Mergers Don't Make Better Cars

Mergers don’t excite me.

I’m not excited about the prospect of walking in to my neighborhood Jeep/Chevy/Buick/Dodge/GMC superstore and thumbing through the soul-less car stocks like a weekend trip to Costco.

Bark makes a good business case that Mazda and Subaru could help each other in worldwide sales, and brings up some interesting short-term mashups: rotary engines with all-wheel drive, a boxer in a Miata, et al. All those things sound fun like monster trucks and cans of Pabst on a Friday night.

But in reality, despite repeated calls from automakers that consolidation will mean the car business can stay “in business,” mergers don’t make better products — but they try to make shareholders happy, if they can even do that (see: Suzuki-Volkswagen, page 231 of your textbook). Shared R&D is often synonymous with “badge engineering” (Cimarron) and when it’s not, well, just look at Saab.

If history has taught us anything, mergers simply leave car people left out in the cold.

After Fiat Chrysler Automobiles’ CEO Sergio Marchionne said this weekend that he’d press for consolidation — whether GM liked it or not — it got me thinking about how it would impact consumers.

In our theoretical world of a GM-Fiat merger on Sept. 1, 2015, there’d be signatures; on Sept. 1, 2020, there’d be cars. And by the looks of most automotive mergers in the past, they wouldn’t be all that good.

History is littered with failed automotive marriages (Ford and its polygamous relationship with European luxury brands, GM and Saab … and Suzuki … and Subaru … and …) with successful partnerships being the exception — not the rule. For every Renault-Nissans, there are three DaimlerChryslers.

If GM and Fiat were to elope tomorrow in all likelihood the platforms would stay where they are for a while — maybe an engine swap here and there — and the marquee stuff would live on. GM would still sell the Corvette, Jeep would still sell the Wrangler. (And the Viper would probably die to death, again.)

But at risk would be unremarkable mass-market cars built to appease a bottom line for a merger that started off with a profit to make. Sergio said the marriage could produce $30 billion a year in EBITDA, and you’d figure they’d be out for every dime. Remember: If GM killed Pontiac once, why not do it again with Dodge?

There’s also the risk of massive recalls on a scale we’ve never seen before. If you put a shared part, designed and built to a budget, on 15 million cars we’d be wise to buy stock in Advil — NHTSA will need all of it.

Perhaps for everyday consumers the differences would be hardly noticeable. The post-merger cars could blend together in a way they already have been blending for the last five years, and normal consumers couldn’t — and wouldn’t — care less.

But for car people, any merger means fewer products on the road and the cars foisted upon us would march closer to a joyless appliance, like our refrigerators.

And I can’t stand cars that are cold.