Just a few years ago Chrysler consistently scored higher than Nissan on both the JD Powers initial quality and 3 year studies. I don’t know what the scores have been the last 2 years. Nissan has always basked in the glow of Toyota and Honda as has Mitsubishi. Neither of those companies made as reliable cars as Toyota, Honda, or even Chrysler. When Chrysler was taken over by Daimler they had better reliability than Mercedes but Daimler thought they could teach the poor Americans about building “reliable” cars. So they instituted Mercedes style quality control at Chrysler. Chrysler reliability got worse. I hear it’s better now that the Germans are gone.

What instead would be up for sale is the name of a company. It is essentially paper being moved to someone who thinks it is a get-taxpayer-money-for-free card. Which it probably is.

Is it worth spending $n billion for a name that may well get $m billion in taxpayer bail-out money this year (and the year after and the year after and the year after)? Not a bad gamble.

The cars? Just camouflage, to make it look as though Chrysler were actually a going concern. Who cares if anyone actually buys them. Along the lines of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

This may actually be good news for Chrysler. If Cerberus can’t sell it, they may have to actually make a good effort at turning the company and product line around.

In the end, they won’t sell “Chrysler, LLC” — that will simply die in bankruptcy court along with the union’s VEBA interests. But they will sell all the individual pieces, which Tata, maybe Renault will pick up for a song.

I am SURE they have this all figured out.

“Cerberus is chaired by a former Bush administration Treasury secretary, John Snow, and its board includes Dan Quayle, who was vice president under former president George H.W. Bush.”

“So, now that the GM merger is well and justly buried, who will emerge (re-emerge) as the next potential partner, if anyone? Nissan/Renault?”

You Nick! You are the winner (assuming you are a US taxpayer). It’s a special kind of partnership. No messy stock certificates to keep track of and your dividend payments will be direct deposited to your UAW account.

You probably thought investing was much more difficult. A side benefit of the current economic restructuring is you will become part owner of some major US corporations.

Older TTAC members will realize the “Big Rock Candy Mountain” is just around the next bend.

They never give up on the crap speak do they?

I imagine this means cold calling auto companies and asking: “Say, do you have anything we could sell on commission? Because we sure as hell don’t have anything people want to buy and we, like, you know, really really need stuff to sell and we know you’d like to get into the US market and we’re the agent with the gold plated reputation you need to do that. What you need is a Chrysler badge on your Pressedsawdust GTXLSS and we’ve got lots of those. Can we talk? No? Are you sure? You are? Is there anybody else near you building cars I can call?”

Absent the $50B and counting government intervention Chrysler was headed for certain bankruptcy. President Obama and Co. may shovel yet more cash into the burner.

Jeep will end up coming “home” to Renault/Nissan.

R/N already has a piece of the action with their badge engineering of the Ram Pickup. Scraping Chrysler lines of cars and using the sales channel for Nissans has potential.

My guess is that Cerberus will sell it at a loss. If they have to part it out, they will, but my guess is that they’ll sell the whole thing, with the possible exception of the financing company. As the clock ticks, expediency will take priority over price.

Cerberus cannot envision actually trying to have a successful automotive company.

All they wanted to do was strip money out of Chrysler and run

You forgot: Horrible design, crappy interior quality, and unbelievably bad build quality.

This quote is incomplete – let me help:

“And the high quality loans we made to people already upside down in their trade-ins. Also, we fudged a bit on the residual value of our wonderful trucks (and car) we leased. And we’re also challenged by public perception, poor leadership, bad investments, and a culture of mediocrity and laziness.

Sorry about that.”