DETROIT: Where have all the car guys gone?

With the surprise appointment last week of Robert Nardelli, the former Home Depot chief executive, to run Chrysler, Detroit has completed a new-model changeover of the executive suite. It is no longer a requirement to have “motor oil in your veins,” as they are fond of saying in Detroit, to run a car company.

None of the chiefs now leading the three American car companies can be credited for inspiring or developing anything on the roads today - the unofficial definition of what makes a Detroit chief executive a true “car guy.”

Only one of them, Rick Wagoner at General Motors, has more than a year of experience in the industry.

Also, very few of their highest-ranking colleagues have come up through the design, engineering or marketing side of the business so vital to Detroits existence.

It is a sharp break from a tradition stretching back to the industrys infancy, when car builders became chiefs of the companies that bore their names. As recently as last decade, all three chief executives could brag about cars they had helped develop.

Fords chief at the time, Donald Petersen, oversaw the Ford Taurus and earlier Fords. At GM, Robert Stempel engineered several vehicles, including the Oldsmobile Toronado.

And the most famous car guy of the time, Lee Iacocca, was credited with the success of Chryslers K-cars and its minivan (and the Mustang from a previous stint at Ford). As a marketing expert, though, he admittedly had others doing the actual development work.

But people in some quarters now argue that an outsiders pragmatic eye may be worth more than the gut instincts that come from bringing a car to life.

Given that the Detroit automakers have lost billions of dollars, and market share, to Japanese competitors in recent years, the evidence may be on their side.

Though car guys were responsible for Detroits triumphs, they also steered the companies into trouble with errors in judgment that included relying too heavily on big sport-utility vehicles.

“This is a business that needs to be run as a business,” Alan Mulally, Fords chief executive, said in an interview at an industry conference last week near Traverse City, Michigan.

Even Petersen, in a rare interview, agreed with that. “I think the concepts been overdone,” he said last week of the “car guy” mystique.

By insisting that only homegrown talent be promoted, Petersen added, “its undervaluing the inherent knowledge that you get about how things do in fact work in a very complex industrial setting.”

The appointment a year ago of Mulally, a former president of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, marked the first time an outsider had been appointed to run an auto company in Detroit, where lengthy careers at a single company are still the norm.

Wagoner, for example, joined GM 30 years ago and rose to chief financial officer in 1992 at age 39.

By contrast, Nardelli has barely finished his first week as an automobile executive.

His appointment has led to a kind of weeklong town hall discussion in the industry - in union halls, on Internet message boards and at an industry conference last week in Michigan - about who is best equipped to lead the industry out of its current troubles.

The Detroit News asked readers to share their opinions at its Web site after Nardellis appointment, and they had wide-ranging opinions about Chryslers future under its new owner, Cerberus Capital Management.

One reader wrote, “Nardelli is a great hired-gun manager, he learned at the best managed company in the country, GE” - meaning General Electric.

Another was less confident in the new boss: “Im terrified by what Nardelli and Cerberus could do to Chrysler.”

Nardelli hoped to win over some skeptics about his background when he stressed his love for Chrysler products at an Aug. 6 news conference - he said his garage included a Jeep, a Plymouth Prowler and a PT Cruiser.

But Edward Lapham, executive editor of Automotive News, a trade publication, wrote on Wednesday that it would be a mistake for Nardelli “to assume that just because he likes cars, hes a car guy.”

Arturo Reyes, the president of United Automobile Workers Local 651 in Flint, Michigan, said he was skeptical of Nardelli.

“I get more excited about the prospect of a company when were talking about a car guy who has seen the manufacturing process, who knows the design team, who can talk about quality and everything else,” Reyes said.

But George McGregor, the head of a UAW local in Detroit, said a “fresh pair of eyes” might not be all bad.

A MAN accused of killing dozens of people in a Moscow park over several years and marking his murders on a chessboard - with the goal of filling all 64 squares - will face trial next month.

After his arrest last year, Alexander Pichushkin claimed he had killed more than 60 people, but prosecutors said they had evidence to charge him with only 49 murders.

Pichushkin, 33, looked calm and aloof as he sat in the defendant’s cage of the Moscow City Court during a preliminary hearing yesterday. The judge accepted his appeal for a jury trial and ruled it should be open to the public. The trial is due to start on next month.

Pichushkin faces life in prison if convicted; Russia has a moratorium in place on the use of the death penalty.

The killings in the sprawling Bittsa Park terrorised the Russian capital.

Pichushkin was arrested in June 2006 after police found his name and phone number on a piece of paper that a woman who was killed in the park had left for her son.

He denied his involvement at first, but then confessed to the murder after police confronted him with video footage taken by a surveillance camera in the subway that showed him accompanying the victim.

Pichushkin went on to confess to at least 62 murders and led police to the bodies of his victims, investigators said. Shortly after his arrest, police invited a television channel to film and broadcast his confessions in an effort to counter media speculation that he had been forced into admitting his guilt.

In the footage, Pichushkin looked calm as he bragged about what he said was his passion for killing.

“For me, a life without murder is like a life without food for you,” he said. “I felt like the father of all these people, since it was I who opened the door for them to another world.”

Experts at the Serbsky Institute, Russia’s main psychiatric clinic, have found Pichushkin sane.

Pichushkin said in the televised confessions that he had killed his first victim, a classmate, in 1992 when he was 18. Police had questioned him then, but no charges were filed.

The killings in Bittsa Park began almost a decade later. Most of the victims were men whom Pichushkin had lured to the park by the promise of a drink, investigators said.

Police found his chessboard with numbers attached to its squares, all the way to 62, the chief investigator in the case, Andrei Suprunenko, said in a recently published interview.

Pichushkin also used the chessboard to keep stoppers from bottles of vodka he offered his victims.

Pichushkin killed more than 40 people by throwing them into a sewage pit after they were too drunk to resist, Mr Suprunenko said. Three others survived and one of these identified him, he said.

Pichushkin killed the others by hitting them with a hammer, the investigator said. Some of the victims had fragments of glass pressed into their skulls.

An elderly woman who was in the court, Tamara Klimova, came home from holiday to discover her husband missing. Prosecutors now believe he was killed by Pichushkin.

“I would like him to be handed over to the people so that they can tear him apart,” Mrs Klimova told reporters.

(12-31) 05:05 PST KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) —

Pakistani stocks suffered their biggest one-day loss ever Monday, the first day of trading following last week’s assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

The Karachi Stock Exchange’s benchmark 100-share index plunged 694.92 points, or 4.7 percent, to 14,077.16 it’s largest single-day loss in points and percentage. Three days of mourning had halted trading after Bhutto’s assassination Thursday.

Atif Malik, an analyst at J.S. Global Securities, said shares could recover in coming days if opposition parties reach an accord parliamentary elections that had been set for Jan. 8. It is not yet known if the government will postpone the election.

Many international markets fell last week after Bhutto was killed at a campaign rally, adding to global uncertainty about the tense situation in Pakistan. Widespread rioting and looting have plagued major cities since the attack.

With such a long history of political assassinations and political turmoil, analysts do not believe Pakistan’s economy will suffer long-term effects. The country’s economy was expected to grow about 7 percent for the fiscal year ending in mid-2008.

The KSE 100 stock benchmark finished the year 40 percent higher than at the end of 2006.