Keller eventually lent her considerable skills to charity after leaving the auto industry.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nBut she didn\u2019t think her gender was as much an issue on Wall Street as in the auto industry itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Have (women) reached the highest levels of their corporation?” Keller lamented in a 2020 interview with Automotive News “Apart from Mary Barra, the answer is no,\u201d she said, referencing GM’s current top executive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A chemist by training<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Keller didn\u2019t set out to become one of the automotive world\u2019s most oft-quoted figures. Her first love was science and she initially enrolled in Rutgers University as a chemistry major, graduating with honors in 1966. She then landed a job providing market research about the chemical industry. But the big shift came when Keller was recruited by Kidder Peabody, the Wall Street firm hiring her to do research on the automotive market. She had fallen in love with her first car, a British Triumph TRA3, and took to the new role.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen I was first assigned to autos,\u201d she said in an interview with Forbes, \u201cI didn\u2019t know which car company made which nameplate. Yet, the job took and she became the first female auto analyst in 1972 \u2014 a job she continued for the next 17 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was a voracious reader and a dogged pursuer of even the most arcane facts and figures, which helped her stand out from the more hidebound analyst crowd of that era. And she was more than happy to accommodate when journalists called, typically prepared with a pithy quote followed by lots of insightful details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turning to new challenges<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
By the time of the automotive meltdown during the Great Recession, Keller had already backed out of her daily career. But she kept close to the industry, at one point running the automotive division for Priceline.com. Just four years ago, she joined \u00a0Autotech Ventures, a transportation-focused venture capital firm. There she served on the advisory board overseeing a $120 million fund focused on ground transportation startups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Keller also made a late-game move into charity work, among other things working with Stamford Hospital Network to help steer its response to the COVID crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her two books, \u201cRude Awakening: The Rise, Fall and Struggle to Recover at General Motors\u201d and \u201cCollision: GM, Toyota, and Volkswagen and the Race to Own the 21st Century,\u201d are still considered critical reading by those trying to understand how the auto industry got where it is today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keller leaves behind her second husband, Jay Chai, a Korean-American executive who served as a consultant for General Motors and has spent years working with Asian businesses investing in the U.S. She had no children of her own, but Jay brought three into their marriage, two of whom survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keller died June 16. No cause of death has been released.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Everyone in the auto industry listened to what she said, as did everyone on Wall Street. “She” is Maryann Keller, who died at age 78. Find out more about her at TheDetroitBureau.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":226955,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4344,7,8,5,1908,1164,905,3541,1347],"tags":[6569,6567,6570,6568],"make":[],"post-state":[],"category_old":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226944"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226944"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226944\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226960,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226944\/revisions\/226960"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/226955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226944"},{"taxonomy":"make","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/make?post=226944"},{"taxonomy":"post-state","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post-state?post=226944"},{"taxonomy":"category_old","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thedetroitbureau.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/category_old?post=226944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}