If there had been, if Dumbler had a more open minded, all kind of good things could have happened. But it didn’t. Absolute worst company to be bought out by. They never asked, what’s Chrylser got that we could use/learn from? They never asked, what do we have that could help Chrysler? Instead they gave them a prev gen E class platform (that they charged royalties for I’m sure) even though Chrysler was well on it’s way with it’s own RWD platform (and thereby delaying the intro of the 300 and Charger by 1.5 years).

At one time (pre Dumbler), Chrysler was one of the quickest to market automakers. They studied what Honda did to develope new models, combined that with lessons learned from their aquisition of AMC/Jeep and created platform teams that handled everything in developing a new vehicle. And mgt was not allowed to interfere and gum up the works. The result was cars developed faster for less cost. At one point I think they developed a car from scratch in 42 months. That’s the real reason they made so much money in the 90’s. The sales were very good, but the cost savings from their development process saved them big time $$.

Of course Dumbler, instead of adapting it for Mercedes use, replaced it with their process and forced Chrysler to use Mercedes parts and consultants – for a fee of course. Could you imagine developing a new Mercedes for 10, 20, or even 30% cheaper than before but selling it for the same or more? They would be swimming in Euros right now.

Seems I’ve heard that is why there’s a warmed-over Mitsu platform under everything that isn’t a truck or old MB tech– They scrapped the original designs and software, and had Chrysler start over.

I don’t think Mercedes ever realized how competitive things were between the mainstream brands. They never seemed to move that quickly, especially when it came to powertrains.

They offer all the marketing gimmicks but never the durability to enable a majority of the vehicles to make it to 200K miles.

Is it really the car or the customer… What do you think…

Any good books on they mess they made yet?

He’s lived in Germany, in Stuttgart, and I think had some kind of handle on the arrogance thing that they have over there.

His (and my) take was that the resulting company would take the styling of Mercedes (zilch) and the quality control of Chrysler (crap) add to cost cutting (liberal doses) and top with German arrogance, and presto!

You have a disaster company with all the worst attributes of both! He also agreed with me that before 10 minutes passed, the Germans would simply take control.

We were right.

Customer didn’t fair as well as the execs, though. Seems like MBZ vehicles received reduced engineering/durability/quality (at least relative to the competition) with ever-accelerating MBZ prices.

I don’t think that’s the fault of an expensive second-hand Daimler chassis. Unless, of course, the cost of sliding it under american styling caused the interior cost cutting that really kills those cars.

But yeah, they really aren’t great sellers are they?

I.e. we can swindle premium brand customers because they have enough money not to care that our option prices are just completely ridiculous.
After all, we can charge more for a nav system than the cost of a brand new computer.

For the price of a phone call I could have told this to Dieter. Mercedes Benz would have saved several billion dollars.

Did it work? Neither of those cars sells that well – compare them to say the Chevy Impala. And they had to decontent the 300 and Charger to get their prices down. No side torso airbags available, curtain side airbags were only an option, 4 speed auto transmissions on all but the Hemi engines, cheap interiors…

That said they are quite good to drive.

And what “leading-edge” technology did MB give to Chrysler? An old model E-series platform for the 300? An old model CLK platform for the Crossfire?

Perhaps we’re looking at management failure rather than market forces?