Tom Kowaleski, the automotive PR executive who held top posts at Chrysler, General Motors, and BMW is dead at 63.

Kowaleski died Jan. 20 after suffering a heart attack while hiking with his wife in Arizona.

tom kowaleskiAutomotive News reports that Kowaleski was "one of the masterminds behind the wildly successful Chrysler press conferences of the 1990s."

Those moves included stunts such as driving a Jeep through the glass window at Detroit's Cobo Center in 1992.

AN credits Kowaleski for driving Chrysler off the business page and onto the front page and TV evening news.

He worked at American Motors, Renault and Campbell Co. before shifting to Chrysler in 1988 as manager of product and technology communications.

Kowaleski succeeded Steve Harris as communications chief for DaimlerChrysler and then moved to GM becoming VP-global communications in 2004.

He retired as VP-corporate communications at Renault in 2012, but re-emerged at Ford's Lincoln unit as a consultant.