Please, no GM looking hybrid garbage techno-mobiles.
More engine room could fit a V10 easier...
> 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."
>
> =====
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