can't help thinking that Autocar have backed the wrong horse here. Autocar made great play of FIAT's plans to grow to a 6m unit a year outfit, which de Montezemolo saw as the threshold of viability for the world's remaining car makers, after the shake out. FIAT/Chrysler are nowhere near this - even if such a 'rule' were true - with Chrysler going backwards in the US, with only the rebound in fat truck sales helping Dodge along. It will take a minimum of five years for FIAT to start to truly integrate its products in a large scale way into the Chrysler group plants and dealer networks; 'cept they haven't got that long, nowhere near it, before the drain of resource to Chryslers' woes starts to bring down the mother company, as happened with Daimler and BMW.
Now wouldn't it be mature for Autocar's senior writers to eat some humble pie over this 6m unit year threshold nonsense and instead highlight what is a genuine, comparative success story, also in America - Ford. Where Marchionne, the superman hogs the limelight - whether it's unwanted or not - of daring corporate raids, a modest, talented engineer quietly goes about the business of turning around a much larger company. That person? - Alan Mulally, Ford's No.1.
Alan Mulally, the qualified engineer, Irish American, ex-Boeing 'quietman', who has achieved more in the last three years amongst the American Big Three and quite possibly more than almost any other auto exec in the world, with the possible exception of Winterkorn at VW group. Mulally had the smarts to flog off JLR to Tata for a great price and then set about turning around Ford's N.American ops. This guy seems to rarely get the limelight or praise he deserves. To me he proves that putting a genuine engineering type into the head of a company, over the usual lawyer/accountant bods, is a surer way of success, as evidenced by the antics of the predominantly accountancy types running GM's HQ or even Marchionne's legal-biased background and the stuttering start of the FIAT/Chrysler integration.
In fact maybe there's something in this Irish roots sh*t perhaps. The last albeit controversial, widely accepted successful US president, Ronny Reagan, had Irish roots; the guy Sir Christopher Kelly, who has finally capped off the looting of the public purse by the pig UK MPs at Westminster is presumably of Irish roots with that name and then there's Mullaly of Ford, of which the founder Henry Ford himself was the son of a Corkman. FoMoCo is back to its roots. So to conclude less 'bella Italia!' from Autocar regards auto industry role models and more 'Erin Go Bragh'!
