Bob Lutz stands in the corner of the General Motors VIP section. He's doing a television interview and the camera is deliberately angled so that the new Cadillac STS-V and Corvette Z06 are clearly visible in the background.
There's no pause between question and answer. There are no ums or ahs. He talks as much with his hands as with his voice. His presence and charisma is immense but his influence reaches far beyond his immediate audience.
Lutz is in charge of product planning for the world's largest carmaker so his decisions determine what millions of us will be driving in the future. We should be thankful for this because Bob Lutz loves cars.
Later, in a one-to-one interview with The Irish Times he explains: "I'm a car fanatic, cars and trucks, also aeroplanes and bikes. I'd have been just as happy in one of those industries."
Indeed, Lutz has a small collection of about 20 or so cars and two jet fighters (he's an ex-marine who still flies to this day) and it's this genuine love of machines that sets him apart from his peers.
"General Motors North America needed change," he says. "It needed a new direction in how it developed products and it definitely needed an injection of the car-guy enthusiasm that I was able to bring to it. Everybody at a senior level was a business person or a marketer and nobody really had a burning passion for the product."
And yet he never loses sight of the fact that this is a business. After all, you can't make appealing cars if you're not making money.
"There are one or two projects that we had in the mill that would have been highly desirable but when we looked at the sales volume and potential pricing, and we looked at the investment needed and the amount of engineering, we just had to tell ourselves 'We can't do that'."
Bob Lutz is no hotshot, forty-something executive on the rise. He'll be 73 in February and by his own admission isn't really "behaving appropriately".
His father, a Swiss banker, was an active man well into his nineties and his mother passed away of a heart condition at the age of eighty-eight. It seems the six-foot-three Lutz is only now getting into his stride - as well as heading up the North American operation he has also been spending a lot of time in Europe of late.
"I was there from last January to last June when I was asked to take over as the chairman of General Motors Europe on an interim basis. I did this happily.
"The disenfranchisement of Opel as a stand-alone entity that GME really couldn't control . . . made no sense. I blew that away and said we're going to have one General Motors . . . not a big company that's loosely supervised by GME. I was the right guy to do this because I spent many years working in Germany. I speak German and the trade unions know me there, so I was able to accomplish stuff which the normal American walking in off the street would not have been able to do."
This gives an indication of just how influential and persuasive Lutz can be. He can chew the fat with everyone involved in the business, from the car-loving consumer (he's been doing some blogging on enthusiast websites lately) to the hard-nosed trade union leader.
He makes things happen because he can communicate with everyone at every level, a rare talent in such a diverse business.
Small wonder then, that his "retirement" in 2001 lasted only four months, before GM enticed him back to the company at which he kicked off his illustrious automotive career some 42 years ago.
Lutz continues to hop back and forth between the US and Europe regularly, working on new products for GM's many divisions.
I'm eager to know more about the thinking behind re-badging Daewoos as Chevrolets in Europe. Is this an sneaky way of getting more profitable American products into Europe?
"We'll definitely be sending more stuff east," he concedes but doesn't expand on what we're likely to get in Europe. Instead, he's bemused by my assertion that renaming Daewoo cars devalues the Chevrolet name.
"It's interesting that the European perception of Chevrolet is much higher than the American perception. You say it 'devalues the brand', but in America Chevrolet is the devalued brand. In the US, it's the equivalent of Vauxhall or Ford."
But Daewoo isn't considered the equivalent of Ford or Opel, I assert, but below them in the automotive food chain.
Unusually, Lutz considers this for just a moment before responding. "It potentially devalues the Chevrolet brand but even if it does, so what? I got a report on my Blackberry today that the early reaction on the showroom floor indicates all the GM Daewoo dealers are reporting vastly increased sales and past Daewoo buyers are coming in saying, 'Eh! Can I have a little Chevrolet badge please?' which just goes to show there's more brand equity in the Chevrolet name than there is in the Daewoo name.
"In the Korean market, where it's a national brand, the Daewoo name will continue for now. But in the rest of the world, Daewoo will become Chevrolet."
On one hand Lutz says he doesn't believe in having all these competing marques within the company, but on the other hand there are superfluous brands such as Vauxhall and Buick floating around.
"Buick is American luxury," he explains. "It doesn't try to be international luxury. There's no intent to export it to Europe. It offers the Lexus experience for ten thousand or fifteen thousand dollars less."
And Vauxhall? "Short term, we're afraid we'd lose sales in the UK because many British people remember their beloved Vauxhall and all of a sudden: 'What's this Opel? Why do I have to buy an Opel?' We're a little reluctant to do it though we realise some day we should."
So, how exactly does GM intend to tempt Europeans out of their BMWs and Mercedes and into Cadillacs? It didn't work very well last time round.
"Before, we weren't in Europe with really competent cars and we were trying to put them through the GM Europe organisation and network. The organisation that's worried about flogging Vauxhalls and Opels isn't going to pay a great deal of attention to Cadillac.
"Plus - the luxury car owner doesn't like to go to the service bay and stand behind a bunch of Opel Corsa owners. Trying to market premium vehicles through a low-end dealer network has never worked and never will.
"You've got to provide the buyer a premium ambience from showroom to service bay to literature to selling experience to providing free loaners for services. Our European distributor, Fritz Kroymans, has put $500 million of his own money into paying for 30 Cadillac experience centres throughout Europe. Normally we sell about 1,000 a year in Europe and his goal is to do about 5,000 in his first year."
Which leaves Saab. How does Lutz intend to put the Swede back in full production. Is the upcoming 9-7X SUV going to be the vehicle to get Saab back on track?
Immediately, Lutz gets quite animated, as if I've reminded him of an itch he can't scratch. "The 9-7X is an expedient solution because Saab couldn't develop its own sport utility. Saab dealers in the US have been clamouring: 'Get us a sport utility, get us a sport utility,' but we couldn't do one in Sweden because they were tapped out in engineering.
"So we said, 'Well, we can do it in the States off the GMP360 architecture'."
Indeed, the 9-7X borrows more than just the architecture. It uses most of the Chevy Trailblazer's sheetmetal, electronics and major mechanical components. Only the bodywork from the windscreen forward, the rear styling, the suspension tuning and the interior is Saab's. So far, the press hasn't exactly been complimentary of the awkward design - this has not gone unnoticed by Lutz who seems to love the media a lot less than it loves him.
"Some of the media have written: 'Oh, what an outrage. They're making a Saab out of a US sport utility. I got news for you: Saabs have always been made out of something else. In the bad old days they used Ford push-rod V4 engines."
So, what about the core Saabmodels? The perception nowadays is that luxury cars have to be rear-wheel-drive. Does this mean Saabs will borrow the architecture from Cadillac, perhaps? Good looking and well made they may be, but they're not selling as front-drive products.
"It's interesting because Saab is in kind of a funny position. If they stay quirky, they appeal only to a small percentage of people - but there are only 120,000 of them in the whole damn world. We can't live on that.
"Then you try to take Saab more mainstream and everyone says, 'Oh, now they're not quirky enough.' And the mainstream people won't buy it because it's not highest on their list of choices and the quirky ones won't buy it because it's not quirky. The first question they ask is, 'Where's the key?' If the key's up on the steering column, you're going to have trouble selling it."
It seems as if lessons have already been learned from the Saab 9-2X, a mildly reworked Subaru Impreza WRX wagon that's had a hard time attracting buyers.
While some suggest that Saab has some terminal problems, Lutz is not having it. "I have a great deal of faith in the future of the Saab brand," begins Bob Lutz, GM executive. But then, Bob Lutz, the passionate car-guy, takes over: "A gorgeous rear-drive architecture with a really compelling, dynamic Saab-like body would be a wonderful thing to have, but on the other hand I get e-mails from probably thousands of Swedes saying (in a Swedish accent): 'I have read in Aftonbladet that you are planning to make a Saab with rear-wheel drive. Please do not do this. This is not Saab-like. I am tired of you Americans (he pauses here to muffle an expletive) screwing up our brand.' If it wasn't for us Americans and our $300 million a year subsidies, you guys wouldn't even be around anymore. In the 20 years we've owned them, they made a tiny little bit of money one year. We've been very patient."
At this point his PA interjects to inform me that my time is up. But before he goes I have to ask about what he's looking forward to in the future.
"I'm excited about a lot of stuff, but, if I was to pick one, it would be the revitalisation of Saturn which was a brand sadly lacking in exciting products. It was based purely on the fact that customers were satisfied with their retail experience." (Saturns are sold by no-commission sales-people at bargain, no-haggle prices.)
"That's just not enough because the retail experience lasts just a day and what are you going to do the other 364 days of the year? So we collectively made the decision at Saturn that we needed much more emotionally engaging, what I would call 'gotta-have' cars. That has the potential to turn the brand around."
The 'gotta-have' cars he's referring to are the Aura concept, which was designed by "some of Opel's better young designers" and the Sky, which was styled by Simon Cox in Britain.
"It was the Vauxhall lightning concept," explains Lutz. "GM Europe couldn't afford to do it, but we had the chassis for it (Pontiac Solstice) so we productionised the car with a larger front air intake."
I have a feeling the European look of both these cars is no coincidence, but Lutz isn't giving anything away. All we can really say for certain is that with Bob Lutz involved, things at GME won't be dull.