Before we all pass the White Lightning Jug on this Shotgun Wedding of Chrysler-Fiat, has anyone considered what the kids will look like? I mean Worst made American Car (Bride) verses Formerly Worst made Car in America (Groom).

Chrysler is unsaveable with or without FIAT, hence C-7. Problem is…what happens WHEN Chrysler finally does go tits up? 1. ALL American Parts manufactures will be impacted—even BMW, Honda, Toyota. Take Windshields, for example—they’re North American MFG’d. No chrysler orders, no glass plants=Shortages for everyone 2. A Mortibund Chrysler will push GM over the edge–not just C-11; C-7 3. GM in bankruptcy/liquidation will drag Ford under (Remember—the reason Ford is not wooching money like GM/Chrysler has nothing to do with superior vision or products. Ford simply started cutting costs and hording capital and were plush when Black September 2008 hit. They will need a loan cum JUL/AUG. Like it or not, America has become a Service Economy and not a MFG Economy. The thing about Service Economies—a service can always be done better and cheaper elsewhere (Think of your girlfriend going to JiffyLube to change her oil vrs you doing it for a six pack and a roll in the hey). There will always be a need for superior products and countries which maintain their mfg base will always dominate service economy countries

You mean, Hondas have had…GASP…reliability issues?

Couldn’t be…we know the Japanese build nothing but perfect cars.

“Case in point, the headgasket issues on the “Neon” I4’s. How did they fix them? They switched multilayer steel headgaskets… Something they could have done to begin with, but didn’t.”
Stuff like that happens a lot. In all industries.
Something must have been wrong with Honda transmissions circa 2001-2005 because a lot of them have failed.

In fairness, you don’t hear stories like that much anymore about American cars, even Chryslers. The Neon was a piece of junk, but so were most other small cars of that vintage.

Nor are Hondas and Toyotas uniformally reliable; witness my friend’s 2002 Toyota Sienna (another Consumer Reports wet dream car), which has had something like six A/C compressors and two motors for the power side door.

My current daily driver is a 2005 Focus. I’ve had it for three and half years and 50,000 miles, and have driven the piss out of it, and the only maintenance I’ve needed to do was regularly scheduled stops, plus new tires and brake pads. The original radio went out, and the handbrake needed to be adjusted, but that’s it for unscheduled repairs, and both were handled under warranty.

Where the Focus falls short of the other cars I considered (Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, Mazda 3) is in resale value, but considering that all its competitors stickered for around $21,000, but I got my Focus for a tick under $15,000 with the sport package and all the toys, the residual value is reasonable.

Where current American small cars fall short vis a vis the competition is interior material quality and intangibles like “feel.” In terms of build quality and reliability, though, they’re on a par with the competition.

Prediction: Ford’s upcoming Euro-sourced Fiesta and Focus will give Japan Inc. a run for its money.

I’m not sure which bizarro universe those “decent” or “reasonable” Neons were sold in. I bought a brand-new ‘95 Neon Sport Coupe as my first car after college, mainly because I had foolishly decided a new Neon was just as good as a used Honda Civic (at roughly the same price).

The Neon was loud, uncomfortable, harsh, and plasticky. At 8000 miles the fuel pump burned out in the parking lot at work. I finally sold it after just 3 yrs and 34000 miles, for less than half what I paid for it. The subsequent owner had to replace the fuel injectors (out-of-warranty), and in order to appease him I had to split the cost. (Never sell or buy a car with someone at work.)

I replaced the Neon with a ‘96 Honda Accord, which already had over 2 yrs and 60000 miles on the clock. It was already better than the Neon, and I kept it for another 5 yrs and 90000 miles.

Yes.

I just don’t understand the whole merger…was their intention to just gut Chrysler and then discard it?

Some of the stars aligned on some of the vehicles for certain years, but you had to pick carefully through the ruble for a gem.

I own 3 GM vehicles, all have been rock solid, but then again I’m not a typical car buyer.

My mom owned a 2003 Sable that was a piece of shit that was plagued with electrical gremlins of all sorts, and was slapped together with all the care of a Yugo. (The trunk sat half an inch lower than the rear quarter panel). So I would put Ford getting their shit together quality wise around mid-2004.

As you know it was Eaton who, like a true GM executive that he once was, had the head gaskets and the “donut” exhaust fastener changed on the Neon, against the wishes of the engineers – all to save $2 a car. The result was predictable. And yet they still made money with that car.

Wsn,

The bigger issue for Hitler and his command was that he counted on a short war. His scientists (Germany did have some very good technical people who weren’t Jewish) told him all about the atomic bomb. But he did not want to expend the resources needed because the war would be over before they could use it. Read The Virus House for the full story on Germany’s atomic weapons program.

I tell this very point to other people (specifically if they’re looking at older used cars) and they don’t believe me. The designs coming out of Chrysler at that time were very competitive, but they shot themselves in the foot when it came to costcutting and quality control.

Case in point, the headgasket issues on the “Neon” I4’s. How did they fix them? They switched multilayer steel headgaskets… Something they could have done to begin with, but didn’t.

If those salad-tossers were so great at what they did, they would have won the war.

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I agree. Adolf Hitler was not an anomaly. He was actually representing what was wrong with Germany.

Isn’t it ironic that the person who discovered relativity was a Jew? Had the Germans not been so arrogant, would they invent the atomic bomb first?

Good point. All automakers have been making reliability improvements since the 90’s. Today Toyota is still ranked high but the gap has narrowed considerably. The difference between Toyota and any domestic make is something like 1.5 problems per car. If you live in fear of a trip to the dealer then I guess this is important.

This is actually an important point. Native Chryslers designed in this period were actually, well, pretty decent in terms of reliability. You could, reasonably safely, have bought a PT or Neon and expected reasonble, if not Toyota/Honda-level, ownership experiences. They’d done real work on warranty performance, too.

They weren’t great, but they woke up just before Ford (~2003) and GM (who still hasn’t clued in). And then Mercedes came in and overturned the whole applecart.

Apparently you make the mistake of confusing market share with profitability. I can understand that if you been a GM fan. They were on top of their game when they had more market share than most auto companies combined. Therefore mkt share = profitability, except that it doesn’t. (By the way Chrysler’s mkt share GREW during the 90’s).

What you don’t understand is that the thing that really drove Chrysler’s profitability thru the roof and gave them the cash cushion that Dumbler so eagerly eyed was the manufacturing effiencies they gained. Chrysler was not only the most profitable automaker in the mid to late 90’s but the lowest cost producer as well. The two go together. Toyota had more efficient factories but they spent more money developing the platform. So Chrysler was making more $ per car it sold.

Case in point, both Ford and Chrysler developed a new compact/midsize platform in the 90’s. For Ford it was the Contour/Mystique/Mondeo (Europe). For Chrysler it was the Stratus/Cirrus/Breeze (”cloud cars”). Ford’s cost: about 6 billion according to Automotive News. Chrysler: 1.6 billion. Now, to be fair Ford’s included a new engine and transmission, and the Mondeo’s engineering might have been different for Eouropean requirements (I don’t know if it was), but that doesn’t account for the total difference. Fact is that Ford’s costs were way out of wack, but they didn’t care too much because they were swollen on SUV profits. Chrysler could not afford to waste money like that. Ford may not have made a profit on those cars. I remember reading how Ford canceled an all new Taurus. Although they didn’t say why it was because they didn’t have the money anymore. Instead we got the Taurus that they recently stopped building, a sad shadow of what the car used to be.

Everyone looks at the externals of Chrysler in 90’s: the eye catching designs, the new market niches (like PT Cruiser), but they don’t look at the changes that were made behind the scenes, the developement methodology (borrowed and modified from Honda), the supplier relations (also borrowed from the Japanese), and the pushing of responsibility and authority to the lowest levels possible.

In the 90’s at their best point in the last 30 years Chrysler was still a distant 3rd place in the US market and was watching Toyota and other transplants gain more market each and every year. That’s a fact.

Even though Chrysler was supposedly “hot” at this time don’t forget that the ghosts underneath the sheet metal were starting to get exposed prior to the Daimler sale. My father’s company quit using Intrepids as company cars because they we piles of junk costing them too much to maintain. The bar of quality was never raised along with the new products. The products were left too long and went stale. Then instead of improving what they had Chrysler threw another hail mary on RWD large sedans, Hemi engines, etc. Meanwhile Toyota kept chugging along constantly improving their existing linup and eating more and more and more and more and more of Chrysler’s market each and every year.

Without a doubt in my mind nobody at Chrysler had what it would take to stop the Japanese even in the 1990’s hey days. Eaton was smart to sell out while the selling was good. He knew what the end game was and played his hand much better than I have done with my 401k. I don’t fault him for that. Nor do I fault lower level Chrysler engineers/designers. Truly the changes Chrysler needed to make needed to happen in the 1980’s or before. I think the 90’s were the dead cat bounce from the first bailout. This time the end is Ch 7. Good bye and good night.

“Eaton was an ex-GM executive, that should tell you something about his management acumen.”

You sir, get the Gold Star. It was Lee who picked Eaton to succeed him, because he so despised Lutz.

akear:

“I wonder how Eaton sleeps at night.”

I’ve wondered this too. If I were God I would sentence him to forever be taking his Mercedes car to a dealer for the same electrical malfuntion, over and over, only to be told each time that his car has “superior German engineering”.

rochskier:

“Thanks for sharing your story. Ever have any thoughts on the historical ‘what if?’ involving Kerkorian and Iacocca’s attempted takeover of Chrysler in the late ’90s? If they’d managed it, do you think Chrysler would be better off at this point in time?”

Well, like anything involving alternative history, that depends. Assuming Lee or York did not disrupt the product platform teams and piss the money away on silly aquisitions like Gulfstream, then yes things would be better. At one point in 2007 someone calculated that the 10 or so billion that Chrysler had in cash would have sustained it during the downtime so far AND paid for new product development. Exactly what it was designed to do. Mgt was actually forward thinking and proactive for a change. Chrysler would have been regarded like Ford is now or the Japanese. The only company to take their “SUV” profits and use them to develop new products, to quote the current meme from the NYT and others. This wasn’t rocket science. Everybody knew automakers “print” money when times are good. Everybody knew they lost huge sums when times were bad. The difference was that GM and Ford had way more access to lines of credit than Chrysler did.
A better ‘what if’ would be what if Lutz succeeded Iacocca? He would not have gone to GM. What would GM’s product look like now? Would the Malibu be as good as it is now? Would the Lambda’s be as good, would they even exist? It’s quite possible that only GM would be on life support.

They had a CHANCE with the 300. Car was on fire. All that was needed was to keep it genuinely fresh. Use it to build. Instead that car is going on 6 years without any sort of significant update, and the follow-ups to that were the turds known as Avenger and Sebring. They had a lot of good press and good will because of those LX cars, and blew it.

I feel for those left. I have friends and family. But you had to know this was going to happen at some point. They seemed to have life, but were struggling with billion dollar losses in 2003. Now look where we are. Even the BEST companies are going to have a big problem staying viable if we sit like this for awhile.

FYI. JNAP is Jefferson North Assembly Plant on E Jefferson and Connor on Detroit’s east side (maybe a few miles from Grosse Pointe Park). Built the Grand Cherokees and Commanders. Connor Avenue assembly where the Vipers are built are just a few miles north of JNAP. There is actually the GM Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant in Poletown that builds Buicks and Cadillacs. Otherwise, I think only those three are still assembling within Detroit city limits. Mound Road engine is behind JNAP. Detroit axle is still open on Lynch road (former Mopar muscle car assembly facility dating back to 1917). Other various big-component facilities are still around, but I think just those three are the only final assembly still there.

Its a shame. So many different reasons, there isn’t one particular thing. I do think this is a disturbing trend of not caring one bit about manufacturing in the US. A service-only economy simply will not be one where the US remains a global power in the world; politically or economically.

Jerry Weber nailed it with Eaton. Eaton knew the company didn’t have what it takes, even at its peak, to survive in the long term.

During the Lutz years they focused on styling and price. Quality was awful, by design. There was only so long they could continue with that strategy before it caught up with them.

Iacocca would have, if anything, made the situation worse. Iacocca didn’t realize it, but his personal taste never evolved past 1982. Lutz recognized this together with Iacocca’s inability to delegate, and couldn’t stand Iacocca as a result.

Of course, Lutz’s personal taste never evolved past 1998. Seems to happen to everyone at some point. But Lutz appears to delegate better than Iacocca did. The best thing he did while at Chrysler was empower the product teams to make many decisions that top managment makes at other companies.

One thing is not in doubt: Daimler managed to kill the few strengths Chrysler once had.

Right now, Chrysler is in a race against time. Compared to the rest of the industry, they can’t even pretend to have the same engineering base as the rest of the industry, both in existing technologies and the means to create those technologies.

The only fields they are still competitive in (I define competitive as the ability to create a best-in-class) in big cars, such as the Ram, minivans, the LX siblings, V8’s, and (soon enough) V6’s. Even if, in theory, they could make it out of this downturn, the next gas price climb would demolish them, plain and simple.

So, the connection with Fiat will allow them to snag technology that would take them years to create otherwise in smaller vehicles.

Now, I’m not saying this plan will work, I’m just saying that this is what they’re trying to do.

At least Mr Source and I share a disdain for the Grand Cherokee.

When they didn’t have foreign competition that raised the bar.

Companies such as Toyota made far better cars, even when they had lower sales volumes. They didn’t need to have more scale to get better quality.

What counts is a commitment to build quality and reliability. The Japanese companies identified that as a weakness and used it to their advantage. They redefined customer expectations and won, and Detroit failed to respond adequately to the challenge.

We will be better off when we can just admit that the best Japanese companies won the battle by building a better vehicle. Until we can admit that the US companies just didn’t do as good of a job and need to do it better, with no excuses, we aren’t going to fix the problem at home.

This person claims that he/she now works in another industry altogether, so why the anonymity? I can think of only two reasons. One, they sincerely believe someone would retaliate against them for telling the truth about working at Chrysler, or two, they are lying.

Not many people are fond of an employee or prospective employee who complains about his former employer. That’s true, even if the employee was previously in a different industry.

It wouldn’t be wise to attach your name to something like this unless you’re retired or dead. I would stay anonymous, too, if it were me.