Lee Iacocca is not the saint he puts himself out to be. He was the one making the business case for the Pinto (poor placement of the gas tank, shoddy panels and paint applications, and everything) over copying the tooling for the first and second generation Escorts. He tried to steel Ford out from under the Ford family. When that caused his ouster, he hopped over to Chrysler, where he used the bankruptcy laws to welsh out on a previously agreed-to contract with the UAW and put thousands out of work. Then, he used those loans to engineer a series of cars that aside from their engine computers and steering, were the most primitive, underengineered things to come out of Chrysler since the early Fifties (the K-Car), used it as the basis for almost every passenger car that would come out of Chrysler for the next ten years, and even forced his good buddy Carrol Shelby to put lipstick on a pig repeatedly to try to save Chrysler's performance image. Even the Mitsubishi engineered Dodge/Plymouth Colt/Eagle Summit and Renault engineered Eagle Medallion and Premier were better cars. His only good idea was the minivan, which he stole from Renault (Espace) and Volkswagen (Sharan).
Is there anything in this timeline that turns him into more of an engineer and less of a bean counter and marketer? Maybe he studies the first and second generation Honda Accords rather than the Fiat 124 and first generation Volkswagen Golf, Jetta, and Passat.
And I speak from a childhood of having to ride around in both the Pinto and K-Car, and experiencing both of them breaking down in the Smoky Mountains, in winter. Speaking as a white man from Kentucky, had I been eligible to vote in the 1988, I would have rather written in Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton than vote Iacocca.