Uncle Mellow:
jonfortwo: Mercedes suffered in there ill fated tie-up with the Chrysler group and they are a very strong company and relatively cash rich. FIAT/Alfa are poor by comparison in both respects do they stand a chance?
To be fair I think Mercedes got what they deserved. Chrysler definitely suffered from the tie-up. The only good thing to come out of it was the 300C. After the break-up Chrysler were left with nothing. All their bright people had gone because they weren't German enough.
Absoultely. Everyone loves to beat up on Chrysler, but the fact is that they suffered a great deal under the "merger of equals" that saw the company gutted of any talent and ability they had.
Bob Eaton, the former head of GM Europe who was Chrysler's CEO at the time, was completely unmatched against Jurgen Schrempp. Eaton was soon pushed out the door post-merger so Schrempp could control things unabated. Chrysler was one of the most profitable automakers in the world at the end of the 1990s. Though they were known as "innovators" for doing more with less (Chrysler was always the weakest among the Big 3 automakers), they put out solid products for the time and many North Americans were attracted to their offerings.
Led by American Tom Gale and Brit Trevor Creed, they even had one of the better corporate design houses in the industry at the time of the takeover.
But slowly everything erroded. The Germans were all about installing their people and their procedures. They kept Chrysler people from positions of authority and slowly drove them out of the company. Even the supervisory Board started with 4 Americans (out of 11) and was down to 1 in a year.
It was a very bad time for the Auburn Hills crew. They couldn't get any of their product plans approved in Stuttgart, they had no voice at the top of the company, and the very corporate execs who made the company a success were fleeing left and right. How can a company survive successfully when their talent and knowledge pool drains away to nothing?
So while Chrysler has been far from the company they once were, it wasn't entirely their fault that things went down the tubes like they did. The Germans have their own way of doing things and the Americans weren't exactly kept in the highest regards by their corporate parents.
It was all a formula for disaster. No wonder they lost money and did doing so poorly.
