Mary Barra Quotes

I think cars encapsulate the history of innovation and style - it's the other side of the coin of the car being public enemy No.1.

My father was a die maker for 39 years, so I had a basic understanding of the automobile industry and what the manufacturing world was like, just from the opportunity to spend time with him - just talking, because he was a car buff.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, 'Nah, what's wrong with a horse?' That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

The Ford Motor Company has always been part of my life, and I continue to draw a lot of energy from this wonderful and exciting business.

As the son of a racing car designer and mechanical engineer, I was exposed to motorsports from day one.

While I was at Cornell in engineering, I was an engineering co-op student, and that turned out to be very valuable because we'd go out every other term to work in industry and have that close association with industry.

My grandfather on one side was trained as a cabinetmaker but eventually worked as a coachbuilder and then built cars. I inherited from him a love of cars, but with no technical ability whatsoever, sadly!

My mum brought me to my first job when I was 12. I started electrical work at her plant. She was an engineer, a technical expert, at one of the plants in the south, and in the summer she brought me in and I learnt how industrial things work: casting, electricity, maintenance, everything.

Removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach, but it is unlikely to produce the first motor car.

The best job training is a job – any job.

My goal is for General Motors to lead in safe autonomous driving.

I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM, so I was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work.

It was great to go to Stanford. Until that point, I'd spent my whole life in southeast Michigan, working for General Motors. I was in a different part of the country. People didn't know what General Motors was, didn't care, or if they did, they might not have had a favorable impression. I saw people driving nondomestic vehicles.

An 18-year-old is good enough for our business, and we can teach them engineering in two years.

To me, Scorpio was a big bet and a quantum leap in the kind of sophistication of our products. People forget that, apart from the Bolero and the Armada, until the nineties we never made hard-top vehicles.

During college days, I started working with a line production company.

In the olden days I always got the impression that TVR built a car, put it on sale, and then found out how it handled. Usually when one of their customers wrote to the factory complaining about how dead he was.

General Motors committed likewise to invest billions of dollars in its American manufacturing operation, keeping many jobs here that were going to leave. And if I didn't get elected, believe me, they would have left, and these jobs and these things that I am announcing would never have come here.

I learned more on 'Spirit Warriors' than I think I have on any other job.

It has been a tumultuous journey, no doubt. But I feel blessed to have got work.

Everybody in my family who had a job worked in the auto industry or something related to it.

I've always been lucky enough to just play tennis, so I never actually had a job when I was growing up.

When I was about 17, I had a row with my mother and left home for six months, renting a flat and working as a waitress for a while. I learnt you could double your earnings if you gave good, cheerful service. It taught me that in any job you can improve your lot.

The American auto industry is blowing up like a 1976 Ford Pinto.

I never had a real job. I started acting in high school, and then I started working. So, I never got to have that experience.