I clearly remember Jacques Calvet once accusing Britain of being “a Japanese aircraft carrier floating off the coast of Europe” because of its government’s readiness to court Japanese automotive investment and jobs.
Calvet, who was CEO of PSA Group from 1984 to 1997, died Thursday at age 88 in Dieppe, France. He was credited with turning around the then-troubled automaker in the 1980s by slashing tens of thousands of jobs and lowering its breakeven point by one million vehicles.
I was stunned when Calvet made that bold statement in the early 1990s.
At the time, Europe’s largest auto markets had strict quotas on Japanese imports, just a few thousand units a year per brand. The result for consumers was very high prices, mainly for excellent SUV models that had no real competition from European automakers.
As a strong believer of open markets – globalization had not been invented yet almost 30 years ago – I considered such a protectionist statement part of the past and a bad business practice.
Were Europeans buying Toyota Land Cruisers and Mitsubishi Pajeros because they were Japanese? No, because the only alternative made in Europe was the Land Rover Defender, a model launched back in 1948 and thus not exactly state of the art. In other words, if you were looking for a capable SUV in those years, you had no alternative to Japanese products.
In truth, European products were not at the same level as the Japanese in those years, both volume and premium automakers.
Soon after Calvet evoked the Japanese aircraft carrier at the Paris auto show, a book appeared that changed the way cars were built in Europe and North America in the following decades.
The book, “The Machine That Changed the World,” was based on a $5 million, five-year study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the future of the automobile that made the term “lean production” known worldwide.
In justifying import quotas, Calvet had said that the European industry needed time to reorganize to be able to compete with Japanese automakers, which in those years did look pretty invincible.
If Calvet read “The Machine That Changed the World” — and he probably did — he would have realized that the European industry had a lot of very difficult homework to do.
And, I am sure that if Nissan, Honda and Toyota hadn’t established manufacturing activities in Britain, the European industry would not have improved dramatically in terms of quality, reliability and productivity — which meant healthier automakers.
Despite our clash of views on open markets, I always liked Calvet. He was by far the most outspoken auto executive in Europe in those years. His only competitor in terms of venom-talking was former Ford of Europe CEO Bob Lutz, but he had moved to the U.S. in 1985, after creating the seminal Sierra model here.
Finally, a style note. In those years automakers were not obligated to disclose their top executives’ compensation, so I have no idea how much money Calvet was making or how he was spending it. But for sure, it was not on clothes. His business attire seemed to have come from a sale on the previous year’s models, not only in terms of cut and style, but also colors. For him, any shade of brown was perfect.