Philip Caldwell Is Dead at 93; First Nonfamily Member to Head Ford

The cause was complications of a stroke, his family said.

Mr. Caldwell was known as a prodigious worker with a knack for restoring floundering divisions of Ford to financial health. He guided the company through some of its most difficult years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when all of Detroit struggled to cope with a sour economy, high gas prices and the first sustained onslaught by Japanese automakers.

He left his mark more on the company’s bottom line than its product line, turning the record losses of more than $1.5 billion that Ford recorded in 1980, his first full year as chief executive, into record profits of $2.9 billion in 1984. At the same time his management team — including his labor chief, Peter J. Pestillo — greatly improved Ford’s strained relations with its unions. And he laid the groundwork for the company’s biggest success in a generation: the Taurus, the top-selling car of the late ’80s and ’90s.

Mr. Caldwell, who spent a total of 37 years at Ford, never developed a reputation as a “car guy,” someone motivated by a passion for automotive design and engineering or the thrill of driving. Nor was he a salesman at heart, as many auto executives are.

Rather, he rose to the top as a manager who could handle tough assignments, overhauling one struggling business unit after another by cutting costs and ratcheting up productivity and profits, most notably in the truck division, the Philco electronics subsidiary and Ford’s overseas operations.

By the 1970s, Mr. Caldwell was one of Henry Ford II’s most loyal and trusted lieutenants. But he was almost unknown outside the company — in stark contrast to the larger-than-life Mr. Iacocca, who famously rode the success of the Mustang in the 1960s to the presidency of Ford, the No. 2 post, but who came to be seen by Mr. Ford as more rival than colleague.

Outsiders were stunned when Mr. Ford dismissed Mr. Iacocca in 1977 and elevated Mr. Caldwell instead, first to vice chairman and later to chief executive and chairman.

Mr. Ford, grandson of the company’s founder, kept an important role on the board throughout Mr. Caldwell’s tenure, leading some observers to wonder how much freedom of action Mr. Caldwell really had, despite his titles. But in interviews around the time of his retirement as chief executive in February 1985, Mr. Caldwell insisted that Mr. Ford had never tried to interfere or tell him how to run the company.

Born in the tiny farming town of Bourneville, Ohio, on Jan. 27, 1920, Mr. Caldwell studied economics 80 miles away at Muskingum College (now Muskingum University) and graduated in 1940, three years ahead of John Glenn, the astronaut and politician.

He was completing an M.B.A. at Harvard when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting him to enlist in the Navy and serve as a lieutenant in the Pacific.

When the war ended in 1945, he stayed with the Navy in a civilian job as a procurement manager and married Betsey Chinn Clark. She and their three children, Lawrence, Lucy H. Caldwell-Stair and Désirée C. Armitage, survive him, as do six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Mr. Caldwell left the Navy after the Korean War in 1953 to join Ford. He often said afterward that his Navy experience had shaped his approach to business, in which he emphasized discipline and efficiency.

It also shaped his approach to life in general. He seemed most comfortable in formal settings and was rarely seen in public out of his uniform of conservative business attire. He did not smoke or drink and exhibited none of the flamboyance of other leading Detroit figures of his time, like Mr. Ford, Mr. Iacocca and John Z. DeLorean, the protean “car guy” then cutting a swath at General Motors.

About as wild and crazy as Mr. Caldwell was ever said to get was an occasional recreational spin around the Ford test track at the wheel of a tractor-trailer. He filled his home and his office at Ford with 18th-century American antiques, and his civic and cultural activities included serving as a trustee of his alma mater and of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

His retirement was an active one. He remained on Ford’s board for five more years after stepping down as chief executive a few days past his 65th birthday. He also worked in investment banking as a managing director at Shearson Lehman Brothers, joined the Council on Foreign Relations and served on the boards of a number of public companies as well as the executive recruitment firm Russell Reynolds Associates.

In 1990, the Harvard Business School named a chair in business administration in his honor.

Wheels Blog: Tesla vs. Chrysler: Who’s on First?

Twitter Part of the Twitter battle between Elon Musk and Chrysler over which American company paid off its federal loans first.

The Twitter messages are once again flying from Tesla Motors.

In a Wednesday announcement, the Palo Alto, Calif., automaker said it had paid off the entire loan made to the company by the Energy Department — and added that it was “the only American car company to have fully repaid the government.”

Within hours, Gualberto Ranieri, a senior vice president at Chrysler, responded on Chrysler’s blog: “The information is unmistakably incorrect. It’s pretty well-known that almost exactly two years ago – May 24, 2011 – Chrysler Group LLC repaid (in full and with interest) U.S. and Canadian government loans more than six years ahead of time.” Chrysler also responded via Twitter.

“Not so fast, Tesla,” says @chrysler comm chief, re claims it’s first to repay U.S. govt. @teslamotorsbit.ly/14zB6sJ #shortciruit

— Chrysler (@Chrysler) May 23, 2013

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and a Twitter regular, responded, saying: “As many have already noted, @Chrysler is a division of Fiat, an Italian company. We specifically said first *US* company.” And later, he added: “More importantly, @Chrysler failed to pay back $1.38B. Apart those 2 points you were totally 1st.”

Tim Rue/Bloomberg News Tesla Motors chief executive Elon Musk (pictured) maintains that Chrysler, which is mostly owned by Fiat SpA, is no longer an American company.

Mr. Musk’s second Twitter message is in reference to a portion of Chrysler’s TARP loan that was assigned to the old Chrysler when the United States government sold its stake in the newly organized Chrysler Group LLC to Fiat SpA. Of the $12.5 billion the government had loaned the old Chrysler, approximately $1.3 billion was left behind. On June 2, 2011, the United States Treasury said in a statement that it was “unlikely to recover the difference of $1.3 billion owed by Old Chrysler.”

Asked to respond to Mr. Musk’s contention that Chrysler Group LLC is not an American company, Mr. Ranieri, in a telephone interview, said: “I don’t have any response to that. Chrysler Group LLC is the company of Walter Chrysler, and it speaks for itself for what it does.”

When asked if he could expand on that, Mr. Ranieri added, “I love espresso ristretto, so I don’t have anything more to add.”

Wheels: Deaths of Teenage Drivers Spiked in First Half of 2012, Report Says

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times Megan Lavery, 17, driving in New Jersey in August 2012. The state has strict laws for teenage drivers.

Fatalities among teenage drivers rose sharply for the first six months of 2012, according to a new report.

The death toll for 16- and 17-year-old drivers of passenger vehicles jumped 19 percent, compared with the first half of 2011.

“It’s troubling” said Barbara L. Harsha, executive director the Governors Highway Safety Association, an organization representing state highway safety offices that released the study, “Teenage Driver Fatalities by State: 2012 Preliminary Data,” on Tuesday.

Based on initial data supplied by the 50 states and the District of Columbia for the first six months of 2012, 25 states reported increases, 17 showed a decrease, and eight states and the District of Columbia reported no change. Over all, 16- and 17-year-old driver deaths increased from 202 to 240.

“Even though the numbers are pretty small, 19 percent is pretty sizable,” Ms. Harsha said in a telephone interview. “We didn’t expect the increase to be as large as it is, so that’s a concern.”

She said the data did not include passengers, bicyclists or pedestrians. “We only looked at drivers, as that is the group most involved in fatal crashes,” Ms. Harsha said.

If the trend persisted in the second half of the year, it would be the second year of increased deaths for teenage drivers in this age group after eight consecutive years of decline. Final data is not available for 2012, but fatalities typically go up in the second half of the year, she said.

The spike in teenage driver deaths appears to have increased at an even greater rate than overall highway fatalities during this same period, Allan Williams, a road safety consultant who wrote the report, said in a telephone interview. He based the projections on data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Safety Council.

Despite these increases, the deaths of teenage drivers remain historically low and are still better than they were five or even 10 years ago, he said.

“But anytime there is a favorable trend and it reverses, there is concern and alarm. We don’t want that to continue to happen,” said Dr. Williams, who is the former chief scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit group financed by the insurance industry. “We don’t want that to continue to happen.”

While it is too soon to know for certain, he attributes the increase in fatalities, in part, to a rebounding economy. With lower gas prices during the study period and greater discretionary income, more teenagers may be on the roads, which increases their exposure to risk.

Another contributing factor may be that progress has slowed among states to strengthen graduated driver licensing laws. All 50 states have some form of the laws that were first introduced in the mid-1990s to gradually grant privileges to teenage drivers during higher-risk situations, like driving at night or with peer passengers. Distracted driving is also thought to play a role, Dr. Williams said.

But while studies and surveys indicate that laws are not particularly effective in changing cellphone use, graduated driver licensing laws have proven to help reducing crashes.

“The more comprehensive state laws are, the greater the effect,” he said.

Compliance is also essential, he said. “A lot, quite frankly, depends on parental involvement,” he said. “But many parents don’t even know what the laws are. They need to know what the laws are. They need to know what the rationales are.”

In addition to strengthening laws and creating programs and awareness to increase parental supervision, improving driver education programs is also critical to reverse the upward trend, said Ms. Harsha, the executive director. “It’s time to redouble our efforts.”

The full report, including state-by-state data, is available online at ghsa.org.