History of the Chrysler / Mercedes Merger

if you ask the average person to name an auto manufacturer odds are that Chrysler will be in the mix somewhere it probably won't be the first automaker they think of or even the second or third but Chrysler has brand recognition across countless different divisions so that everyone has at least some experience with the Chrysler vehicle and that's the natural result of being a brand has had countless ups and downs in it's nearly century long history no seriously Chrysler is nearly a hundred years old and I suppose the part where I go into their history because to understand where they are now we have to understand where it is they came from and that's not exactly something you can just brush past in 30 seconds so let's get to it Chrysler was founded in 1925 by walter Chrysler he was a corporate fixer sort of like the automotive version of the wolf from pulp fiction his job was to completely restructure automotive manufacturer Maxwell Motor Company and he was trusted to do this because he'd already rescued Willis overland Motors a few years earlier you see when John Willis created the Willis Corporation his goal was to create a flagship six-cylinder vehicle however the 1920 recession dashed whatever hopes Willis had to turn a profit so they brought in walter Chrysler the former president of Buick and one of the first things he did was ditch the Willis six in favor of a less complicated model that would be referred to as the Chrysler sex he then auctioned off corporate assets to pay off debts while also selling the Chrysler six prototype to his former boss General Motors co-founder William C Durant who would modify it into the 1923 Flint which was a car utilizing a six cylinder continental engine the car was a success and walter Chrysler managed to give Willis Overland a fresh start so when Chrysler was brought in to do the same for Maxwell motors he brought along Owen Skelton Carl Brewer and Fred's eater three former Studebaker engineers who had helped him in developing the chrysler six to rework the original prototype and bring it to market as a finished product together they would eventually achieve this goal with the launch of the six cylinder Chrysler in 1924 this would set the standard for what Chrysler would aim to be affordable luxury vehicles known for innovative top-flight Engineering and that's straight from the Chrysler website even the quotes around the word luxury the car featured the industry's first mass-produced four-wheel hydraulic brakes using rubber engine mounts to reduce vibrations you also got ridged rims which prevented flat tires from falling off the wheel and an oil filter and carburetor air filter which were also featured on the car as innovations for the era in time the six-cylinder Chrysler turned out to be to hit the company bad we needed to pull its ass out of potential bankruptcy one year later Maxwell Motor Company became the Chrysler Corporation and by 1936 Chrysler had risen the second place in the US auto industry this is thanks to a clever bit of corporate restructuring that allowed Chrysler to cover the market at different levels the plymouth brand was for lower priced models the DeSoto brand was the middle class line and dodge was paired with Fargo for a fleet of dependable cars and trucks for the workingman Chrysler wasn't simply great value luxury vehicles they had begun to cultivate their American image as a blue-collar brand now for the most part Chrysler was able to keep pace in the mid 20th century simply by playing to their consumer base and not rocking the boat too much granted the company faced a pretty big struggle when the 1973 oil crisis hit and demand for smaller more fuel-efficient cars outstripped Chrysler's ability to meet that demand this is without even getting into how government regulations cut in the business or how imports were gradually becoming more prominent in American car culture it took Lee Iacocca securing a loan from the US government to begin turning the tide along with the advent of Decay platform the rise of the jeep brand and the popularity of the minivan in the 1980s but that's a story for another episode the long and short of it is that Chrysler had its ass pulled out of the fire twice now so the luck had to run out eventually right by the mid-1990s the Chrysler Corporation was the most profitable automaker in the world even if they weren't necessarily selling the most cars this was because profits were high but production costs were low by 1997 Chrysler had a 23 percent market share and high brand loyalty among consumers thanks to vehicles like the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Dodge Ram cars that represented quintessential Americana to consumers both domestic and abroad however even with billions of dollars in the bank and an entire fleet of best sellers in the lineup hot hand was never going to last forever any good gambler knows it and any businessman worth his salt knows it too so the duty fell a chrysler CEO bob eaton to tackle the issues that would likely face the company in the years to come he gave a speech at Chrysler headquarters in Auburn Hills Michigan on July 17 to 1997 to address what he felt was the oncoming change in the market caused by a combination of factors that he deemed the perfect storm for instance there was the issue of how environmental activism was threatening the long-term viability of the internal combustion engine more and more reports were detailing the environmental effects of emissions as well as the health problems that long-term exposure was causing lung cancer cardiovascular disease asthma and a Rolodex of other medical issues were laid at the feet of the auto industry sort of like how every bandwidth plug-in instruments got blamed for Columbine to make matters worse the auto industry wasn't really addressing the issue because any techniques that were used to reduce emissions on internal combustion engines invariably impacted performance another issue facing Eaton and Chrysler was the shifting dynamics in the market in the late 90s it used to be that you can market a particular type of car to a particular type of person and expect it to sell but that kind of stopped being the case in the late 90s suddenly trucks sedans SUVs they were all competing for the exact same demographics because so many of those demographics overlapped more than ever before buyers were resisting categorization and just buying whatever the hell they wanted which generally made it harder to figure out what exactly it was people even wanted in the first place you could get whatever the hell you wanted because the economy allowed you to do just that thanks to the ninety's economic boom in the United States people had more earning potential in 1996 hourly wages increased by 10.1% while may 1997 saw unemployment dropped below 5 percent for the first time since 1973 so right back to the oil crisis then you wonder why people are nostalgic for the 90s it's not because of the movies or the music or the video games although those are part of it it's because America was truly the country that was promised on all the brochures and in all the patriotic rhetoric of the time America was a land of promise and opportunity which is not to say that it wasn't that in other decades but in the 90s the economy reflected that possibility more than in most eras but even could see the writing on the wall and expected that the auto industry would struggle to keep up with the changing tastes of the American public and the demands it would make on production it really was a perfect storm and has eaten stated in his speech the only way to survive the perfect storm is to avoid being in its path in the first place to be somewhere else all together when the time comes another lesson eaten packed into the speech is that whatever came next they couldn't face it alone automakers would have to work together to sidestep the oncoming storm and find a way to thrive in the new marketplace enter daimler-benz time where Ben's with in 1926 the year after the Chrysler Corporation was formed Karl Benz and his company reached a deal to incorporate with Daimler motoring Gessle shaft founded by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach strangely enough by the time the deal was struck Daimler had been dead for over two decades and Maybach hadn't even been part of the company for nearly as long the new company went by the name daimler-benz AG with the understanding that the brand name would become mercedes-benz after the successful Mercedes series of cars that had kept Daimler motor in afloat two decades earlier and also in honor of the daughter of Daimler motoring director Emil Jelinek in the nascent age of the modern car jellinek was a man always looking ahead sort of like a European Henry Ford he had vision and while vision alone can't always get the job done he didn't exactly become wealthy by accident the idea at least at the time jellinek helped create the Mercedes was quote I don't want to car for today or tomorrow it will be the car of the day after tomorrow on the strength of the Mercedes series Daimler Benz built a carefully curated public image as the brand of luxury performance and dependable German engineering cultivating an image of affordability wasn't really a priority for these guys at all seriously part of their brand was its inaccessibility to the common man and yet even if their success waxed and waned over the years history still remembers the innovations Daimler Benz introduced to the market there was the first diesel-powered passenger car in the form of the mercedes-benz 260 d in 1936 the first direct fuel injection car in the form of the mercedes-benz 300sl Gullwing the development of the safety cage front and rear crumple zones in 1951 and traction control that worked during braking as well as acceleration but profit margins were skinnier than Bonnie bear's love and sales eventually slowed to the point that the Mercedes brand was getting spanked by Lexus and BMW by the mid-90s at the time Eaton was beginning to assess his options and weathering the storm Daimler Benz was just trying to keep its head above water the economy was stronger than it had been in a generation but it wasn't so strong that the increase in sales it translated to the luxury vehicles market and the promised land of North America was a tough nut to crack for daimler-benz it certainly didn't help that production was expensive time-consuming and required the company to hire more employees on average than its competitors just to get the cars off the factory line to meet deadlines so daimler-benz looked for a partner to help increase efficiency lower costs and reach the North American consumers in ways they've largely failed to do chrysler ticked all the boxes so talks began but the goal of crafting a truly global brand capable of speaking to the demands and needs of all consumers now you would think someone would have recognized that this partnership was a bad idea from the start given how vastly different the two brands were in terms of philosophies but daimler-benz was desperate and eaton was anxious since shareholder kirk kerkorian had attempted a hostile takeover of christ for a few years earlier and eaton was afraid of something similar happening again needless to say like a courtship between two love-drunk vegas newlyweds talks escalated and on May 7th 1998 Eaton formally announced the merger between Chrysler Corporation and Daimler Benz it was a 37 billion dollar marriage that Daimler Benz CEO Jurgen shrimp famously declared a merger of equals emergence growth and a merger of unprecedented strength and while plenty of people believed shrimp at the time the deal was signed and the stocks were swapped history tells a different story all together the merger began well enough in 1998 revenues increased by 12% over the previous year net income increased by 29% operating profits were up 38 percent and over 19 thousand new jobs were created but a little more than a year into the merger the bloom was off the rose one of the biggest issues right off the bat was the us-versus-them mentality at the newly minted DaimlerChrysler AG although daimler-benz arguably needed Christ were more than Chrysler needed them there was still a pervasive attitude that the German automaker was this hoity-toity holier-than-thou brand meanwhile Chrysler was seen as the uncultured American ogre in need of a good-ass washing this isn't to say that Daimler Chrysler didn't at least try to keep things civil between the two divisions as the transition team paid millions to send employees the sensitivity workshop centered on German dining etiquette or sexual harassment in the American workplace the idea was to engender a better sense of cultural understanding between the Americans and the Germans since their corporate approaches were so significantly different the Americans were risk takers with an eye towards a more individualistic form of business every man is responsible for his own advancement and while companies did have team oriented practices it was ultimately up to each individual to see that his or her goals were met and that his contributions were completed how the job gets done didn't matter as much as the job simply getting done at all another big factor in the American business model is that there's less separation between the different levels in the hierarchy so that the left hand usually knows what the right hand is doing by comparison the Germans were far more risk-averse with less of an emphasis on the individual and more on the collective team or brand there's also less of a trial and error mentality in production because to the German engineers it mattered how the job got done yes it was important for them to reach their respective goals but they weren't going to do it flying by the seat of their pants it's sort of like math class Americans didn't care as long as they got the right answer but German engineers want you to show your work so they created detailed plans that essentially served as a kind of Bible an immutable document that was the final word on how things were to be done less trial and error and more precision even at the risk of costly timing money bends also care about where the sales were coming from since they had a reputation uphold but the only thing Chrysler cared about was that the checks cleared essentially need a brand could be themselves in this partnership because they were complete opposites by teaming up with mercedes-benz Chrysler lost a bit of its rugged everyman shine while mercedes-benz lost some of its patrician aristocratic luster after being lumped in with us Yanks so it was only natural if the Germans would come offended once they learned their American counterparts were making more than them a lot more like four times more conversely the Americans sort of gloated about their privileged position relative to their lower-class reputation while also being pretty sore about having that lower-class reputation in the first place this would already have been bad enough if the executives hadn't also decided to get in on the mudslinging themselves like mercedes-benz executive Jurgen Hubbard claiming that Chrysler products were trash and that his mother's Plymouth hardly lasted her two years Bob Lutz the guy everyone thought Iacocca was going to pick as his Chrysler successor ended up firing back and claiming that the Jeep Grand Cherokee earned higher marks and customer satisfaction than the Mercedes m-class to make matters worse biases between the brands meant that their retail and distribution divisions were kept separate as well since mercedes-benz dealers felt Chrysler brand cars compromised the high-class integrity of the luxury models they were trying to sell while chrysler dealers didn't want any part of that bougie benz of course the mismanagement of Daimler Chrysler extended to the actual products being foisted onto the global car market for instance Daimler Chrysler struggled in Europe because the Daimler Benz side of the team insisted on pushing the Mercedes a-class a $20,000 car that wasn't up to the standard of comparable vehicles from Renault Fiat and Volkswagen cars which retailed for between 4,000 and 11,000 dollars less than what an a-class went for normally brand loyalty would mean that previous Benz consumers would pay extra just for the standard of quality they'd come to expect from the German engineers but the a-class was a disc appointment by any standard featuring a host of problems that included an automatic transmission that was prone to slipping in first gear occasional power steering failures and the risk that your car might stall near stop it was a complete mess that flew in the face of the initial purpose of DaimlerChrysler at first the goal was to build new chrysler vehicles using parts and even design framework from daimler-benz vehicles as a method of cutting costs and boosting Chrysler's global reputation by linking it to Mercedes but like a kid with a new toy in a house full of cousins daimler-benz didn't really want to share with Chrysler they handed them some suspension and steering parts and a few other scraps but that was mostly it and morale sank after Bobby and retired from the company in early 2000 having spent his final months in the company generally sulking around and struggling to come to grips with how badly the merger was playing out many of the visionaries behind the Chrysler brand began to jump ship as well leaving the company without a sense of direction along with Eaton the Daimler Chrysler company lost Chrysler President James P Holden as well as visionary designer Tom Gale who designed the 1970 Barracuda in addition to heading up the team that developed the K platform as well as the first modern minivans he was also one of the minds behind the LH platforms so yeah this was a pretty big loss to the company to make matters worse longtime managers from different divisions joined in bailing on the company's profits took a plunge over the course of the third quarter of 2000 price learn recorded a loss of 512 million dollars which shares dropping from 108 dollars to just 40 dollars in nineteen months this speaks to perhaps the biggest problem with partnership there was never a singular unified vision it was just two separate companies sharing one name when they were supposed to be equal partners then again as it turns out Chrysler and Daimler Benz being equals was never really part of the plan in 2000 DaimlerChrysler co-ceo jurgen shrimp and admitted that the whole merger of equals statement was a lie in an interview with german publication handles blot he revealed that the plan was always to make chrysler subsidiary in fact shrimp went as far as to declare the merger of equal statement was necessary in order to earn the support of Chrysler's workers and the American public but it was never reality of course shrimp never envisioned that anyone in America would find out about these statements because who would tell them right but sure enough the Financial Times caught wind of the interview translated it into English and published the article stateside needless to say despite being co-ceos in the new venture shrimp and Eton clearly weren't equals and shrimp's willingness to say as much publicly showed an intrinsic lack of respect sure he had initially been one of the biggest proponents of allowing chrysler group to simply continue operating as it had been with its products since they had been doing a hell of a job in their market but shutting down any attempt at synergy meant that the entire purpose of the merger was null and void from the get-go because if you're not going to integrate your products the means of production and the methods of distribution and retail then why even merge in the first place shrimp pretty much gave up on the pretense of a merged company by late 2002 German management team in place at Chrysler headed by German auto executive Dieter Zetsche and Wolfgang Bernhard as the new CEO oh and while Zetsche did manage to bring Daimler Chrysler back into profitability by the time his run came to an end a few years later the damage had been done and the Chrysler brand had nowhere near the value it did a decade previous this was the administration that discontinued the Plymouth line in 2001 and took the focus away from the everyman aspect that had brought Chrysler to the dance in the first place as the years dragged on the company produced cars that were more and more divisive among auto enthusiasts with not a whole lot of middle ground between love and hate take the Chrysler Crossfire which utilized the SLK roadster platform and recirculating ball steering while the design was striking in the eyes of a certain segment of consumers its performance left a lot to be desired with less than responsive handling and reliability that wasn't up to the standard of either Chrysler were Mercedes meanwhile the jeep commander struggled as Chrysler's answer to the Hummer h2 failed by being a completely reactionary product a cash grab that basically took the Grand Cherokee and bulked up the body style instead of hanging with competitors like the Chevy Tahoe and the Ford Expedition the commander came across as a parody of the Jeep Grand Cherokee a vehicle most people liked way better so even while the commander lasted until 2010 it wasn't the hit the company was hoping it'd be this was also the administration that gave us the Chrysler Sebring which is generally regarded as one of the most hated mainstream vehicles of the past 20 years getting torn to shreds over styling poor ride quality junky handling and uninspired interior design and mediocre engine hell jeremy clarkson would famously declare that the powertrain did nothing but convert fuel into noise adding that the Sebring gave off the impression that it had been built by someone who is being deliberately stupid or who is 4 years old he would go on to say that any person who choose a Sebring Convertible over Volkswagen Eos would have to be so window licking ly insane that you'd be banned from handling anything other than crayons ultimately it was a large-scale issue that hit Chrysler harder than most the prices weren't as competitive as they used to be and the engineering wasn't as reliable as it had once been in much the same way the merger caused mercedes-benz to lose some of its engineering efficiency Chrysler was similarly affected as if they'd forgotten that quality cars made cheap was their stock in trade they lost the foothold they'd held in the light truck and SUV market as the brand lost equity from one bad decision after another granted not every move was a bad one in 2005 the Chrysler 300 offered a glimpse into what could have been had Daimler Benz and Chrysler Group been on the same page from day one it used parts from the second gen Mercedes e-class to provide the feel of German engineering but at a more competitive price it earned high marks in just about everything the a-class didn't from handling to steering to overall reliability in fact many of the sales came as a result of trainings on earlier Mercedes cars illustrating that luxury car buyers would take a risk on Chrysler product if given the proper incentives however forever good move there was a head-scratcher such as Dieter Zetsche deciding that all chrysler jeep and dodge products would share dealerships as opposed to having separate dealers for each division the company further angered dealers who were pressured into taking more product and they could sell reading the quarterly losses in general dissatisfaction with Daimler Chrysler it was a wall-to-wall show and the writing was already on those walls presumably smeared and well figuratively because let's kill this analogy dead you by 2007 neither side could bother to keep up appearances any longer it was clear that neither company was really gaining anything out of a partnership in fact the general consensus is that they lost quite a bit in the venture after reporting 1.5 billion dollars in losses for 2006 DaimlerChrysler began laying off employees left right and center it started in February 2007 with the plan being to reduce the workforce and downscale production from other plants with the hopes of turning the corner financially by 2008 but even with this short-term plan the Daimler side of things was already looking for a way out General Motors was allegedly a contender for the sale and it would have been interesting to see what GM might have done with a brand like Chrysler resuming they didn't just completely rework everything from the ground up on the assumption that the name had no more brand equity however Daimler ultimately went in another direction opting to sell the Chrysler Group to private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management on August 3rd 2007 servers would own 80 point one percent of the new Chrysler Holding LLC while the newly renamed Daimler AG would hold on to nineteen point nine percent with Daimler paying server six hundred fifty million dollars to take the mess of a company off their hands suddenly Daimler AG was free the debts the responsibilities the failures and even the triumph they were no longer Daimler's problem they could move on to more profitable ventures and while not everything Daimler will go on to do would be a hit they can claim an investment fake or outright ownership in countless automotive concerns everything from mercedes-benz to Beijing Automotive Group Chinese automakers Denso to Russian truck maker combos hell Daimler AG is currently the second biggest truck manufacturer in the entire world and the 13th largest car manufacturer as well so it looks as though for the most part Daimler AG managed to escape without too much long-term damage to their brand however the same couldn't be said of Chrysler the Charlie Brown of the automotive world the economic collapse that hippy automotive industry from 2008 to 2010 Chrysler as much as any other big three auto maker the energy crisis of the early 2000s led to higher fuel prices which led to consumers turning away from anything and everything with low fuel economy suddenly bigwigs like General Motors and Ford were right there in the dirt with Chrysler discovering that they were stuck with factories full of SUVs pickup trucks and other gas guzzlers that no one wanted to buy sales were down across the board from company to company and it didn't take long for the effects to start taking their toll on the former Giants of the industry so they turned to the government for yet another bailout in September 2008 in order to cover healthcare expenses and prevent mass layoffs and this is where it gets kind of dicey you see Congress was totally willing to throw them 25 billion dollars if it went towards the development of more energy-efficient vehicles given that the age of the gas guzzlers seem to be nearing its end but the auto industry was also asking for an additional 25 billion dollars from the Troubled Asset Relief Program or tarp this divided Congress between those who supported bailing out the auto industry in the interest of American jobs and those who felt the industry had made their bed pissed in it and now deserve to feel that warmth slowly spreading out across the mattress ultimately the government decided it would be more beneficial to just bail the companies out since a post bankruptcy restructuring would take too long cost too much and wouldn't really be as effective as an outright bailout I mean there was no walter Chrysler around to help fix things this time so the responsibility fell to Uncle Sam in the form of President Bush who approved an emergency bailout in December 2008 that essentially kept the industry afloat with the funds to be distributed in January and February by then president-elect Barack Obama as part of the bailout Chrysler implemented several new policies such as offering consumers 0% financing for five years on several new models and drastically reducing executive bonuses by nearly half but this was only a quick fix in April 2009 Chrysler filed for bankruptcy as a result the federal government took over Chrysler and one of their first orders was for the company to enter into another merge this time with Fiat SP a suddenly Chrysler was in a position to regain its former place in the automotive industry as the merger made them the sixth largest auto manufacturer in the world by May 2011 Chrysler managed to repay eleven point two billion dollars of its 12.5 billion in tarp loans so the government only lost 1.3 billion on the loan and while 1.3 billion dollars is a lot of money it's kind of surprising Chrysler was ever able to pay back as much as they did at all considering the shape they were in by January 2014 the company became known as Fiat Chrysler automobiles and then later FCA u.s. LLC unfortunately for every positive in the company's lineup like the Chrysler 200 which was synergistic in a way that Daimler never allowed the merge to be there were the usual problems that plague accompanied as beleaguered as Chrysler in 2015 Fiat was named the most hated car brand in America by the American Customer Satisfaction Index although their overall score was 73 they still ranked below Fiat brands like Jeep and Dodge which were both near the bottom of the list hell they even ranked lower than the generic all other brands listing naturally any aspersions cast on Fiat impacted the Chrysler brand itself and shares took a bit of a tumble although they did manage to bounce back still Fiat Chrysler would continue to face problems just this January the EPA put the company on blast for emissions cheating this is still technically an ongoing scandal but they could face fines stretching into the millions potentially billions of dollars that Chrysler continues to survive in any form is a minor miracle but it looks like this is simply a company you can't kill like Senor Chang or Impact Wrestling it's the ultimate underdog and it's hard not to root for an underdog even when they're kind of disappointing you but then disappointment comes from a place of expectation of knowing that the person or thing that let you down can do better can be better here's hoping Chrysler steps back up and taps back into the zeitgeist of the auto industry maybe we'll never be that quintessential American company again like they were in the 90s but then it's better to chase the possibilities of the future than the distant or ease of the past and that's a wrap on another RC our stories um it was kind of crazy because this was supposed to come out in the beginning of February because I've been working on this since January but this was a story that sort of got away from me because I opened up a suggestions thread on the subreddit about what sort of stories I should do for this podcast type thing and I saw the DaimlerChrysler story on there a suggestion decided read a little abstract of the entire story and thought well you know this is great I could do this pretty quick but it wasn't long before I now that I kind of bit off a bit more than I can chew but I'd already started writing it so I figured you know let me just keep going with this and I'll find the story that I want to tell in there somewhere and hopefully people enjoyed this I'm already planning the next one I have the subject and everything all lined up but like I said hopefully people enjoyed this and if not hopefully I'll win you back next time but until then thank you so much for listening it really does mean a lot and hopefully I'll see you next week well not for this but for our CR in general take care

Channel: Regular Car Reviews

Views: 396,748

Keywords: Chrysler, Mercedes, joined, Mercedes Merger, dymler chrylser, dymler Chersler group, Daimlerchrysler group, Daimler AG, Daimer Chrylser documentary, Documentary chrylser merger

Id: FRmzd1AB4kc

Length: 30min 33sec (1833 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ablnoozy]

I'm loving these!

[u/AussieMike20973]

At the time, I had high hopes for the Daimler-Chrysler merger.

The Chrysler brand was a big deal in Australia. But they left in the late '70s. I thought their return in the mid '90s might see some cool cars down here, but no. That hope peaked with the merger. Mercedes built right-hand-drive models. They sold pretty much their whole line-up here. I thought cool Americana would follow.

I liked the Crossfire, but I seem to be one of only a dozen or so that did. The 300C pretty much killed the local Ford LTD and Holden Caprice.

Viper? No. Prowler? No. Challenger? No. We didn't even get the two-door Neon, just the four-door.

I thought a sure fire money maker would be to dust off the Valiant name, and slap it on the Charger. Price it to compete with the Commodore and Falcon. When the Charger debuted as a concept car, one of the Chrysler guys said in an interview that "Australians understand performance four-door sedans." Yeah, we do, because it is the only thing the American owners of our car manufacturers will ever let us buy.

No Charger.

So, here we are. Dodge-Chrysler aren't reliable enough to compete with the Japanese. They aren't cheap enough to compete with the Koreans. They don't have the quality to compete with the Europeans. And Jeeps are bought by inner city posers while serious off-roaders go for Toyota Landcruisers or 4X4 Hi-Luxes.

The Fiat deal seems to be more if the same, with added corruption at the local level.

At least Ford are selling us the Mustang now.

[u/DrBiochemistry]

Here's a fun fact.

The last platform to be co-designed by Mercedes and Chrysler was the W166 M-Class and the most recent Durango and Cherokee.

Further down the rabbit hole, in the GLE-400 (née ML-400), the twin turbo V6 uses what amounts to be a PentaStar V6 block.

[u/Raziel369]

Noticed the map at 7:15 is in Romanian.

Wanted to ask Mr Roman if that was his own photo or something off the net.

[u/PrpleMnkyDshwsher]

Great piece.

Should have brought up the ME-412 as further proof of the problems inside in the company.

Chrysler engineers threw it together because they needed something showy for an upcoming autoshow.

They called up AMG and got a quad turbo V12, strapped it into an american designed body, a completely revolutionary double clutch transaxle and built a car in roughly 6 months that would have likely crushed the McLaren Mercedes SLR in every category.

The car was "near production" at one point but killed because Mercedes execs were publicly embarrassed. Wolfgang Bernhard supposedly was in line for the Head Mercedes job, and because this car was such an embarrassment to Mercedes, it is assumed it is one of the reasons he was passed over.

[u/Dtrain323i]

Loved this one. I want FCA to succeed so badly. My grandfather was a Dodge mechanic his whole life and they're kind of the only US automaker making anything cool. Sure there's the mustang and Corvette but name me another company that's making a rear wheel drive 4 door with a V8 that costs less than $40,000. Hell, I bought a Charger RT in August of last year brand new for $28,000. Then you have the Hellcat and the Giulia Quadriplegic. You can argue about how well those cars are being executed but at least they're trying.

[u/lampredotto]

As of 2017 the Chrysler 300 is still using the circa-2005 LX platform. That was itself derived from the circa-1995 MB E-Class. And it's one of the best full-size sedans on the market. Go figure.

[u/Tomguy24]

This was great! It's a pretty good start into how badly Daimler winded up actually raping Chrysler (with other items, like selling off assets like hotcakes, keeping quite a few for themselves, and raiding the coffers). Chrysler had literally billions in cash on hand - not assets, cold hard cash - that Daimler raided on Day 1 of the "Merger".

[u/JuanChaleco]

Just saw it...Awesome documentary (because that's what it is... don't let nobody tell you otherwise)