The auto industry executive Lee Iacocca has died at age 94, his daughter Lia Iacocca Assad told the Washington Post.

Iacocca, the celebrated businessman behind the Ford Mustang who helped Chrysler stay in business, died of complications from Parkinson’s disease at his Los Angeles home, Assad told the paper.

During a nearly five-decade career in Detroit that began in 1946 at Ford Motor Co, the proud son of Italian immigrants made the covers of Time, Newsweek and the New York Times Sunday Magazine in stories portraying him as the avatar of the American auto age. He was one of the first celebrity US chief executives, and his autobiography made bestseller lists in the mid-1980s.

Iacocca was a celebrated salesman. He encouraged his design teams to be bold, and they responded with sports cars that appealed to baby boomers in the 1960s, fuel-efficient models when gasoline prices soared in the 1970s, and the first family-oriented minivan in the 1980s that led its segment in sales for 25 years.

“I don’t know an auto executive that I’ve ever met who has a feel for the American consumer the way he does,” the late United Auto Workers union president, Douglas Fraser, said. “He’s the greatest communicator who’s ever come down the pike in the history of the industry.”

Iacocca also had some duds, such as the Ford Pinto, an economy car that became notorious for exploding fuel tanks. “You don’t win ’em all,” he said of the Pinto.

Iacocca won a place in business history when he pulled Chrysler, now part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, from the brink of collapse in 1980, rallying support in the US Congress for $1.2bn in federally guaranteed loans and persuading suppliers, dealers and union workers to make sacrifices. He cut his salary to $1 a year.

Iacocca was often described as a demanding and volatile boss who sometimes clashed with fellow executives.

“He could get mad as hell at you, and once it was done he let it go. He wouldn’t stay mad,” said Bud Liebler, vice-president of communications at Chrysler during the 1980s and 1990s. “He liked to bring an issue to its head, get it resolved. You always knew where you stood with him.”

Iacocca often spoke of his immigrant roots and how America rewarded hard work. When he was tapped by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 to be chairman of a campaign to restore the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, he said he accepted the job as a way of honoring his parents. The campaign raised more than $350m, more than double the initial $150m goal.
Lido Anthony “Lee” Iacocca was born in the Pennsylvania steel town of Allentown in 1924. His father, Nicola, owned a hot dog stand he called The Orpheum Wiener House – a foretaste of his son’s later marketing creativity.

He was a diligent student who enrolled in Lehigh University, earning his engineering degree in fewer than four years. He received a fellowship at Princeton for his master’s degree.

After joining Ford, he realized he was better at marketing than engineering. Ten years later, when his district had the worst sales in the country, he came up with a marketing campaign, “56 for ’56” – buyers could get a 1956 Ford with 20% down and three years of monthly installments of $56.

The plan took off and the Ford executive Robert McNamara, who would become secretary of defense in the Kennedy administration, made it part of Ford’s national sales strategy.

Iacocca’s relationship with the Mustang was cemented when Time and Newsweek featured him on their covers in April 1964. By 2013, about 9m Mustangs had been sold.

Gene Bordinat, Ford’s design executive at the time, said of Iacocca’s contribution to the Mustang’s popularity: “We conceived the car and he pimped it after it was born.”

It was cheap to produce and generated big profits. For years, it was Iacocca’s signature achievement.

The low moment in Iacocca’s career though came in 1978, when Henry Ford II fired him. He asked why, reminding his boss that the company had earned record profits of $1.8bn two straight years. Ford replied: “Well, sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”

Within weeks, Iacocca accepted the presidency of Chrysler, even though its market share was shrinking and losses were deepening.

Iacocca searched for a merger partner but when no takers emerged, he turned to the government for up to $1.5bn in loan guarantees. He pounded on the doors in Washington, assisted by dealers and union officials who knew their brethren would be out of work if Chrysler folded.

Iacocca won the loan guarantees but they required broad sacrifices, of plant closures, pay cuts for factory workers and layoffs of white-collar staff. Still, factoring in positions at Chrysler, its dealerships and suppliers, he saved more than 500,000 jobs.

“People saw him in the trenches,” Liebler said. “When we needed the loan guarantees and he was pounding the halls of Congress, the dealers were with him … he worked his head off day and night, and everyone who was involved in any way with Chrysler knew it.”

He paid the loans back seven years early.

Iacocca stepped down at the end of 1992. He lived out his latter years in stylish Bel-Air, California.

He penned Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, a 2007 book critical of American leadership, especially President George W Bush.

Iacocca had two daughters with his first wife, Mary, who died of diabetes in 1983, prompting him to start a family foundation to fight the disease.

After Mary’s death he married twice more. His second was brief and ended in annulment, while his third ended in divorce.