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For part one of this series click here. 
With Lou Santiago, what you see is what you get. Many know him as the host of Car Fix on Velocity, but I sense even if he wasn’t on TV, people would gravitate towards him anyway. I met Lou for the first time last year, when I was a guest on the Playing N Traffic show, alongside Louis Lee Sr. and Louis Lee Jr.
We proceeded to have one of the most intoxicating conversations about cars I’ve even been a part of. For the entire hour, I fed off Santiago’s energy. I remember it vividly.
There was, during our rousing conversation, a deep examination of the love affair with the automobile. We concluded it was gone; or if not gone, certinately changed to the degree where it will never be the same again. For this series, I asked Santiago when he felt the American love affair with cars shifted. “Changed when the bean counters got in; when the bean counters got into all the manufactures and went ‘oh we can?t do this because of the money,'” he said. “That’s why it happened. The bean counters killed it.”

Passion Versus Pennies
In his 2011 book, Car Guys Versus Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of the American Business, former General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz details this trend. He makes a case throughout the book that GM’s management became too smart for its own good, that product quality suffered at the hands of corporat...