I just bought a new car last month and when I do buy a new car it’s really the only time that I pay a great deal of attention to the various makes and models available out there. American cars are still over priced and don’t have the holy grail to a guy like me - a serious warranty that will last me the financial obligation of the car or beyond. I want bumper to bumper coverage for the term of my loan at the minimum. American car companies tend to have deals like 3 years/30k miles. Nissan gave me 5 years, 75k miles and my girlfriend got 10 years/100k miles on her Hyundai - bumper to bumper. Everything is covered. Until one of them can turn around and make a decent small passenger car that isn’t a complete hunk of shite with wheels on it, they’re all doomed no matter what they try to do in the short term.
And what should we call such an amalgamation? American Motors!
Sounds better than Studebaker.
Trucks as in American-style pickups or heavy commercial vehicles? Toyota have both already, and when they want to take the lead in a market they have a track record of slowly grinding their way there rather than trying to buy their way in.
Toyota has this too. If you define ‘International’ as ‘outside the USA’ then far more so than Ford.
A cynic would see this as proof that Ford can only compete by sticking their badge on Toyota’s product.
Maybe. Stranger things have happened, and we’ll have to wait and see. But from what I can see, Toyota is well on the road to becoming the No1 carmaker in the world by just doing their own thing. Why would they take on all those billions in liabilities Ford have racked up over the decades? Why bother with all the endless post-merger politics, rationalisation, firings and restructurings when they’ll be undisputed top dog in a few years anyhow? They have very little to gain and everything to lose. Five years is nothing to Toyota, it’s their short term. No-one can even be sure Ford will be alive in five years. And I doubt Toyota are quaking with fear at the thought of a merged GM/Chrysler entity. If they want anything from any of the US big three, they’ll most likely wait to pick it up in a forced sale or a liquidation.
Most mergers fail, the only recent big car industry merger (DaimlerChrysler) was a spectacular disaster, Renault-Nissan is probably not a template they can follow easily, and the Toyota way is incremental improvement, not huge risk-taking.
I agree with this. As others have said here and elsewhere, the big 3’s problem is that it has been so long since they made cars that anyone would want to buy. They have done as much as they possibly could to kill their brand’s good will with abortions like the Pontiac Sunfire. I think that GM, maybe, has realized this. Most all of their recent cars have been much better. The Malibu is sharp looking car, so is the Saturn Aura, and the Pontiac G8. Cadillac has turned around two decades of horrible design and has been on the right track for 5+ years now. Whether any of this is enough to save them after 30 years of going out of their way to make horrible cars is another story. Even if the big 3 die, I still think valuable brands like Jeep, Cadillac, and maybe Ford Trucks will stick around, its just a question of who will own them.
Well I’d love a Caddy CTS, or a Jeep Wrangler or a Dodge Charger, but those aren’t realistic vehicles for me to own, at least not as a daily driver. The only thing I’d hope out of a merger between a foreign maker and a domestic one is that they’d keep the American sense of style, which they have plenty of, and add a bit of Japanese mechanical reliability. I would have loved to buy a Ford or a Chevy this time around, but unless you’re buying a flagship vehicle you’re getting burdened with 20 years of design flaws bundled into a nice little sedan.
I can’t imagine that they can’t reverse engineer a Corolla or a Civic and make something that will run for more than 50k miles without having a heart attack, but that seems to be the case. Without something like that and the realization that small, reliable transportation is the new flagship of a brand our domestic auto companies are dead in the water.
This was posted on the Chrysler website this am.
Chrysler LLC as a matter of policy does not confirm or disclose the nature of its private business meetings. As we have said, the Company is looking at a number of potential global partnerships as it explores growth opportunities around the world. Beyond those partnerships already announced however, Chrysler has not formed any new agreements and has no further announcements to make at this time.
Always the last to know. I like how they capitalized “company”.
Most likely written by the legal department.
How prescient! AMC was formed by the merger of three very sick companies: NASH, RAMBLER and HUDSON. The abortion known as AMC lasted another 28 years, but it was always the standing joke in detroit-RAMBLERS were known as “rumblers”, and the firm produced some of the weirdest styled cars in American history-like the AMC PACER!:smack:
In the late 70s/early 80s, in response to French firm Renault owning a 40% stake in American Motors, our government ordered AMC’s military contract division AM General spun off, due to our military assets deemed not to be under the control of a foreign government.
AMC/Jeep was aquired by Chrysler in the mid 80’s, and AM General…now known by the iconic name HUMMER…had its marketing rights aquired by GM in the late 90s/early 00s.
Jeep and Hummer will reunite!!!
Back to the OP, if this merger goes through it’s probably good for Ford. GM and Chrysler will take years to integrate, close plants, kill brands, etc and remove a competitor with no guarantee that the new and improved GM will avoid bankruptcy or emerge a more formidable competitor.
Competition is not Ford’s problem. “The Ford Way” is Ford’s problem.