Before Johan de Nysschen hopped aboard the General Motors mother ship, he held several high ranking positions with Audi. While working for Audi USA, he took a trip to New York, where he had a rather interesting encounter with the desk clerk at his hotel. He recently recounted the somewhat comedic event to his Facebook friends in a status update.
Via Daily Kanban:
“The hotel had given my room away, and the assistant behind the counter was rather unapologetic about it. So after some exchange of dialogue I told her “you don’t have to be so hard-assed about it”, which is an expression sometimes used in South Africa to describe people who are being difficult. With my accent, she misunderstood, concluding I had said she had a hot ass, which of course was an entirely different thing. Following intervention by the security people, at least we clarified the misunderstanding, even though I still had no room. Which by now, having been threatened with arrest and a jail cell, seemed like a really good deal.”
de Nysschen recently returned to New York, where he discovered his guaranteed reservation room at the Renaissance in Times Square had been given away. To remedy the situation, they got him a room at the Marriott Marquis, the exact hotel where his South African accent almost had him arrested not even 10 years earlier.
“I have come the full circle, right back to where I started,” the longtime auto exec humorously proclaimed on Facebook.
If this situation wasn’t ridiculous enough, a spokesperson from the Renaissance Times Square got wind of de Nysschen’s bad luck in regards to his guaranteed reservation room and sent him a Platinum Elite Membership card to make up for it. The only problem? They sent it to his former assistant at Audi, Tracie Kimiayi.
Comments
Interesting tidbit about De Nysschen, yet I feel on this website we’re more interested if this
new Cadillac chief can make the luxury marque a more profitable, better-respected
division of GM.
De Nysschen is infamous for his distaste for electric cars or PHEVs with a plug.
He cancelled cars at Audi and Infinity that were forward-thinking and
were aimed at the future. GM hired the man knowing his position, and
his abrupt departures from those companies. Today, he believes NYC is the
place for the division to gain luxury cred, and he says he’s on track to
lead Cadillac above or equal to marques such as Audi and Mercedes.
Good luck, GM. Good luck, de Nysschen. I believe he’ll leave GM as abruptly
as he did the other positions due to the fact that Tesla will prove him
a shortsighted, average executive who believes he knows more than he actually
does.
I do not believe Mr. de Nysschen will jump ship from Cadillac abruptly as you say because he did not abruptly leave Audi. He was with Audi for almost 20 years. He helped transform Audi, especially here in N.A. He decided to take a higher position with Infiniti which didn’t seem to be a good fit. He comes back to N.A. with Cadillac and he seems to be a good fit so far.
I don’t really care if Cadillac wants to do electric vehicles. Should people care if Audi or Infiniti do either? These sub-companies do not determine whether GM, Volkswagen, or Nissan do them. By the way, this argument does not hold water because the CT6 is supposed to be an advanced hybrid. This seems to be forward thinking towards the future, not unlike exotic car companies developing these technologies right now. Just look at F1 using hybrid systems this year. Could the CT6 be the launch for new GM hybrid tech.? Outside of the next gen Volt, I haven’t heard about anything GM is doing with hybrid. Flying under the radar, maybe?
Oh James. There’s a time and place for everything. Electric cars aren’t prime… yet. So there’s a reason that most cars sold today are not electric.
And how do you know the circumstance of de Nysschen’s supposed (unproven) cancellation of EVs at Audi and Infiniti? Maybe the products didn’t meet certain criteria, plain out sucked, or were overly expensive. Who knows? Point is, you don’t. So to make grandiose claims about an executive’s stance on a certain kind of vehicular propulsion system seems amateur and low to me. As does your claim that he left Audi and Infiniti abruptly. He was with Audi for 20 years… and who knows the circumstance of his departure from Infiniti? Have you considered the possibility that Nissan didn’t want to invest the proper $$$ to make it a proper luxury brand (it is still a tier 2 luxury brand)?
So maybe he felt that his talents would be put to better use at a place that valued long-term investments. Again, you have a tiny portion of the facts… but try to derive some major conclusions from them. THINK before you type man. THINK!
“The Chevrolet Volt is a car for Idiots…No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a (Toyota) Corolla. So there are not enough idiots who will buy it.”
“Mass electrification” of the vehicles on American roads could lead to problems like a strained electric grid. Large-scale utilization of electric vehicles will require massive investment in new power stations that are much cleaner than the ones in use in the U.S. today.”
“(EVs) could merely shift greenhouse gas emissions from the tailpipes of cars to the smokestacks of coal-burning utilities. That’s not just my opinion. The California Air Resource Board this past April concluded that electric vehicles presently are second only to hydrogen cars in greenhouse gas impact when measured on a well-to-wheel basis”
InsideEVs own Lyle Dennis had a prolonged interview with Mr. De Nysschen shortly after the ‘Volt incident’, where he admitted that EVs could be a long term solution…but “not for 20 years”, while still adding that “promise land” of electric vehicle will lead to “dirt in the atmosphere.”
I’ve got many more quotes from de Nysschen to back up my views. You are pretty quick to
judge when you say, “THINK before you type”…. You seem to know very little about the man.
In addition to making waves in the press re: how he believes diesel is the way forward
( a total joke to those in the know ) for Cadillac in North America, he continues to put
his foot in his mouth and I would be happy to prove this to you if you are to lazy
to Google on your own.