Fact is, I was one of those who was excited by the possibilities the Daimler "merger" presented. Who knew they were a steaming pile of lying, cheating crooks?
I did. I called it back then, long before my forum days. Those of you who were around in the halcyon days of ScatPack, circa mid-2000, may recall that I was vocally critical of NaziKrysler even then, when they were still in the honeymoon phase and all the news coming out of Highland Park was rainbows and unicorns.
It was pretty obvious to me from the get-go: M-B, obviously successful but nowhere near the powerhouse in the most profitable market on Earth, somehow worms their way into a "merger" with, at that time and for a couple of years prior,
the most profitable car company on the planet. Chrysler had more cash in the bank than Ford and GM combined, more than Honda, or Toyota, or anyone else in 1995 and continually up through the merger. Not assets, not cars, not dealers
--cold, hard, withdrawable cash. For nearly two years prior, Chrysler literally had enough pennies in the jar to nearly
buy GM outright. Let that sink in. In the mid-'90s, Chrysler couldn't miss. Everything they built was generally considered quite attractive, and each new product was an out-of-the-park home run: Ram, ZJ, TJ, Neon, the cloud cars, the LH and LX, you name it. It was a heady time to be a Mopar guy. The Krauts knew the "merger" would spur activity in Chrysler stock sales and used that opportunity to buy all they could and take controlling interest. Once they held the hammer, they used it to break a
$28 billion piggy bank and keep it all for themselves. In a move similar, but not identical to Honda's way of doing things, they then used their outdated tooling to make parts for "new" Chrysler products. Daimler filled the lineup with decade-plus-old Benz stuff. Good quality? Apparently. State of the art? Not even close. Challenger, Charger, 300? '90s Mercedes underpinnings. Hell, the Crossfire was blatantly a first-gen SLK with a new outer skin and a V6 to tug its chubby ass around, rather than the supercharged four. The key? On paper, they sold some of the dedicated tooling and machinery to the Chrysler divisions, so that when Daimler had finished raping the former Chrysler Corporation they'd actually made money on it. Even worse, the non-dedicated tooling still belonged to Daimler--so Cerberus, the government, the UAW, God knows whom else, and now Fiat are stuck buying components
from Daimler. If put to celluloid, I'm not sure if it would be a porno or a snuff film; it's clearly one of the greatest fuckings in history, but the climax is the real-life murder of one of the players.
Fiat? Fiat's done nothing but rebrand some buildings and polish the husk. The 200 is the car nobody asked for except Stuttgart's overstocked warehouses, and the Dart was a low-risk disaster waiting to happen since the small-car market is essentially dead (Daimler knew this, hence the replacement of the formerly successful Neon with the ill-conceived Caliber miniature tallwagon). Fiat got the company inexpensively from the government and the UAW, and the linked article at the beginning of the thread tells the story between the lines: Marchionne is a master deal maker. His intent was to sling some filler at the rusted hulk of Chrysler, slap an Earl Scheib paint job on it, and toss that fucker on the lot for a profit... using Fiat's global successes as an indicator that Chrysler is clearly worth owning.
You know what? While I'd enjoy seeing him fail and have the Chrysler acquisition drag Fiat down kicking and screaming--I doubt it will--I honestly don't give a fuck. Chrysler's been gone nearly 19 years. It's never coming back. Nothing introduced since the '90s has sparked my interest. Though the C-Class Chargenger SL-RT8 AMG EvilPussy, or whatever they call that eyesore, is an amazing performance car, it's no more a Mopar than a '90 LeMans was a Pontiac. The current "Hemi"--merely a corporate V8 neither more proud nor special to own than a Chevrolet 305 in 1986--
doesn't even have hemispherical combustion chambers, for fuck's sake.
I refer to all the new cars as the "Axis" Mopars. Germany and Italy are once again waging war against the Americans. And "Mopar guys" carry the flag proudly...
