#consolidation

Speaking to reporters in Toronto on Friday, Fiat Chrysler Automobile chief Sergio Marchionne said the official filing to spin off Ferrari could happen within the next few days.

“We are days away from filing the prospectus,” Marchionne said, according to the Detroit News.

The future standalone supercar maker will make available 10 percent of the company through its initial public offering, which is widely expected in October. The remainder of the company will be held by Fiat investors and Enzo Ferrari’s son, Piero Lardi Ferrari, who is vice chairman of the company.

Though FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne is still looking to merge his company with another automaker, no one is all that willing to tie the knot.

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne — who will be retiring from the company after the next five-year plan runs its course after 2018 — believes mergers between automakers will one day result in a new No. 1 automaker.

Nobody knows for sure how many automakers China has. The guesses were somewhere between 60 and 120. Now we have it official: It’s “more than 130 big and small companies in 27 provinces,” writes China Daily. But it looks like a lot of them need to seek other employment. After having made consolidation noises for more than a year, the Chinese government is about to bring their car companies down to a manageable number.

Here is one sad aspect to the inevitable consolidation of the wild and wooly Chinese car industry: It will reduce the amount of humorous material. Case in point: Zhejiang Gonow Auto, known as the creator of such memorable cars as the „ Gonow Aoosed GS” will most likely not grace us with more unforgettable nameplates. True to its name, Gonow is gone. Well, not really.

If there’s a single phrase dominating the imaginations of auto executives right now, it’s the infamous neologism of “too big to fail.” Whether executives justify their obsession with consolidation with their fear of a Chinese planet, efficiency-standard ramp-ups, or mere groupthink, there’s no doubt that consolidation is currently the name of the game. And it should be, not only for these reasons, but also because the last several years have proven that the car game is no industry for small companies. Nothing illustrates this quite like the US government’s “bailout” of auto industry supplier firms, which ended on April Fools Day.