(FORTUNE Magazine) – WHILE A STUDENT in high school, Robert C. Stempel worked after hours and summers at an automobile garage in his hometown of Bloomfield, New Jersey. Like most teenagers he had his own ideas about how cars should work, and he frequently complained to his boss, Edward Uniss. Uniss told him: ''If you really want to change the way cars are made, you have to go to Detroit.'' Nearly four decades later, Stempel, 54, has his big chance. On September 1 he became General Motors' 17th president, its youngest in 30 years. If he wants to change things, his timing could not be better; GM is in turmoil. ''He's walking into a buzz saw,'' says Keith Crain, publisher of Automotive News, who has known Stempel for 15 years. During the first six months of 1987, GM sold 22% fewer cars than a year ago, while rival Ford sold 1.7% more during the same period. Almost one million unsold GM cars were piled up on dealers' lots in August -- a quarter of 1987's production. Despite denials, rumors swirl that Chairman Roger B. Smith, 62, will take early retirement because of a disfiguring skin condition brought on by stress. Whenever Smith retires, Stempel will be one of the candidates to succeed him. Being president of GM, however, is akin to being Vice President of the U.S.: While you are close to the throne, you rarely get to sit on it. In the GM system, chairmen tend to come from the finance department and run the staff functions; presidents are engineers who handle operating divisions. Only one man since Alfred P. Sloan Jr. has held both jobs. Stempel won the presidency after a well-publicized horse race with Lloyd E. Reuss, another former engineer, who is executive vice president in charge of automotive operations. Stempel is known as the consummate ''car guy'': someone who understands all the ingredients of an automobile. In GM jargon he has ''sat in all the seats'' -- been around the company. But because of GM's companywide problems, it is hard for him to claim many visible successes. Both Chevrolet and Pontiac lost market share during and after his stints as general manager. The Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac group, which he headed from 1984 to 1986, is GM's worst problem now. Stempel himself concedes that he has no particular expertise in design -- one of the areas where GM is hurting most. Nor is he known as an astute marketer. Some auto industry observers believe the company's troubles are so deep-seated that neither Stempel nor any other GM careerist in the presidency could put it back on track. Inside the company Stempel was a popular choice. Six-foot-four and heavyset (he won't reveal his weight), the one-time Worcester Polytechnic football player still has the easy affability of an athlete. He appears equally at home explaining the workings of an overhead camshaft engine or delivering a sales pitch. He gets especially passionate about high-performance cars such as the Aerotech, which was built to test GM's advanced engines. In August the Aerotech set a world speed record over an oval track when it reached 257.123 miles per hour (see model on page 105). Says William E. Hoglund, a finance man who succeeded Stempel at the Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac group: ''Bob has a great ability to take a complex problem and explain it without making me feel dumb.'' Unpretentious and easy to work with, Stempel is the sort of guy who pumps his own gas at self-service stations. At one corporate outpost he ordered glass doors installed in his office to encourage better communication with the troops. In 1981 he charmed GM personnel in West Germany by arranging for a tape of the Detroit Lions' Thanksgiving Day football game to be flown overseas. Off the job, Stempel is an exceptionally private man, and he never talks , about his wife and children. In 1975 they suffered a harrowing ordeal when one of their three children, Timothy, then 13, was kidnapped at gunpoint near home and held captive in the trunk of a car for two days. Stempel played a key role in the boy's release. He called in GM security despite a warning not to from the kidnappers. With FBI agents and local police following his every move, he then rounded up $150,000 in ransom money and waited three hours for the kidnappers to appear. ''I was scared as hell,'' he said afterward. Timothy was released unharmed, and most of the ransom was recovered. Although the kidnappers were arrested and got long prison terms, the incident is something Stempel says he ''absolutely will not discuss.'' AS PRESIDENT, his first job will be to slim down GM's components operations, which make brakes, axles, radiators, and other parts. Because GM manufactures 70% of its own parts, vs. 50% for Ford and 30% for Chrysler, it is the highest-cost producer in Detroit. Stempel wants to weed out parts made within the company that use little high technology or are widely available elsewhere. The United Auto Workers will be watching his moves carefully. Although the union has chosen Ford to be its strike target when the contract expires September 14, GM could also face a walkout. Because of its high costs and slow sales, GM cannot afford as generous a settlement with the UAW as Ford. Around GM Stempel has a reputation for taking a long while to make up his mind. He is a great believer in group decision-making. ''I don't take a vote,'' he says. ''But I'm convinced that two heads are better than one, and three heads are even better.'' Critics say the technique is ponderous. Cadillac chief John O. Grettenberger, who worked for Stempel at Opel, is a Stempel fan but concedes that sometimes ''we would rehash things at such length that you'd wonder if we hadn't already made the decision long before we actually did.''

Talking to people does not always eliminate mistakes. Following the 1979 gas price spike, Stempel decided to stop production of the big Pontiac Bonneville, only to see demand for the car surge when gas became plentiful. Stempel says he should have taken the advice of two GM executives who warned him that big cars would be popular again. Like many other industry experts, Stempel predicted the consolidation of the world auto industry into a handful of giant companies. Today, with some 30 manufacturers selling cars in the U.S., he wishes he ''could eat those words.'' Even in an industry known for long hours, Stempel's appetite for work is gargantuan. Every morning by 7:30 he is at work on the 14th floor of the GM building, where the offices are protected by two sets of electronically operated glass doors. He tries to leave by 7 P.M. Stempel prints notes to colleagues that are easily recognized because of their capital letters. ''Bob is a real presence,'' says Lloyd Reuss. ''His voice carries and he writes loud.'' Stempel is a compulsive notetaker and has a reputation for assimilating vast amounts of data. ''Nobody ever told me when to stop,'' he says. Nobody will anytime soon. Even GM's newest car programs show signs of mismanagement. The hopes of Buick, Pontiac, and Oldsmobile are riding on two- door midsize models known as GM-10 cars, the first of which is due this fall. But the four-door versions were delayed until 1989 to save money. GM is also giving a big push to a new four-cylinder engine with multiple-valves called the Quad 4. Japanese and German carmakers already market multiple-valve four- cylinder engines. And customers will not be able to get Quad 4s in the GM- 10 cars for at least a year or two because GM cannot make enough of the new engines. Stempel's father, a New Jersey banker, always owned Chevrolets and Pontiacs. So GM was the place Stempel looked for work after a short stint at General Electric's wire and cable division in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and a two-year hitch with the Army Corps of Engineers. His first assignment on joining Oldsmobile's chassis design department in Lansing, Michigan, in 1958 was to design a wheel. It sounds simple -- just make it round. But engineers have to figure out where the brakes fit and how to hang the wheel on the axle. Stempel's supervisor told him he did a terrible job. But he learned fast. When Olds developed the 1966 Toronado, the first U.S. front-wheel-drive car in 29 years, Stempel got the critical task of devising a way to marry the transmission to the front axle. It remains his proudest achievement as an engineer. By taking classes at night, Stempel earned an MBA at Michigan State University in 1970. Then in 1973 he won his first high-profile job when President Edward Cole chose him as a special assistant. Cole was a brilliant if quirky engineer who championed radical designs that often proved troublesome, such as the rotary Wankel engine and the rear-engine Corvair. He assigned Stempel to coordinate development of a revolutionary emission control device located in the engine compartment. The device was later scrubbed in favor of the now familiar catalytic converter slung underneath the floor pan. Bill Hoglund credits Stempel with delicately nudging Cole toward the floor- mounted system without alienating him. IN 1978 he won the first of five big jobs that elevated him out of engineering. His success is hard to gauge because none lasted longer than two years. That is too short a time to measure performance in the auto industry, where it traditionally takes five years to develop a new car. While at Pontiac from 1978 to 1980, Stempel started design work on the two-seat, plastic-body car that emerged as the Fiero in 1984 and has since proved a modest success. But Pontiac's erratic market share peaked when Stempel arrived and then went steadily downhill for four years. Stempel's stint at Opel in Russelsheim, West Germany, was even shorter -- just 17 months. Opel was running in the red, and Stempel had to deal with an unwieldy 20-person supervisory board that included ten union representatives. Despite that, and the language barrier -- Stempel speaks no German -- he developed a rapport with hourly workers and pushed hard for what became the strong-selling subcompact Kadett. Back in the U.S. in 1982, Stempel took over Chevrolet, another troubled divison, and was unable to recapture lost customers. Chevy, which accounted for nearly one in every five new car sales in 1980, now has a market share of just 15.2%. Stempel promised the unhappy dealers that they would get to sell Saturn, the radical new GM car still under development, but that was a mistake. GM decided to distribute Saturn through a separate dealer network. Says Stempel: ''I wanted a new front-wheel-drive car, and I was very disappointed when we did not get Saturn.'' After two years at Chevrolet, he became head of the new Buick-Oldsmobile- Cadi llac group created by GM's 1984 reorganization. The realignment, designed by McKinsey & Co. to streamline GM's divisional structure and exploit its economies of scale, resulted in chaos. Executives and hourly workers alike were bewildered and demoralized after being set adrift from 75-year-old divisions. The cars produced since the reorganization have languished at dealerships because they look so much alike. Stempel rejiggered the McKinsey blueprint to try to maintain some traditional alliances. Instead of creating a huge central organization, he let most employees stay at the divisional outposts where they had always worked and keep their autonomy. The change did little to stem the slump but won him praise inside the company for reducing confusion and boosting morale. When Stempel is away from the office, says a friend, ''he is more prone to his privacy than any person I know.'' His family isn't mentioned in his GM biography. Timothy and his older sister, Barbara, are now grown; another son, Peter, is a high school senior. Stempel likes to ski and enjoys surf-casting, but will not say where he pursues either sport. He attends stock car races and tinkers with old cars in his spare time. One favorite is a 1974 Corvette that he describes as ''pre-fuel injection, pre-electronic ignition,'' which means he can fiddle with the carburetor and spark plugs. He jokes that his home ''looks like a used-car lot.'' Stempel's wife, Pat, whom he met in high school and married right out of college, is considered an unusual corporate spouse. Says Bill Hoglund: ''She is her own woman. GM is not her life.'' Tall and striking, she drives a Cadillac Allante, a $55,000 Italian-body sports car, and caused a stir at a recent GM dealers' convention when she showed up in a zippered leather jumpsuit. Stempel wears a pair of oversize cuff links, a gift from Pat, with his zodiac sign. He is a Cancer (''emotional, home loving''), she a Taurus (''passionate, loyal''). Asked about his marriage, Stempel says, ''Just say that Cancer and Taurus get along fine, and we have too.'' Assuming Stempel and GM get along as well, he could log nearly 11 years as president. It is an opportunity that Stempel relishes. One of things he likes about motor sports is that ''when the checkered flag comes down, you know who won and it's winner take all.'' A decade or more as president of General Motors will be ample time to complete the record on Robert C. Stempel.

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