Forget the rest of the pretenders - like BMW or Toyota or the Chinese. The first day of the Detroit Motor Show, which for reasons known only to the Yanks is a Sunday, is really about the antics and concepts of the American Big Three – especially now Chrysler is both independent and American owned again following its mid-year divorce from Mercedes.
Chrysler not so convincing
Chrysler was first away on the stroke of 11 am with a press call for its four biggest management men, led by the former Marine and hardware king Bob Nardelli, (he previously ran Home Depot, one of America's biggest and most successful corporations). For a quartet whose job was to reassure us that "the new Chrysler" knows what it is doing and can make a success of it, the body language was rather downbeat. And they were short on the detail, too.Nardelli came across as believable, even fatherly, but he could easily have been talking about aluminium step-ladders or bags of cement instead of cars. There was a lot of predictable talk about "chasing quality" and "listening harder than ever to the customer". Hacks have heard this stuff before, and were rather scathing about the fact that Chrysler was happy to give exact figures for overseas sales (238,000 units, up 15 per cent) because it was a positive, but resorted to "we never give numbers" comment when home sales were mentioned.
Down, but not out
Still, there were positives. Chrysler has some decent cars to sell and seems intent on keeping its three marques (Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge) together. It has the Frankfurt-launched Dodge Journey crossover to sell, and is confident about exports for it. And even though demand for Chrysler models crumpled by as much as 30 per cent in some regions, while the German de-merger was going on, the company still finished 2007 with a smaller erosion of its annual sales (down 3 per cent) than "some rivals' (read Ford). The most bullish bit was a claim that it can more than double foreign sales to around 500,000 cars inside five years, too.
Ramming the point, and the cattle, home
Then the action started. Dodge launched the new, full-sized Ram truck by literally stopping the Detroit traffic and using this all-new Hemi-engined, full-size pick-up (and 10 cowboys on horseback) to drive a mob of 120 long-horn cattle up Washington Boulevard, right outside the Show venue. It takes quite a spectacular to draw several thousand people outside into sub-zero temperatures, but they managed it. The Ram seems a rather unreconstructed Yank model, but some people did get excited about its extra pizzazz and better interior.Then Ford drew us into the Cobo Arena, a former ice-hockey stadium in the show complex. With the earthquake-level introductory music came a progression of pictures of recently launch, recently successful US and European models together - Mondeo first, S-Max third - which was meant to show that Ford's models will grow more international over time. Just like Volvo's or Mazda's or BMWs. That's one of the key cornerstones of new CEO Alan Mulally's reign: do the engineering once, for the world. It's possible now - as it never was before - because legislation and customer requirements are converging.
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