Here’s what I know about the story. After Lee left Ford, he brought over another gentleman from Ford (whose name escapes me) who had worked on a minivan for Ford that got quite far in development before Ford killed it, without Lee’s knowledge. When this gentleman left Ford, he asked them what to do with all the files on the minivan, which ended up in his custody after they killed it, and they said keep them or toss them. He kept them and took them to Chrysler, and Lee asked him if he had any ideas, and he said he had developed a minivan for Ford that they didn’t want and he had all the stuff on it – including marketing studies that predicted massive sales (enough right there for Lee to green-light it, probably). Interestingly, this gentleman asked Lee “why didn’t you tell me it was so bad over here at Chrysler when you asked me to work here?” Lee told him “You wouldn’t have accepted a job here if you had known how bad it was!”
