an observation about chrysler

Re: an observation about chrysler

But those cars may not have been purchased within the past 7 months.

Chrysler had a MASSIVE decline in sales since just this past fall (Nov 08). It was so severe that they are literally out of cash.

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I own a Jeep and have been a long fan of Dodge/Chysler automobiles. I used to have a Dodge Neon before my Jeep Liberty. Its a shame that they arent doing so well compared to other makes. Loved the classic Challenger and love the new one too.

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This is not just related to Chrysler, but the whole auto industry. Look at this headline from today: Fords vehicle sales fell 32 percent in April - Autos- msnbc.com It makes it sound like this just happened, but but they are talking about the past year. Duh.. Who doesn't know that auto sales are down from last year? When you read the story, things are doing much better. Why isn't what I put in bold below the headline? What is with the news service and why are they so bent on putting down our auto makers? (rhetorical question) Maybe sales would improve even more if the buyer had more confidence in the companies and headlines like this don't help at all or overall consumer confidence.

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I really like the commercial from Saturn where they are telling everyone to not believe that every U.S. auto maker is doing bad.

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Isn't Saturn being sold off?

As for the new Chrysler and Fiat partnership, I hope this means we'll see the Fiat 500 in North America very soon. That looks like a fun little car!

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i've always wondered how quickly things would have bounced back had the media not sensationalized it all and constantly doom and gloom. (not just the current situation but everything in the last 15 years, when a 'disaster' or 'attack' or 'financial crisis' happens it always freaks me out that there is a customized logo spinning at you on the screen within an hour).

in the past 6 months i've stopped looking at news sites, avoided tvs showing the news and my level of stress/worry has been great where as before i felt physically ill with everything i'd read through out the day

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They don't want you to want it, they want you to buy it. These days, people who need "new" cars are more likely to buy a used car instead of a brand new one.

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Correct. Honda sales were down almost 25% in April from the previous year. Toyota Prius sales were down 61%, though that may be in part due to the anticipation of the next generation model due out soon.

Of course, Chrysler was the last to the "eco-party", with its CEO towing the SUV line longer than anyone, speculating (beyond reasonable hope) that once real-estate prices pick up, people will want to buy big Chrysler vehicles again so they can do the rounds in the back 40. Chrysler was still advertising how many gas giants their vehicles could tow when even GM got the religion and started talking up the Chevy Volt and doing market research on the Cruize and a couple of other econo-concepts. The Magnum, nice as it is, came on the scene with collossally bad timing.

But even that magnificent failure to do a timely U-turn isn't what ended up hurting Chrysler. People just aren't buying cars.

Of course, I'm no help. I've been driving the same car now for 21 years.

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Poorly designed cars with quality issues = failure. BTW, the challenger was one slight ray of sunshine for Chrysler, they relied far too much on larger vehicle sales.

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Chrysler has come up with some great designs but has fallen down in the execution and quality areas. Why buy a great design that breaks down by the side of the road? I personally was hoping the Daimler-Chrysler merger would add up Chrysler's brilliant designs with Daimler's build quality. What we got instead was insipid Daimler manufacturing productivity with Chrysler's dubious build quality.

Now we expect Feeble-Italian-Attempt-at-Transportation to come to the rescue? Fix-It-Again-Tony pulled out of the US market 25 years ago because they couldn't compete in the US market. With the completely-innocent UAW as majority (55%) shareholders? Oy veh.

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Oh my god. It just hit me. Fiat also now owns Ferrari. Will a Fiat-controlled Chrysler rebrand the Dodge Viper as a Ferrari Viper?

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Present problems are rooted in fundamental financial problems, unaffected by the citizens' mood. The breaking point was people defaulting on mortgages: that didn't happen because people were gloomy, but because they couldn't refinance their over-financed debts.

It's been argued that if everyone was more upbeat, we'd be out there spending, taking loans, and keeping the economy humming. We did that for the post-dotcom crash and then for the post-2001 recession. We are, in part, reaping the postponement unrealized market corrections. A non-real "escape" from the current situation would also postpone necessary pain and would does nothing about the underlying debt problems of the financial companies.

As for the car companies: too few cars sold and too high costs. And a now-losing gamble on leases (automotive leveraging, it seems). I don't know how their financing arms (e.g. GMAC) factor into the carmakers' problems per se.

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I think you may have something there. A lease is like an interest-only loan with a balloon payment at the end - on a depreciating asset. You either make the balloon payment on the depreciated asset, or you let the car company foreclose. Sounds like the recent home mortgage industry.

I always paid cash for cheaper cars than I could have leased, although I've been teased by my friends for decades because of this. I bought a Contour SVT rather than a BMW sedan. I bought an F-150 XLT rather than a super-fancy truck. I bought a Miata rather than a Boxster.

Many of those friends are now bankrupt.

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Neither figure makes a good headline, because neither tells the whole story. Comparing March and April is apples and oranges since car sales usually go up as the weather improves. On the other hand, the year to year comparison is overly negative: Auto sales fell 37 percent year-to-year in March, but only 34 percent in April. A better headline would have been something like: "Ford gains market share in April amid weakened auto sales" The media's job is to report the facts, not cheerlead industry or artificially bolster consumer confidence. There's no question that media coverage amplifies the good times and deepens the down times, but that coverage is a reflection of the larger reality, not a cause of the larger reality. While it's of no comfort to anyone, especially those employed by the auto industry and the dependant parts and service industries, auto sales down 34 percent is big news.

My first car was a Chysler. A V6 sedan that was a lot of fun to drive, but an absolute lemon. Two transmissions, multiple water pumps, new power steering lines, gas tank, electrical, as well as some I'm not remembering. My next car was a four-cylinder Toyota with trouble making it up the hills. But the biggest expense was ~$10 for a new power steering belt. I'd never buy a Chysler again, and I've yet to see anything to convince me to switch from Toyota. The larger issue with GM and Chrysler (and to a lesser extent Ford) is that their brands have yet recover from the decades of building crap. There's no question the product they're putting out now is leaps and bounds more improved; but there's a lot of people like me that will stick with the foreign brands that have been dependable for them.

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The MSM cheerleaded real estate, because real estate was one of the most - if not THE most - important source of newspaper advertising revenue. You do know how that has turned out?

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You could almost substitute "Harman Kardon" for "Chrysler". Calm down H/K owners, I have, and love, a 520. With the way Fiat constantly screws things up they'ed probably call it the Yugo Viper (the Yugo was based on a Fiat design. Surprised?). And calm down you Fiat owners. I also have (and yes, love) a Fiat 124 Spyder.

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Isn't Chrysler just selling the Fiat, not making them??

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When Dodge originally designed the Viper, they owned Maserati, who designed the heads for the truck-based V10.

I recently had a Caliber and a Mazda3 as rental cars while my Subaru was in the body shop (I managed to take out not one but two deer). Of the two I was MUCH more impressed by the Caliber. Drove nice, looked great, nice utility. Some of the interior plastics were kind of cheapish feeling compared to my (admittadly much more upmarket) Legacy, but they were way nicer than the ones in the Mazda.

Chrysler makes nice looking cars, some of which are well engineered. I'd buy one, but I just paid off the wagon and won't be buying another car for at least 5 years if I have my way.

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Plus there's just plain too much rolling stock out there. Part of the borrowing-debt-fiesta which has been going on for the last 20 or so years and popped into this glorius orgasm of catastrophe we call the modern economy was people borrowing to buy cars. Buy a new car when you want, not when the old one wears out. That's been the order of the day. That day is OVER. People are going to own fewer cars and keep them longer. The industry must contract.

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As I understand it the plan is for Chrysler to manufacture at least one Fiat design.

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There's several factors at play with this. There's the news media -- newspapers, network news, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC -- and there's the broader spectrum of media like CNBC, TLC and HGTV. CNBC is always a market cheerleader and serves more as entertainment than legiitimate news. TLC and HGTV spearheaded the cultural phenomenon of "flipping" properties that is at the root of so many second home foreclosures.

Not including advertising, which is handled seperately from the news and editorial desks, I still contend that the legitimate news media simply "amplified the good times" when it came to the housing bubble. Real estate prices were soaring; homeowners were extracting extraordinary values from their properties. The media coverage reflected that. Were there critical examinations of this unsustainable practice during the upswing? Yes. Were there as many as there should have been? Probably not. As a result of the 24 hour news cycle and an unprecedented contraction of staffing (and therefore the depth and scope) of newspapers across the country, coverage is more skewed toward the immediate facts instead of the broader picture. And the immediate facts of the housing bubble for a long time pointed toward an unprecedented rise in real estate values.

Is the media perfect? God no. Have the pressures of cable news and new media made media worse? In my opinion, yes. But that doesn't mean it's correct for people to blame the media for not emphasizing their interpretation of the facts.

Ford isn't getting the same attention as GM and Chrysler simply because taxpaper money isn't on the line with Ford. But when the auto market as a whole begins a sustained rebound, I guarrantee you'll hear about it. Fiat is essentially being handed a 20 percent stake in Chrysler in exchange for sharing their technology with Chrysler, mainly for using in carving out a fuel-efficient sector at the bottom end of Chrysler's product line. Part of what's killed Chrysler is that they don't have smaller fuel efficient cars like GM and Ford do. The Focus and Fusion have been huge successes for Ford in recently years, especially since Ford began marketing them as fuel efficient before gas prices soared to $4+ a gallon. They've stayed strong even now that gas prices have plunged. GM has the Chevy Aveo and the Chevy Cobalt (starting at $13,000 and $16,500 respectively) which both get 34 miles to gallon highway. Ford is also has its more fuel-efficient European models to turn to; the Fiesta is returning to North America in 2010 while the global 2010 Focus will be based on the superior European version of the car instead of the cheaper-to-build North American design. Chrysler's most affordable car is the Sebring, which was plagued with problems through the 1990's, starts at $22,000 after employee discount, and gets 21 mpg max. Dodge has one compact, the Caliber, at $16,000 with employee pricing, which gets "up to" 30 mpg. The Avenger is as bad as the Seabring in terms of price, and just plain looks bulky. The next closest vehicle left is the Dodge Callenger, a stylish beast of a car that isn't exactly targeted at the suburban sedan market.

Re: an observation about chrysler

^^ What about the Dodge/Chrsyler Neon?


EDIT: I just researched and saw they ended production in 2005.

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I had a 1996 Avenger and it was much better than the new versions. It was basically the Sebring but for non-golfers.

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Yes, the Neon was replaced by the Caliber. But because it is limited to a hatchback configuration, it's seen as a glorified station wagon in a way that the Neon wasn't.

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I certainly don't blame the media for the automakers' current predicament but if there's one industry that all but relies on the advertising dollars of what was once the Big Three it's major media. Flip to the front of just about any magazine on any topic and right under the agency contact listings for New York and San Francisco you'll find one for Detroit. I don't see any other businesses out there that will be willing or able to fill that massive ad hole if the car companies go under or cut way back.

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BTW, I haven't kept up on this as much as I should have, but I thought Chrysler was bought by Mercedes a few years ago and then sold to a Canadian based parts manufacturer last year. So who does own Chrysler?

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Not every car company is losing sales. Mini, Subaru and Rolls-Royce actually have sold more cars in the last year than in the years previous. (Reuters)

But thats neither here-nor-there I guess. Daimler-Chrysler does have some nice cars......

Chrysler 300/Dodge Charger - The 300 is simply an amazing full-sized sedan. Better looking than anything from Lincoln or Cadillac IMHO. The Charger is the police cruiser. Of course both of these (and the challenger/magnum) were all based on last generation Mercedes-Benz E-class platforms, so not state-of-the-art or anything, but still pretty sweet rides.

Dodge Viper - Still awesome. Still $100,000

Dodge Challenger/Charger SRT8 - 430hp. 15 years ago you had to buy a Viper or a Lamborghini to get that kind of power.

Re: an observation about chrysler

There is one unmarked dark blue Charger and two unmarked silver Magnums with black tinted windows that patrol I65 daily. Very hard to spot in a crowd. Makes me paranoid of all Chargers and Magnums now.