http://forums.amceaglenest.com/index.php?topic=17794.0

Buick sells more units per model than Chrysler does. Buick’s market position is much better-established than Chrysler’s is. Most of the Chrysler brand’s sales are in vehicles that cost less than Buick’s entry-level models…the PT Cruiser and Sebring cost well below the LaCrosse’s base price.

Chrysler’s model average starting price is $25,300. Saturn’s is $24,467. Buick’s is $29,000. It would appear that Chrysler is closer to Saturn.

However, I’m not a fan of GM taking on Chrysler anyway. If Chrysler does get broken up, I can see an advantage to GM taking the minivans, and badging one as a Chevy and the other a Saturn and/or Pontiac. Move the tooling to that Moraine, Ohio SUV plant, and everyone would be happy. And drop the Hummer marque and the H2, merge the H3 into the newly-acquired Jeep line, and add it to the BPG dealer network, and you’d have something. The 300/Charger are getting old, and since GM already has a great new platform called Zeta, they could drop the old Benz tech LX platform.

Nissan-Renault can take the Ram to replace the Titan with.

The idled Chrysler plants could be sold to Nissan-Renault, VW, Fiat AG, PSA, etc. so they can start building cars here, too. That way, no company would experience the backlash of all those Chrysler employees getting sacked…they just be building a different company’s vehicles.

If Chrysler were to survive, they’d do best paired with Fiat. Chrysler needs really good B and C cars, and Fiat’s got just the platforms and technology Chrysler needs to do it right.

Absolute numbers are important. There is no doubt about that. However, investment decisions are based on the direction of those numbers. The fact is that every single Chrysler Division product is on the decline. If GM were to takeover Chrysler LLC, it would have to decide the future of each Division. GM has done a fairly good job of defining Buick. Just as an aside the notion that you can make Buick a Chinese-only brand ignores the reason that Buick is popular in China. It is popular there because it is American. Take away the caché of its American origins, it becomes just another player in a fast-growing market.

I digress. Many people think they know what Chrysler is, but it has many vehicles that do not fit the image. To save the Division, GM would have a lot of rehabilitation to do. How much will the rehabilitation cost? Would the effort be worth it? My guess is that it is not. Given a choice between Buick and Chrysler, Buick wins hands down.

Oh come on now. Chrysler has sold much less…? LOL You even say that Buick only sold 113,000 of which Chrysler sold twice as much. Its stupid to compare Chrysler to all 3 brands combined when we are only discussing dropping one brand and switching it for the other.

Come on, its GM — they are the king of badge conversion. Aura -> Malibu, Enclave -> Traverse, Solstice -Sky…ect….

So…

Convert CTS into the new 300. Convert the Enclave into the new Pacifica. Convert the new Malibu into the new Sebring.

Quick, dirty, efficient and improve sales. Seems like a no brainer but apparently that’s not the case.

And yes, they can keep Buick in China.

The other question here is will the Gov let a deal like this happen?

Buick *will not die* because of Buick’s strong presence in China, it’s the #1 selling brand in China. Now granted, GM could reconsider ditching the Buick brand in the U.S. and work towards keeping Chrysler here and Buick in China, similar to how GM is handling Vauxhall, Opel, Saturn, and Holden… but in the end, the Buick brand has tremendous equity. They sell more Buick’s in China than many of GM’s divisions sell over here.

Personally though, I really hope Ghosn steps up, or perhaps even Fiat. With Fiat’s interests in bringing Alfa Romeo to the U.S. market, having a dealer network and parts supplier (Mopar) to distribute parts through and U.S. manufacturing capacity could be huge for them. Fiat has tons of compact platforms that could pave the way for a # of small compact cars to help in fuel costs. It’d also give Fiat engineering in the states and brands with existing U.S. equity, something it completely lacks and will have an uphill climb to establish if it ever does. Personally, while financially Fiat might be the hardest fit… strategically, they’re the one to benefit most. It’d also give them engineering, manufacturing, parts distribution, and product/part sourcing that could be grafted into their European platforms long-term, and help pave the way for bringing more Fiat marques to the U.S. over time. Not just Alfa Romeo, but Fiat itself, Lancia, et al. They also have some executives (Jim Press esp.) within the Cerberus-owned Chrysler with some knowledge on how to get it done over here, something that would be beneficial to Fiat ownership.

GM… to me would be spending $ hand over fist to kill off a brand only to see the other brands around them get stronger. Sure… they gain Jeep, but rather than buy the whole kit and kaboodle from Cerberus, they’d be better suited to bid solely on Jeep and/or work out deals with Fiat or Renault/Nissan to buy the other brands and manufacturing. In fact, outside of $… Cerberus could gain significantly more from a Nissan/Renault merger longterm than they’d gain from selling it to a cannibalistic GM. GM could maybe even ink a deal to spin Hummer back into what they buy (after all, they clearly want to rid themselves of it from past commentaries) and sell it to Renault/Nissan or Fiat to recuperate some of the investment.

Nissan/Renault on the other hand… really only wants U.S. manufacturing for it’s brands IMHO. It could perhaps gain from purchasing Jeep (the one brand with tremendous equity that everyone would buy Chrysler for solely), and maybe even obtaining the Dodge and Chrysler brands for U.S. sales… but the thing about that level of merger is that Renault/Nissan would seriously need to assess the brands and/or reposition them so that their products and sales don’t impede on Nissan’s and Infiniti’s success in the U.S. After all, while there is a certain semblance of “Buy American” loyalty and equity in that principle, the real problem is that in the end… a buyout by Fiat or Nissan/Renault effectively makes them “not American” neither in executive status nor engineering/sourcing. Not that, that wasn’t already the case when Daimler previously owned them.

Having an American nameplate like Dodge (value and still has a sporty image, plus the whole NASCAR connection does have it’s place) is likely more beneficial to Nissan than Chrysler (sort of the Buick of the Chrysler lineup stateside, with exception to the 300 but it’s getting a bit old and ready for a redo), which would impede on Infiniti, and Chrysler’s equity isn’t really there as a luxury make so it’s sort of a haphazard brand that would take tremendous effort to reposture into something usable (i.e. a Lincoln or Cadillac like marque, which once again would cannibalize Infiniti sales). That said, using Nissan’s RWD platform for future replacements to the 300/Charger/Magnum/Challenger sounds divine, but I don’t think it’d come to pass personally. It’d be nice to see though as after losing Plymouth… and prior to that AMC, the American brand market is looking like a very shallow pool. Sad to see that no one has learned to swim yet either…

Comparisons between Chrysler and Buick are flawed because Buick is part of the Buick-Pontiac-GMC Group whereas Chrysler is a standalone division of its parent. BPG over the last 12 months has sold 644,928 vehicles, 113,130 of which sported the Buick badge. Chrysler has sold much less 61% fewer vehicles at 252,389.

Buick has just three models in its catalog, the LaCrosse, the Lucerne, and the Enclave. The two passenger car models are struggling, but the Enclave CUV is a spectacular success–experiencing a 123.9% increase in Jan-Sep YTD sales for 2008 over 2007 and a 26.7% increase in sales for Sep. 2008 over Sep. 2007. The Chrysler Division has many more models, but none of them are can brag about increased sales year-over-year. Its best selling model, the Town & Country (86,058 CYTD), is struggling the least with a sales decline of only 5% YTD. For the month of August 2008, it actually saw a 15% year-over-year increase. Chrysler’s second best model, the Sebring, suffered twice as much as the Town & Country with a 10% sales decline CYTD. Fanboy favorite, Chrysler 300, is dropping like a stone with a 41% CYTD in sales.

As a brand, Buick is struggling with a 20.5% CYTD decline is sales volume. The Chrysler brand, however, is struggling more than twice as much with a 44% CYTD decline in sales volume. The bottomline is that the Chrysler Division is the solution to none of GM’s problems.

Oh and I forgot to list Cadillac and its ever growing quality line-up. Come on GM, wake up and smell the coffee on Chrysler. Don’t let your pride get in the way of making the right decision to kill off Buick and replace it with Chrysler.

Keep Chrysler and keep Jeep and toss Dodge and Buick.

Switch their cars to GM platforms. Can you imagine Chevy Camaro, Malibu, Corvette, Chrysler 300, Chrysler Pacifica (actually the Enclave in Chrysler dress), Chrysler(or Chevy) Caravan, Jeep Cherokee, Saturn Vue, Aura, Sky, Pontiac G8/6/Solstice all coming from the same company?

That Dodge Hornet was gathering some buzz, too. Wow, what a line-up GM would have then. How can they just junk the Chrysler 300? Its much more popular than Buick…anything.

The Chrysler name has sway than Buick. Stupid to keep Buick and not Chrysler if this goes through.

Had to.

There is no place for Dodge left in a merger here. That much is certain. But I think they’d be better served with Chrysler as the gap filler between Chevy and Cadillac.

Plus, I think Chrysler appeals to a lot more people than Buick ever will.

But in the bigger scheme of things GM would prolly shut most of Chrysler down. They should get Ford to pay for part of the deal, as both companies would benefit from less competition in the market.

Sadly, I called this the moment Chrysler was bought by a Private Investors Group. I was expecting it to take awhile, though, and for it to be sold off piece by piece, with only Jeep staying a solid brand before the end. The signs have been showing up over the past number of months, with the prospect of the Viper ‘brand’ being sold the latest bit of writing on the wall. Unless Renault/Nissan steps up and makes the purchase, I don’t hold any hope of Chrysler surviving the next decade.

Ending the brand completely would create much more of a backlash than AA buying TWA did. However, we all agree that Jeep is salvagible, while Chrysler is not…especially in light of a Buick division that is resurgent and selling more units per model than Chrysler is.

Either way, it’d be smart for GM to remove the excess capacity, though I’d hate to see Chrysler chewed up and spit out.

Maybe some of you follow the (also hurting) airline industry. About eight years ago TWA was a real sick pup, with a great brand and great employees but no particularly vaulable planes or routes or ideas. In other words TWA was the Chrysler of the airlines.

American Airlines acquired TWA in 2002 or so and paid good money for TWA assets. Not because AA wanted TWA’s airplanes, brand, route system, airport gates, or employees. What AA wanted was to put TWA out of business, because it represented “excess capacity.” When AA did the deal it gave lip service to the glory of the TWA brand, the wonderful TWA workers joining our team, etc. and then immediately tossed everything TWA into the garbage bin. That’s business.

And that’s what GM is thinking about Chrysler. Excess capacity. With the exception of a couple of Jeep nameplates representing solid equity (Wranger, Grand Cherokee), and the minivan dies (rename it the Chevy Caravan), there is no solid business argument for sustaining ChryCo products or brands, and a very strong case for killing them. And, yes, that includes the RAM — why split the Silverado market?

Welcome to depression-era realpolitik. It hurts, but it has to be said. Nobody can afford sentimentality anymore.

But they got Diff’rent Strokes
It takes Diff’rent Strokes
It takes Diff’rent Strokes to move the world

Now everybody’s got a special kind of story
Everybody finds a way to shine
But no matter what you got, not a lot? So what?
They’ll have theirs, and you’ll have yours, and I’ll have mine
And together we’ll be fine

Cause it takes Diff’rent Strokes to move the world
Yes it does
It takes Diff’rent Strokes to move the world

.

Cheers

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I figured since you guys did it…

The Golden Girls (sorry LLLL#3)

However, a Fiat-Chrysler tie-up might be better. Then again, Fiat is just getting back to profitability after verging on oblivion just 4 short years ago.

The XJ Cherokee was designed by AMC in response to rapidly increasing fuel prices in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It became an evergreen smash hit that managed to stay competitve for 18 seasons.

It is interesting that at this stage, there is a Renault connection, as well. Renault-Nissan is working on a small Chrysler, just like AMC and Renault collaborated on small cars in the early ’80s (Alliance/9 and Encore/11), and then moved to midsize (Medallion/21) and large cars (Premier/25) by the late ’80s, while the only 100% AMC-engineered vehicles were their Jeeps and the evergreen Eagle. Just like the only 100% Chrysler-engineered vehicles these days are the BOF trucks/SUVs, the Jeeps (save the Compass and Patriot), the Viper, and the minivans. The rest of their line is either Mitsubishi or Mercedes-Benz-derived.

Anyway, GM taking on Jeep and merging it with Hummer, and rebadging the minivans (probably one as a Chevy and the other as a Saturn or Buick), would probably work out best. The next-gen LX platform might be a good, and less expensive, source for larger rear-drive vehicles than the Aussie-sourced Zeta. But beyond that, it’s hard to see how GM benefits from taking on another troubled company when it’s struggling itself.