My excellent adventure with the auto industry

Editor's note: Print Editor Richard Johnson is retiring after a 35-year career with Automotive News that took him across the globe covering some of the industry's biggest stories and personalities. Here, he takes a look in the rearview.

Thirty-five years ago, almost to the day, my first assignment at Automotive News was to write a big story about dieselgate.

Yep, dieselgate, 1980s-style. Not really a scandal, but a calamity for General Motors all the same. With gas prices soaring, GM converted an Oldsmobile gasoline engine to run on diesel fuel. It merely destroyed the U.S. diesel market for three decades, until Volkswagen came along and finished the job.

Thus, a career that essentially followed the downward path of the diesel.

In between, and somewhat ironically, I got involved in creating the European Automotive Hall of Fame in Geneva, for which we inducted Rudolf Diesel into the inaugural class. On the wall of my den is a photo of Herr Diesel at the wheel, signed and gifted to me by his great-granddaughter Annette, who attended the induction ceremony.

At Automotive News, I kept brushing up against history. My first beat was American Motors in its last couple of years before being acquired by the Lee Iacocca-led Chrysler. My first and forever favorite PR counterpart was AMC's Jerry Sloan. Can't not mention Jerry.

Upon my dispatch to Europe in 1986, my first interview was with Jack Smith, the new No. 2 man at GM Europe. About a year later, I wrote a long, lurid Opel-on-the-skids story. German dealers were up in arms about something or other and had invited me to a secret meeting where they vented.

Barnburner of a story. Of course, Opel proceeded to embark on the best five years of its history.

Anyway, Smith went positively thermonuclear when he read the piece. I mean, it was as if he had a plutonium trigger, hydrogen core and natural uranium casing.

A few weeks later, we met at the Noga Hotel during the Geneva show, and it was one of those encounters where you could see his jaw muscles clenching together and his hands forming fists as he spoke, with slow, exaggerated composure, about the "punch in the gut" I had delivered him.

A few years later, after Jack had become GM's CEO on the back of his remarkable success in Europe, we were at the same table at an Automotive News World Congress in Detroit. If all wasn't exactly forgiven, he could at least tease me about misjudging the arc of his career.

The Opel story was my calling card for a while, giving me a reputation as a bit of a hard case, journalistically. Not long after it appeared, I arranged an interview with the 30-year-old Bill Ford, who at the time was managing director of Ford Switzerland. It was a productive, friendly discussion that included a fair amount of gossiping about the Detroit Lions.

Near the end of the session, when I guess he realized I was not out to get him fired, Ford pulled out a copy of the Opel story from his desk and said, "I told our guys, 'Let this be a lesson to you all.' "

My second big interview in Europe was Carl Hahn, then CEO of Volkswagen. Hahn was friendly to American journalists, which I appreciated. He liked our country. A quarter century earlier, he had personally unleashed Beetlemania in the U.S.

We talked that day in Wolfsburg about Ford-Volkswagen cooperation, which was in the process of unwinding after limited success.

We also chatted about VW's early moves in China, where just a fragment of an auto industry existed at the time. I couldn't understand why Hahn was so buoyant about the country's prospects.

A couple of months ago, Hahn, now 92, was named Person of the Year 2018 by China Newsweek magazine — a tribute to his pioneering and thought leadership during VW's entry into China in the '80s. Today, the Chinese ask: Where would we be without Carl Hahn?

While reporting in Europe, I began traveling to automotive installations behind the Iron Curtain — Skoda in Czechoslovakia, Wartburg in East Germany, the GAZ works in Gorky, Moskvitch in Moscow and, of course, Togliatti, that automotive capital on the Volga where the Lada factory was Russia's version of Henry Ford's Rouge.

My big scoop of 1987: Moskvitch planned to enter the U.S. with a small car; a story that went viral in the only way a story could in those days — it was picked up by CNN.

All the Muscovites needed to do was develop a serviceable engine, and if they ever do, I'll ring the scoop bell one last time.

I was then transferred to Tokyo, where American journalists were being stonewalled by Japan's emerging auto giants. Yet I found I could interview any Japanese CEO or senior executive I wanted — almost any time I wanted.

The same had been true in Europe. Automotive News could open any door.

The peripatetic Keith Crain had blazed a trail across the global auto industry you could drive a 1950 Dodge Power Wagon through.

Indeed, Tokyo was the best pure reporting experience of my life. I arrived in August 1991 just as Japan's bubble economy began to deflate. It was the first month Toyota Corolla sales declined — ever.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, Chrysler was coming on strong. Bob Lutz and Co. even tried to challenge the Corolla with the Dodge Neon. My most delicious scoop while in Japan was uncovering the details of Toyota's teardown of a defenseless Neon, having gotten my hands on internal Toyota documents that absolutely cannonaded with belittlement of Chrysler's engineering prowess.

In 1993, my Tokyo colleague Mary Ann Maskery and I wrote that Mazda CEO Yoshihiro Wada was about to be fired.

OK, my theory has always been that the story saved Wada-san's job. Instead of firing him, Ford — a few days later — installed three senior executives in Hiroshima to protect its 24.5 percent investment in the company and nudged Wada into a window seat, though, yes, he remained CEO.

Summoned to Mazda's Tokyo offices on the Monday the story appeared, I was escorted into the inner sanctum, where the CEO sat across from me — two chairs set up in a big room — and gave me a Jack Smith-style dressing down, complete with a prosecutorial demand for our sources. (This is where I learned something about the fine points of going out on a limb.)

Getting out of Tokyo in the nick of time, I went to London to launch Automotive News Europe in the mid-1990s.

More fun awaited. In May 1998, I attended a hastily called press conference held, bizarrely, at the London Arena. It was the day DaimlerChrysler was announced.

What a scene. Security guards wore matching bronze jackets; waiters circulated with trays of canapes and fruit punch; and Chrysler Corp. CEO Bob Eaton never once stopped smiling. Automotive News Europe colleagues Bill Diem and Kathy Jackson and I sat in thrall at this union that had not been rumored or speculated and yet was suddenly upon us.

Eaton, on stage, called it a "merger of equals," and I recall thinking I'd never heard the term before and that it sounded a tad over-optimistic. We spent the next couple of years watching DaimlerChrysler unravel from the German side, replete with more misguided belittling of Chrysler's capabilities.

In the 1990s, we covered a fast-rising Renault executive who did something unheard of in Europe. He shut down an underutilized assembly plant in Vilvoorde, Belgium, enabling Renault, a bloated ward of the French state, to reduce costs. Once the union protests began to die down, this was viewed as a brilliant stroke by the young executive vice president, a Brazilian-born Frenchman of Lebanese descent named Carlos Ghosn.

Combined with the success of Patrick Le Quement's Megane Scenic, it pulled Renault out of the depths just as Nissan was plunging. Renault seized the brief window of opportunity.

It acquired control of the much bigger Nissan and put Ghosn in charge, and both sides lived happily ever after.

As a reporter and later editor in Europe, I made a kind of sideline specialty of covering car company startups — the likes of Erich Bitter, Walter Treser and Claudio Zampolli (remember Zampolli's Cizeta, with the transversally mounted V-16, a mating of two Ferrari V-8s?).

What I discovered was that trying to create a car company from scratch was a fool's errand.

I concluded it was not just impossible to sustain a new car company, it was impossible to get one off the ground. Which is why you won't find me among the nabobs of negativism when the subject turns to Elon Musk.

Returning to Automotive News in the U.S. in 2003, I was stunned that Jeep seemed to be sinking into insignificance. This was the consecrated brand that with the Cherokee had begun to change the industry when I covered AMC 18 years earlier. What the hell happened?

In another of my razor-sharp calculations, I felt pretty sure Jeep would from then on exist in the shadow of Hummer.

One guy made sure that didn't occur. Indeed, my favorite interview was still to come — a session with the late Sergio Marchionne in August 2015, done with my eminent colleagues Jason Stein and Larry P. Vellequette.

I've written about it before. Suffice it to say it was the most pleasurable three hours I've spent practicing journalism since that long-ago Geneva show when Automotive News Editor Peter Brown and I — both of us exhausted from the morning of the first press day — plopped down on the Ford stand to shoot questions at Ford of Europe President Lindsey Halstead.

The interview with Halstead began with a waiter popping open a bottle of champagne. I recall thinking, "Remember this." I knew then I had the perfect job in a pretty amazing industry.