PILGRIM: Well, joining me now from Detroit, Michigan, the unretiring General Motors vice chairman, Bob Lutz.

And thanks for being with us, sir.

LUTZ: Hey, thanks for having me and that was quite a eulogy and my parents would have been proud if they were still around.

PILGRIM: Oh, well, Bill Tucker, I think, told it well. You know, you are the ultimate car guy. Tell us what you think the GM is going to look like? It came out of bankruptcy very, very quickly, tell me what it's going to look like going forward.

LUTZ: Well, it's going to be a very fast-moving company. It's going to be a lot much risk averse. It's going to be run, rather than being run by several large committees, like the North American Strategy Board, the Automotive Strategy Board, the Automotive Product Board and so forth, all of those committees are going to be gone and it's going to be run by a small executive committee of about seven members.

We're going to deal with all customer, market, and product decisions once a week in Friday meetings. We'll achieve very fast decision making and, you know, when you move fast, you're going to make some mistakes, but when you move slowly, you produce only mistakes, because by the time the decision is made, it's -- it's -- it's beyond its best-buy date.

PILGRIM: You know, let's talk about government in this equation. Government's pumped $30 billion into GM, it will pay $20 billion by the end of this year to get it through the reorganization. I mean, is the government effectively running GM at this point?

LUTZ: No. No. And that's a -- that's a common misperception that now that we're -- we have received equity from the government, we're going to be having to do what the government says. We are -- we are -- we are being run like any other automobile company, except that the government, instead of giving us loans on which we would have had to pay expensive interest, which would have sapped our earning power, gave us the money in the form of equity, which the government over time will sell down that equity in order to repay themselves and we'll replace it with an IPO, with fresh equity.

But I want to make it -- I want to make one thing perfectly clear, the automotive task force that I -- all of us have met with several times, I have the ultimate respect for these. Whether it's Steve Rattner, Ron Bloom or Harry Wilson, these are -- OK, they're financial re-engineering or they're workout people, but they know their jobs, and they really learned about the company and they made sure that the new -- the new General Motors that they were helping to craft would be lean, debt free, focused on what it has to do, and now that -- now that we've got a new board, we've emerged as a new company, the whole government influence is going to fade into the background...

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PILGRIM: Yeah. How long it -- how long will it -- sorry, how long will it be until taxpayers own this company -- I mean, the Treasury has -- is the biggest stockholder, right?

LUTZ: Yeah. Yeah. Of course, they've got 70 percent, but that's very hard to predict, because it depends what the economy is going to do. You know, right now the selling rate in the United States is about 9.8 million, seasonally adjusted rate. A couple years ago we were at 17 million, so, the market is down by 50 percent almost. And I want to -- I want to remind everybody, it's not just General Motors' sales that were down, everybody's sales are down 50 percent, including the vaunted -- the vaunted Japanese.

I mean, Toyota is bleeding cash and money faster than we are. They just started out with a bigger pile. So, if the economy doesn't recover, it's obviously going to be longer for us to be able to pay it back. If we have some sort of recovery and go to 12.5 million or 13 million units, we will make a lot of money and we'll pay it back very fast. And I'll tell you, all of us are focused on one goal, including the government, we want the same thing, they want this company reprivatized, highly effective, debt free with a very competitive wage rate.

PILGRIM: We wish you every success for the -- for the benefit of your company and for America. Thank you very much for being with us.

LUTZ: Yep.

PILGRIM: GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz. Thank you.

LUTZ: Thank you very much.