Pet projects like El Camino had fizzled out, Middle East sales were slowing.

He noted more GM influence at Holden’s headquarters. It was something he had feared would happen when his preferred replacement (an Australian he still refuses to name) was rejected. Instead Mooney, an engineer who had never worked outside North America, got the job.

“There was nothing going on that was creative towards the future of Holden as in Australia, New Zealand and toward the export market. They just neglected this whole thing,” recalls Hanenberger.

“After me these people didn’t make enough out of it. They somehow sunk in a kind of bucket, suddenly Holden was off the map everywhere.

“I don’t know, I am speechless.”

The anger and grief Hanenberger feels at the fate of Holden is obvious. Here was an opportunity that was lost.

There are the counter-arguments of course; the well-documented events and reasons that drove the fateful decision to close local manufacturing have been given plenty of air-time. Hanenberger’s perspective is singular, almost lonely. It is of a man who tried to create history, but was foiled.

“I didn’t understand why this didn’t work,” he simply says.

But Hanenberger makes it clear he is at peace. He gave 45 years and seven months to GM and is proud of what he achieved. He still loves GM, albeit the globally ambitious company of last century not today’s slimmed down version.

He especially loves what he experienced in Australia. And nothing that is happening now will allow those memories to be muddied.

Which is why Hanenberger hasn’t been back to Australia or Holden since 2006. He and Ingrid, his wife of 53 years, prefer to remember the good times and happy days.

“My mind is still full of all the beautiful things. If I come back now I think I would be disappointed,” Hanenberger reflected.

“We won’t come back again. I have such good memories. No-one is going to spoil them.”

And with a firm handshake he is gone, Holden’s greatest living leader, quickly anonymous among the Wiesbaden sidewalk traffic.

But always remembered.

Peter, from all of us who appreciated an inspiring era… One when it seemed anything was possible… Thank you.