Hi everyone,
Here's an excerpt from today's Wall Street Journal
which has an article about MB's influence over the new
design and production plans of DC products,
particularly the new Dakota pickup truck. I thought
ya'll might find it interesting.
--Excerpt--
"The challenges Chrysler faces are evident in the
struggle over the next generation of several important
models. The Dodge Dakota pickup truck, introduced in
the late 1980s, typifies the kind of innovative
vehicles Chrysler was famous for designing. The
current Dakota, which sells for between $14,000 and
$24,000, depending on options, has an imposing front
end that evokes an 18-wheeler, a look popular with
mostly male truck buyers. And its size is unusual:
somewhere between a compact and full-size truck.
But the plans for the new Dakota in the works when Mr.
Zetsche and his team arrived were for a radically
redesigned Dakota. The new version would be bigger,
taller, and full of stylized bulges and curves.
Resembling some recent vehicles from GM and Ford known
as hybrids, it would be less a pickup than an SUV. It
would be loaded with creature comforts, but it would
make do with a shorter, and not very functional, cargo
bed.
"The bells went off right away," says George Murphy,
Chrysler's No. 2 marketing executive, whom Mr. Zetsche
brought over from Ford with Mr. Schroer. He recalls
worrying that traditional pickup buyers would reject
the new version as something less than a real truck.
Another red flag was the new truck's development cost:
about $650 million. That's typical for a high-volume
pickup. But this was intended to be a niche model,
with an annual volume of about 110,000 units, about
40% lower than a traditional line of pickups. "The
financials were very much out of a reasonable frame,"
Mr. Zetsche says. The plan asked "for a pretty high
investment, and no volumes to support that."
Back to the Drawing Board
Mr. Zetsche's team told the Dakota designers to go
back and come up with a different proposal. They were
to improve quality in certain areas, such as safety,
making the front end several inches longer so the
truck would be safer in a crash. And they were to do
all this for about $373 million.
Chrysler's design chief, Trevor Creed, recalls that
the manufacturing experts told the designers they
could slash the cost of retooling the Dakota factory
to build the new model if they retained some of the
current pickup's basic measurements, known as
principal locating points, or PLPs. The designers used
two stripped-down Dakotas with just their frames and
sheet-metal exteriors to mold clay models of the new
truck. They stuck wooden dowels into the clay to mark
the inviolable PLPs.
Within a few months, they had come up with a design
that used the same roof and windshield as the current
Dakota, retaining the PLPs, but that looks like a
totally redesigned truck. The cost: about $400
million, a bit above the revised target but still far
below the original budget. Now, it is undergoing its
final revisions."
=====
'00 Quadcab SLT+ Garnet Red 4x4 (AWD) 5.9L 46RE 3.55 LSD. For list of modifications to my QC, see my profile:
http://www.twistedbits.net/WWWProfile/dakota/Vof5jrNb0pR1M/
For pictures of my QC & Accessories: http://www.geocities.com/txqc2000
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