The 75-Year-Old Adolescent's World; Why everybody in our universe calls GM's vice chairman the car guy.(Revs)

Byline: Phil Berg

Fit-and-trim 75-year-old Bob Lutz has a reliable gut sense of what is a cool car and what is not. Business stories about the General Motors vice chairman mention that he flies fighter planes and has had such a cool, confident life that he could make nearly any man cry uncle in either a boardroom or bar fight.

Naturally, GM's "product czar'' would have a garage full of cool stuff. In fact, he needs two garages to house 13 of his favorite cars, hidden in the thick woods of suburban-rural Michigan.

The original car building is a concrete-block, multiple-use garage, set neatly below a chalet-style guest home far in front of the estate's main house. The ceiling is low, the block walls unpainted and the electrical service surface-mounted. It's bare but neat and functional, and the world's two nastiest Vipers, acquired while Lutz was running Chrysler's car business, reside inside. (While developing the cars, Lutz once passed an unmarked Arizona sheriff traveling well beyond 90 mph on a twisty road out of Sedona and managed to talk his way out of the ticket. Cojones muy grandes.)

"I always wanted a Cobra,'' Lutz explains. "At the time, the real ones were $600,000, and now they're over a million. I refuse to pay more than a couple hundred thousand dollars for a car, when I can get a military jet for $500,000.'' So he purchased an Autocraft Cobra with a Roush 302 V8 for $45,000 in 1985.

"I was driving it with a `Powered by Ford' badge on the front, which I removed because I was at Chrysler. I said, `If only Chrysler had this.' Then I thought, we have the Dakota with a wishbone front suspension, new five-speed transmission, V10 engine coming, no reason we couldn't at least do a show car. The first sketches were like a Viper, and I thought it was too far away from the Cobra. But they convinced me they didn't want to copy the Cobra.'' The Viper design grew on him.

The garage ...