Despite market research indicating, as early as 1970, that consumers did want air bags and would pay for them, despite field tests that said they worked reliably, despite federal mandates requiring they be adopted, air bags, and all their partisans, were the sworn enemy of GM, Ford, and Chrysler. From 1970 to 1984, when the federal government mandated the phase-in of air bags, the recalcitrant Big Three played cat and mouse with both regulators and the market. Detroit announced and then either canceled or deferred the introduction of air bags nine times. The Supreme Court called the industry's long standoff "the regulatory equivalent of war." Only a high-court decision handed down in 1983 and an act of Congress passed in 1984 brought it to an end.
Thousands of lives that might have been saved were lost. More than a few would-be suppliers fell, too. The dance with Detroit grew too costly for most, especially the biggest suppliers who'd won contracts and tooled up for production, only to watch their investments get flushed every time the carmakers reneged. After a decade of on-again off-again rollouts, the question of when and whether an air-bag market would arrive became one that few suppliers had the patience or the capital to answer. They folded their air-bag operations in disgust.
But Breed, incapable of quitting, kept on: cracking up cars on tracks and on computers, piling up sensor patents, waiting for the moment he swore would come -- when the air-bag market would inflate.
"When something is basically good," says Breed, "you can suppress it for a while, but you can't kill it."
"He just wouldn't give up," recalls Ted Thuen, vice-president of new-product development and a cohort of Breed's for more than 30 years. "He just kept saying that this was going to go." No matter what the car companies argued -- that hubcaps and stereos, not seat belts and air bags, moved buyers -- Breed believed safety would sell. "Air bags will be the biggest safety feature since antilock brakes," he kept telling his future customers.
Call it visionary. Call it obstinate. Allen Breed is both. A cautious manager would have weighed the risks and considered the competitive disadvantages -- like Breed Corp.'s small size and inexperience as an automotive supplier -- and pulled out. Most did. But Allen Breed is neither cautious nor particularly managerial. He's a brilliant engineer, an irresistible salesman, a poor realist. His optimism borders on the delusional.
"He's got the strongest rationalization process I've ever seen in my life," says his son Doug Breed, corporate procurement manager. "Sometimes you're telling him, 'Hello, it's raining. You're soaking wet.' And he's looking at a break in the clouds."
From the late '60s until the mid-1980s, it was often pouring on Allen Breed. Not that he'd admit it. Even though he went through three divorces, mortgaged nearly every personal asset, endured being blacklisted by key customers, flirted with bankruptcy, and survived triple-bypass surgery, the storm-resistant Breed pressed on.
All he says about those years now is that "it was hand to mouth." The air-bag skunkworks continued -- with Breed pouring at least $20 million in earnings and personal cash into development -- while the company survived as a government contractor. The company's revenues bounced up and down with the cost-plus contracts it won or lost from the Pentagon. Breed designed parts for missiles and land mines, developed Agent 007 gizmos like camera pens, and even dabbled in commercial work, designing a round-dog machine for the inventor of the Whopper, who thought the future of fast food lay in patty-shaped hot dogs.
By the mid-'80s, when Breed Corp. began angling for production contracts from Ford and GM, the company was a money-losing enterprise that had never topped $10 million in revenues and had never manufactured more than job-shop lots of anything. Which was an unabating frustration for Breed, a "maker of things." His company's stunted size and uncertain market and anorexic bank account had always conspired against his boyhood desire to own some big "werks" -- a factory, a stand of smokestacks, an army of machines -- where hundreds would come day in, day out to "hammer stuff out" in his name.
Licensing had been his lot. He'd designed too many new and improved mousetraps to remember, only to sell off the rights to bigger players, who got nearly all the glory and all the gross, tossing him 3¢ on the dollar as a royalty. It was no way to make a fortune. It was no way to build a company. Breed wanted more: to be a manufacturer, cranking out seven-figure volumes; to be a modern-day Henry Ford, his hero; to be the builder not of some anonymously successful little business but of an empire.
The market was so late-blooming and the customers so hostile that, ironically, Breed got a crack at realizing his dream: at manufacturing the product he might have otherwise licensed away. All those false starts and reversals, which had discouraged rivals, in the end empowered Breed. They bought him precious time -- not only to perfect a cost-effective design but also to raise capital. And then marry it.
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"He was attracted to my mind," says the vice-chairman. "And to my bank account."
In 1986 Johnnie Cordell (not yet Breed) had a net worth of $16 million. "Not bad for a girl who started out with nothing and never borrowed a dime," says the entrepreneur whose travel business, founded in 1974, had grown to more than $25 million in revenues. She had met Breed in 1985 at the Pritikin Longevity Center, where both had retreated to correct habits that had left them with health problems, him with a bad heart and her with runaway blood pressure. But while everyone else talked "lifestyle changes," Allen Breed talked air bags. And Johnnie Cordell, who knew something about building a business and also knew that an obsessed man on the brink of a new market might spell a decent investment opportunity, listened. Months later, the two planned to meet in Chicago for a business dinner. Cordell found herself meeting Breed at a hospital instead. He'd had another coronary and was scheduled for a triple bypass the next morning. "I spent the whole night with him," recalls Cordell Breed, Allen Breed's administrative alter ego. "Getting a living will written, calling his kids, discussing what kind of funeral he'd want if he didn't pull through.
