Hi Gabe
While you and many more of us dream of an American buyback of Chrysler I
suspect our German friends spend sleepless nights or nightmares at best over
having acquired Chrysler in the first place. It's been a financial disaster
for them almost from day one and I wonder if there is any end in sight.
Competition in the auto industry is intense and certainly will not lessen in the
coming years.
Survival appears to hinge on a manufacturer's ability to keep bringing
out "new" models. American tastes and preferences are as brief as a first
grader's attention span----"what have you done for me lately" seems to be the
byword. The Asian producers are clearly setting the pace with constant new or at
best drastically altered designs, often from the platform up. Detroit lags
way behind and major platform changes are even slower from them than sheetmetal
changes. Analysts tell us it's all because of the top management systems in
Detroit, lines of decision making authority that have been in place for years
and staffed by individuals unable to keep tabs on the market and to react with
models that really catch the public's fancy.
Here in California, America's largest (in dollar and unit volume) auto
market Detroit cars have less than a 50% market share and trucks are loosing
ground annually. We are seeing whole generations of Californians getting now up
into their 40's and early 50's who have never owned a Detroit-built vehicle
and only ride in one when they take a cab or may ride with a friend. This
tells us something about why perfectly good cars and trucks from Detroit are just
ignored. Growing numbers of Americans don't even consider a Detroit product
when car or truck shopping.
DC has their work cut out for them if they are going to see a revival of
Chrysler. It translates into vast sums which they must invest plus a lot of
shuffling of management and changes in the whole system by which designs
eventually become a new model if red ink is to become black. I wonder if they are
up to it??
To complicate matters, car owner satisfaction sources now tell us many
European brands have slipped from satisfactory to unsatisfactory status on
frequency of repair issues. Brands like MB's whole lineup which used to be the
standard of excellence in assembly and engineering are now in the shop in their
early years more than some USA brands. It's safe to say this is not the
reputation DC wants and they know it is going to take a lot of new money to track
down these matters and get them fixed too. How much is left then for propping
up Chrysler?
Paul Sahlin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 06 2004 - 11:47:07 EST