Maryann Keller, formidable Wall Street analyst, pundit and frequent Detroit 3 critic, dead at 78

Maryann Keller, one of the first women on Wall Street to cover the auto industry and later a widely respected consultant who became a formidable critic of management at Detroit's automakers, died on Thursday. She was 78.

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Connecticut confirmed her death.

Keller, routinely the No. 1 auto analyst in Institutional Investor's widely watched ranking of the top stock pickers at leading brokerage houses, wielded enormous clout and influence over boardrooms and showrooms. Her books, meticulously reported with unprecedented access to company insiders, became must-reads for dealers, suppliers, journalists and anyone else who desired to go behind the scenes.

Her clarity and insight, biting at times, could move a company's stock price in either direction with the release of a new report or a traditional buy or sell call.

With an appreciation for comprehensive, hands-on research, well before the Internet and cellphones spawned today's influencers, Keller was the rare celebrity analyst to get out of New York regularly and visit dealerships, parts makers and factories — domestic and overseas — to get a firsthand look at key operations across the auto industry.

Whether weighing in on what she called Tesla's flawed retail model, the ideal number of doors on a minivan or General Motors' prospects under new leadership as it exited bankruptcy, her candid assessments of the auto industry's business practices, old and new, could be unsparing.

She was among the first analysts to question the wisdom and longevity of the 1998 merger between Mercedes-Benz and Chrysler, saying she couldn't imagine two companies with more different cultures.

When Roy Brown Jr., the designer of the Ford Edsel — one of the auto industry's biggest flops — died in 2013, Keller called the car's styling "almost grotesque" and cited among the vehicle's many flaws its "hundreds of pounds of unnecessary weight in bumpers."

Roger Smith, a finance veteran who rose to become CEO of GM during the 1980s, a time of upheaval for Detroit, was a frequent target. Smith was brilliant, she said, but lacked both the charisma and sensitivity to motivate others to see his bold vision to remake the plodding giant through to completion, or to understand when the vision was flawed.

"He is like a cook who gathered all the ingredients for making a cake, then just tossed them in the oven randomly, thinking they would come together on their own," Keller wrote about Smith in one of her acclaimed books.

Recognizing the auto industry's traditional booms and busts, she routinely cautioned investors about investing in GM, Ford and Chrysler, at one point calling out Chrysler's fragile balance sheet and constant struggle to secure adequate funding to design and produce new models.

"You buy them to sell them," she told The New York Times in 1986 of Detroit 3 shares. "You don't hold onto them to put your grandchildren through college."

She mastered the names and functions of tools used to build cars and light trucks, and the formula to calculate corporate average fuel economy ratings required by the federal government.

She once called Toyota Motor Corp.'s Tahara assembly plant, on the eastern coast of Japan, amid fishing villages in Mikawa Bay, a mistake because it was much too automated when it was built in 1979. Toyota, fearing a shortage of workers amid Japan's declining birth rates, packed the plant with robots and automation to build the finest Lexus sedans and Toyota models.

"It was not a competitive factory when they built it," Keller would say later.

While she praised the third-generation Ford Taurus as a great car and probably the finest car built by Ford Motor Co., she determined it was too expensive to build.

"Instead of understanding what the marketplace would have paid for a Taurus, Ford designed the car that it wanted to design ... and priced it to earn a reasonable return on its investment," Keller said in an April 1996 speech before a supplier conference. "Now it's paying for those mistakes with rebates, content reduction ... increased incentives and cheap financing and lease deals. The Taurus may reach Ford's sale targets, but it will not reach Ford's profit target."

One of Keller's best sources for research and intelligence was former Detroit 3 executives who went to work for Japanese automakers setting up U.S. operations, as well as U.S. dealers who signed on early to sell Japanese cars starting in the 1970s. Her on-the-ground research made her among the first analysts to warn Detroit of the rising threat from Japan's more fuel-efficient automakers, especially Toyota, Honda and Nissan.

When the Detroit 3 began narrowing the reliability gap with Japan as the 1980s closed, Keller predicted technology would become a key selling point and competitive advantage.

"There are no longer big differentials in size and quality, and cars are becoming look-alike the world over," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1988. "High tech, therefore, is the last competitive edge."

With an encyclopedic memory of the auto industry and a cheerful demeanor, she became a popular guest expert on TV news programs — morning, noon or night. Reporters in small towns and large media markets routinely reached out to her for insight or a quote.

Steve Friedman, onetime executive producer of NBC-TV's "Today" morning program, once told The New York Times that he often invited Keller to be a guest "because she talks English, she knows her stuff, she talks in short sentences, and she's right. What else do you want?"

Keller was born on Dec. 31, 1943, and was the daughter of a factory worker and a nurse. She was raised in Perth Amboy, N.J., and earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Rutgers University and an MBA from City University of New York.

"I was a wallflower, far on the outskirts of the in crowd," she told Fortune for a profile published in 1986. "Nobody saw greatness in me when I was in school."

After consulting and finance stints at a chemical maker and on Wall Street, Keller landed her first automotive job in 1972 as an investment analyst covering the auto industry for Kidder Peabody. Her knowledge of the industry at the time was limited: She had no idea DeSoto had been discontinued for just more than a decade and that Bentley was an ultraluxury brand.

She later was an automotive industry analyst at Furman Selz, a portfolio manager at Vilas-Fischer Associates Inc. and did another stint as automotive industry analyst at Paine Webber.

In 1999, Keller was named president of Priceline.com's new automotive unit that steered shoppers, eager for a deal below sticker price, to participating dealers.

She was an adviser to Manheim Auctions for more than 12 years and served on the boards of multiple companies, including Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group, Lee Automotive Group, AutoCanada, DriveTime Automotive and Lithia Motors.

Keller also led and advised the first initial public offering of a public auto retailer, Cross Country Auto Retailers, and advised IPOs at UnitedAuto Group (now Penske Automotive), Lithia and Asbury Automotive.

In 2001, she started her own advisory and consulting company, Maryann Keller & Associates, mostly serving dealers, startups and investors.

In 2008, with the U.S. auto industry on the verge of financial collapse and seeking a government bailout, Keller blamed leaders at GM, Ford and Chrysler for lacking credibility and speed and being resistant to change for decades.

"The Detroit 3 have only themselves to blame for the fact that two-thirds of the American public thinks they should be allowed to fail," Keller wrote in an essay for Automotive News. "Having watched and written about the utter incompetence of executive management and corrupt automotive corporate and union cultures, it is a sentiment that I understand."

She singled out GM in particular at the time.

"The question for Congress and the American public is: Can the executives of the auto companies, especially General Motors, be trusted with their money? Unfortunately, the track record of GM executives, including the current roster, is not good," Keller wrote. "During the 1990s, when GM was flush with cash, the company quite literally wasted $9.0 billion on share buybacks, only to later complain that they didn't have the cash to spend on fuel-saving technology."

She wasn't always critical of GM. She praised the company in 1983 for partnering with Toyota on a joint factory in California, saving some $1 billion to develop a new line of subcompact cars. By adopting and learning lean manufacturing techniques from a leading Japanese automaker, GM was able to reduce manufacturing outlays below those of rivals Ford and Chrysler.

"This inexpensive strategy will allow GM to offer competitively priced subcompacts on which it will earn a profit — a first for an American manufacturer — and devote its resources to the midsize and large cars that have always been GM's strength," Keller said at the time.

More recently, she called GM's decision to resurrect Hummer as an electric vehicle-only brand "strategically brilliant and absolutely necessary, especially if the company is going to convince a skeptical public that a car — or in this case, a hulking truck — can showcase the attributes of electric power, namely no engine noise and rapid acceleration."

Keller, a fan of BMW cars, shunned the dark business suits that dominated Wall Street dress codes for decades in favor of boldly colored dresses.

In a 2020 interview with Automotive News, she lamented the lack of women in top leadership roles across the auto industry, even as more and more women acquire academic credentials and seek key management roles.

"Have they reached the highest levels of their corporation?," Keller said. "Apart from [GM CEO] Mary Barra, the answer is no."

In 2000, when she was named one of the 100 Leading Women in the North American Auto Industry by Automotive News, she said her proudest career achievement was being an author.

Her two widely acclaimed books — 1989's Rude Awakening: The Decline, Fall and Struggle to Recover at General Motors and 1993's Collision: GM, Toyota and Volkswagen and the Race to Own the 21st Century — were among the first to chronicle and expose the management hubris and challenges facing GM, the world's biggest automaker for decades, and other companies.

"I find much of my professional life is consumed with looking at the numbers and making my judgments based on what they tell me,” Keller wrote in the introduction to Rude Awakening. “But contrary to what many people think, an analyst’s job isn’t abstract. It’s really about talking and listening and observing.”

While she was among the first female auto analysts in a traditionally buttoned-down but competitive industry in which millions of dollars were at stake, and fortunes made or lost, Keller said it had no effect on her or her career.

"There have been and still are women covering the auto industry," Keller told Automotive News in 2000. "Sex is less of an issue in the investment research business than it is in an operating job in an auto company. The measurement of value is very different. The measurement of my value was whether I was successful in making people money. Being a woman was not a hindrance."