Rugged Luxury
August 16, 2006 | 12:00am
If you were a car, what would you be?
For a man who has been in the car-making business half of his life, we expected a quick answer.
But no, Dr. Rainier Thiel, president and CEO of DaimlerChrysler Southeast Asia, found the question rather difficult, even silly, and so it took him quite some time to come up with a reply.
Apparently, it was the first time he had been asked to compare himself with an automobile.
"How can I answer that?" he replied in a slight German accent. "We make cars for people. We don’t turn people into cars."
We both laughed at his answer. Pausing for a moment, he went on to explain that because of DaimlerChrysler’s extensive line of cars, it is very difficult for him to choose one to compare himself with.
Finally he said that if he were a motor vehicle, he would probably be one with a high-displacement engine, yet fuel-efficient, responsible to the environment, and protective of its occupants.
He would also want to be fun to drive – a go-anywhere type like the Jeep, rugged yet luxurious.
Thiel was in town for the recent opening of Chrysler’s second showroom in Metro Manila. The new showroom on Pasong Tamo, with 5,000 square meters of space, used to house an American car company. Now, the white building bears the three logos of the Chrysler group – namely, the ram of Dodge, the wings of Chrysler and the word Jeep taking the place of the old blue oval.
We interviewed Thiel on a stormy Monday morning, the day President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo delivered her state of the nation address. Despite the weather, Thiel was in a working mood, clad in a business suit and with a smile and demeanor that showed he was ready for some serious action.
A perfect match?
Well, that was everybody’s expectation at the beginning, but things turned out to be not as rosy as predicted in the initial years.
Originally touted as a merger of equals, the truth that the merger was actually a buyout of Chrysler by Daimler-Benz became evident in the first two years, with the latter being very much the dominant partner.
Now, eight years later, the resulting $180-billion company has officially ended its honeymoon stage. The man who made the merger possible, Dr. Jurgen Schrempp, was shown the door last year and the new man calling the shots – Dr. Dieter Zetsche (pronounced "Zet-cha") – seems hell-bent on making the marriage work.
Zetsche himself was viewed as a contradiction when he was put in charge of the Chrysler division shortly after successfully turning around Mercedes-Benz. A German running an American company on American soil? Well, he showed everybody in Auburn Hills that he was truly different. He avoided the traditional executive perks, ate in the employee cafeteria, discouraged managers from calling him "Doctor," parked in the employee parking lot and avoided the executive elevator.
And Zetsche did not keep the contradiction a secret. In fact, he highlighted it. In Chrysler’s new TV advertisements in the US, he ripped off the shock absorbers from a Chrysler 300C to show that the car, even if it was considered an American icon, was now a product of German engineering. The American man standing behind him in the commercial could only respond: "Cool."
Thiel seems to have taken after Zetsche, his boss. The first thing he told me during the interview was that he was not the president and CEO of DaimlerChrysler, a title I had erroneously ascribed to him in the list of questions I sent him.
"I’m just in charge of Southeast Asia, and not the whole company," he pointed out.
He also had no qualms about eating empanada or drinking bottled water during our interview on the showroom’s sofa while construction workers were busy putting the finishing touches on the facility.
He did not even find it un-CEO-like to personally tell Felix Ang’s people to remove the conduction stickers on the cars displayed in the showroom (he was surprised to learn that Filipino customers prefer to remove the stickers and the plastic wrapper of the seats by themselves).
"You have to lead by example if you want to motivate your people," he told me later. "And you have to challenge your people, to make them feel powerful. You cannot do everything by yourself."
The Southeast Asian region, according to him, is comparable to Europe, with a population exceeding 500 million. "And the Philippines," he said, "is a market as big as Germany."
With the ever-growing portfolio of DaimlerChrysler products – from cars to SUVs to commercial vehicles to trucks (DC also owns FUSO) – Thiel is confident that they have a product that appeals to varied tastes and needs.
"It’s not what I want that is important but what the customer wants," he said. "If nobody wants a product, then no one will build it."
Thiel noted that fuel optimization is DaimlerChrysler’s main focus at the moment, designing and producing cars with bigger yet more fuel-efficient engines.
The company, he said, revived the American "muscle car" tradition last year with the introduction of the new Dodge Charger and the new Hemi engine; but unlike the original Charger and original Hemi, the new versions of those American icons now run faster on less fuel.
The Charger, the Hemi and the 300C brought fresh interest to Chrysler, and Thiel said top management is upping the ante once more with the introduction of more new products such as the all-new Jeep Wrangler, Jeep Compass, Jeep Patriot and a Jeep Grand Cherokee SRTK with a Hemi engine – the fastest Jeep ever made.
Under the Chrysler brand, the company is introducing the Aspen, the brand’s first SUV, while Dodge has launched the Caliber and will be introducing the Nitro.
"This year, the Chrysler Group will introduce 10 new products – more than ever before in a single calendar year," he said.
In Southeast Asia, Thiel revealed that intensive testing is being done on fuel cell-run vehicles to determine if such a technology will work in tropical climates.
"We now have several Mercedes-Benz A-Class cars running on fuel cells in Singapore. We’re testing them for two years," he confirmed.
Thiel alternately drives a Chrysler 300C and a Mercedes-Benz S-Class when in Singapore, and a sportier C-Class when driving along the Autobahn in Germany. He hasn’t driven in the Philippines yet, but he thinks that, given the chance, he would drive a Chrysler 300C – "big enough, powerful enough, and truly luxurious" – or a Jeep Commander, the first seven-seater SUV of DaimlerChrysler based on the Cherokee.
Asked to comment on the dominance of another German marquee in the luxury car market in the Philippines, Thiel simply shrugged it off.
"You can define being number one in so many ways. Are you number one in market share? Are you number one in sales? Are you number one in profits? The only thing I can say is that we are number one in luxury," he said.
Thiel, 57, considers Germany and Singapore as his "two homes" but prefers to retire to the rural part of Germany where life is slower. He has a son, 19, now vacationing in Japan on his own, and a daughter, aged 11. His idea of a good time is staying at home with his wife.
He invited us to go for a spin in the 300C. Under a heavy downpour, the mid-sized car proved to be very stable yet very easy to drive. And it did not hesitate in the leg-deep flood waters covering the road leading to Fort Bonifacio.
Back in the showroom, Thiel, watched as rain poured down outside. He maintains high hopes for the Philippines, he said, and believes that we Filipinos can be successful if we can only work together and help each other.
"You have to believe in the future, you have to believe in yourselves," he advised. "And you have to keep working hard."
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