Known in Motor City as the Ultimate Car Guy, GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz knows cool cars.

Before he drove his first car, The Car Guy remembers imprinting his developing brain with a “monumental” collection of Dinky and Maerklin toy cars that he would push around on the floor before he could walk. He perfected the “varoom” noise while learning to speak. When he was slightly older, he used balsa wood to try to craft his perfect car, although the results looked more like copies of bad Ferraris, says the vice chairman of the world’s fifth-largest corporation.

The first car 75-year-old Lutz drove was a 1940 Ford flathead coupe, which he drove straight into a stone wall. You can forgive the mishap, however, with the brand new flathead coupe--he was only eight years old at the time.

Inside a secluded forest hideaway in rural Michigan are two buildings containing the cars Ernest Hemmingway, Humphrey Bogart, Steve McQueen and Richard E. Byrd would have owned if they were alive. Each car possesses an attribute that is at once masculine, purposeful, and substantive. This collection is genuine cool.

While former GM design boss Bill Mitchell was admired in the 50's and 60's for the one or two cars he parked at the General’s design center, a Ferrari here, a prototype Corvette there, life is more complicated for a car guy today. There is no perfect car guy’s car. “The ‘perfect’ car is impossible to define, as it would need to be preceded by the questions ‘for what purpose?’, and ‘would it have to be my only car?’” explains Lutz.

Lutz recalls he was influenced by his father and his uncles, who were also car nuts. Not just shine-the-Chevy-on-Sunday car nuts, but serious drivers. He remembers more than one Delahaye, numerous Talbot-Lagos, and Alfa Romeos in the family driveway. “Luckily, the family was not poor,” he says. Packard “Super Eight” Convertibles were his grocery getters, and an SS Jaguar 3.5-liter sedan got the Lutz’ to church.

Lutz has been around cars his entire life; visited so many car collectors’ garages that he can’t remember them all. Lutz keeps up with worldly auto tastes, having two garages each at his homes in Montserrat and Switzerland. He has a Cadillac XLR at the Swiss garages, and a red Hummer H3 and a Pontiac Solstice at the garages in Montserrat. He once visited a garage he thought was the Taj Mahal of car barns: “It was opulent beyond description, the cars displayed on cobblestone circles, in outdoor-looking surroundings, murals on the walls, palm trees in pots, street lamps putting focus on individual cars while the whole garage was bathed in a natural-seeming ambient light. It made me want to go home and burn my garage, and the house along with it,” he recalls.

Two things have prevented the veteran vice chairman from having the garage of his dreams: First, he owns two fighter jets that can hit 600 mph and reach 50,000 feet. Keeping fit and familiar enough with flying consumes his free time. Weekly he buzzes the Midwest with a Czech Albatros trainer painted with a star-and-stripes logo, and a German built Alpha in olive green with a red star on it, just to keep in practice.

Second, before he could assemble his cars in a respectable stable, Mrs. Lutz had requested that the home’s closets be turned into a Martha Stewart-style marvel of design, popularized by the California Closets company. Okay, now that the closets are done, here’s the new place The Car Guy hangs out while at home, and no item of design near the cars was influenced by ex-con Martha.

The original car building is a concrete block multiple-use garage, residing neatly below a chalet-style guest home far in front of the estate’s main house. The ceiling is low, the block walls painted, the electrical service surface-mounted. It’s bare-but-neat, functional, and inside reside the world’s two nastiest Vipers that Dodge ever created, acquired while Lutz was running Chrysler’s car business.

This garage—built in 1983 with the guest chalet—didn’t have enough room for some of the examples of Lutz’ favorite machines, and so he converted a pole barn on the property into a proper garage a few years ago. It’s also modest, has no full kitchen, no wine cellar, no big-screen entertainment center. The elephant in the room is a Pinzgauer from Austria’s Steyr-Daimler-Puch. “I take it to the airport for parking. Also nice to go shopping and tells people in SUV’s like the old Crocodile Dundee movie, ‘You call that a knife, this is a knife.’ It’ll go where no Humvee can go. It can be air-dropped. It’s narrow and can go through trees his can’t.”

Surrounding the Pinzgauer are potent early ‘50’s Cunningham C3 Vignale and C4R Le Mans coupes, an Autocraft Cobra with a Jack Roush V-8, and an Aston Martin DB2 Vantage, the personal, two-door transport tools of a person not addicted to speed, but jazzed by the accomplishments of human beings designing things with which to traverse the earth while preserving its most precious commodity—time.

These are not the fastest exotics that Miamiwood rappers bow to, but they’re much more significant. They’re historical, and history, we know, is the root of our esteem, our wisdom, and our true confidence. They show the qualities of real car guys, not just rich guys. They also allow a peek into the gut instinct of the world’s most influential Car Guy.

While we all study the Autocraft Cobra, the Cunningham coupes, the two really potent Vipers for hints about how we, too, could become cool Car Guys, there also resides in the Lutz collection a Monteverdi. It’s a universally agreed-upon ugly car, but at the time (1968) it was on public roads as regular car, it blew away chic sporting poseurs in Ferraris with its good, old-fashioned Chrysler V-8. A crude, powerful American V-8.

Lutz also has a Citroen front-drive Traction Avant which is just simply weird, and a Riley MPH, a tiny warbler that is the sleekest of the classic English roadster designs, making early MGs look oversized and ungainly. Lutz is sensitive to size, having lived in Europe for during his military service and as stints running GM, Ford and BMW sales. Unlike most so-called “car guys”, Lutz is not an engineer. That’s perhaps an important key to unlocking the secret to knowing what real people like to drive.

In 1961 Lutz bought and restored a 1948 MG TC, which is still owned by his former wife. Fast forward again to 1980 when Ford turned a few front-engine Capris into high-strung road racer funny cars, with extremely powerful 750-hp engines and wind-tunnel bodies, and The Car Guy raced the cars in at the Hockenheimring when professional drivers were excluded from the exhibition heats. He came within seconds of the best lap times of notable touring car champ Klaus Ludwig. “It’s a neat car to drive. This is the car I saw 200 mph in most.”

The Car Guy we want to be also had close friendships with Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio, which are two of the most talented and friendly grand prix champs who ever lived. In fact, Lutz’ favorite car is the Alfa Romeo 8C. “It just hasn’t gotten any better since then. Also, late ‘30s Talbot Lagos, Delahayes, Delages, were just dynamite. That was the high point of French cultural design. I’m extremely fond of the Cadillac XLR and Corvette C6, both very honest workouts. It was done brilliantly.”

Lutz was inspired by his Cobra to back the creation of the Dodge Viper while he was president of Chrysler. It wasn’t just because he’s a fast coupe addict. “The lesson of the Dodge Viper was not lost on the rest of the world. That car almost single-handedly transformed the image of the Chrysler Corporation from one of going out of business to ‘Whoa, who are those guys?’ Many brands feel they have a need for that type of transformation. Some of that is straight ego driven.”

Lutz has worked for and run large automakers, and is presently helping wrestle General Motors back into profitability. What he learned about car companies from this he can sum up in a short phrase. “Resistance to change and inadequate response to new situations,” he says. “The horse will not want to leave the burning barn.”