Totally agree. They deserve it for driving Chrylser into the ground.

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just curious, where would Chrysler have been had Daimler not purchased it, keep in mind it'd loose the 300's platform and everything built on it?

I thought Daimler bought Chrysler because they were already having problems running themselves like a business which made them vulnerable for takeover. Looking forward to the well researched reply indicating how awesome Chrysler was doing pre-takeover and how great they’d fair without the 300. I’m not defending Daimler, I don’t care for them one bit, and if anyone has no clue how to run a sub luxury brand in north America it’s them, I just don’t recall things factually being all rosebuds and smiles pre-takeover.

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It will barely dent their overall profit from raiding Chrysler. They took way more than $1 billion out of it.

The sad thing is that without Chrysler to bleed, they're going down now too. So they'll have taken Chrysler with them for no good reason.

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"just curious, where would Chrysler have been had Daimler not purchased it, keep in mind it'd loose the 300's platform and everything built on it?"

hard to say. Bob Eaton was the catalyst to kick off their fall (Actually it was Iacocca, by way of selecting Eaton.) For some reason back then people were enamored with execs coming out of Proctor & Gamble who were also totally unsuited for running a car company (see also Ron Zarrella at GM.) Chrysler was facing some looming warranty fallout thanks to some stupid cost-cutting moves by Eaton's teams (think Neon head gaskets, LH A/C and steering.) Plus, there were the rumblings that Iacocca and Kerkorian were going to head up a plan to buy in heavily into Chrysler. Eaton was a scared little man who jumped right into bed with Juergen Schrempp.

Too bad Lido couldn't swallow his ego, if he had put Lutz in charge as he should have, DCX would never have happened.

"I thought Daimler bought Chrysler because they were already having problems running themselves like a business which made them vulnerable for takeover."

No. Chrysler was a very efficient manufacturer at the time. They had a program (SCORE) which was great at finding ways to save money (And wasn't a GM-style "beat your suppliers to death, then go buy from China" strategy.) They had very high CAFE numbers, they had *cars* and trucks that people wanted to buy, and weren't heavily loaded with SUVs.

"Looking forward to the well researched reply indicating how awesome Chrysler was doing pre-takeover and how great they’d fair without the 300. I’m not defending Daimler"

They could have been fine. But here's the problem- Daimler took over in 1998. The 300 didn't come out until 2005. You're glossing over a huge gap in time. When the Neon came out, people were lining up on waiting lists to buy them. The "Cloud cars" (Stratus/Cirrus) were, if not top-notch, at least competitive in their segments and somewhat fun to drive. The BR Ram truck had been a home run.

So then ze Germans take over, and what happens?

- They let the Neon wither and rot away until it was a joke, then they pissed on its grave and gave us the miserable Caliber instead
- they turned the cloud cars from good looking cars into boring griefboxes
- cheapened and decontented the Ram until it was no longer competitive with anyone
- threw away a bunch of new platforms (JA, PL, LH) in favor of re-inventing the wheel *AGAIN* by replacing them with the aborted attempt to merge with Mitsubishi.
- loaded up the product mix with stupid crap like the commander and Aspen, then Joe Eberhardt comes in with a strategy to build trucks that nobody ordered, then fill up every empty lot in SE michigan with them until they can force some poor dealer to take them.

Sorry, but DaimlerChrysler happened solely because Eaton was scared, and Schrempp wanted to build an empire. Anyone who saw the mess that Daimler caused at Freightliner could have seen the Chrysler disaster coming.

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"I thought Daimler bought Chrysler because they were already having problems running themselves like a business which made them vulnerable for takeover."

just a bit of information on the takeover. in 1979, Lee Iacocca was brought in as CEO of Chrysler to save it from some horrible times. He brought forth two models - the minivan and the K-car - which, for all intents and purposes, saved chrysler. that, along with a government guaranteed loan, allowed chrysler to get back to being a competitive company, and by the 1990s, Chrysler was actually the most profitable automobile manufacturer in the world. Iacocca left Chrysler in 1992 if i remember correctly. Daimler took over chrysler a short time later (after a failed hostile takeover attempt by Kirk Kerkorian), but when Chrysler was bought out, it was still one of the most profitable (if not the MOST profitable) automobile companies in the world.

Iacocca appointed his successor at Chrysler, and (based on having read his books) he explains that he feels he made a big mistake choosing that person (whose name escapes me right now). he says the successor allowed Chrysler to essentially be given away to Daimler, without any guarantees of equality (he stresses that the name should never have been DaimlerChrysler, but ChryslerDaimler). The essentially sold away Chrysler under horrible coniditions so he could get his big payout. He was gone within a couple years from the merged company.

Now, I'm not saying that Daimler purposely or actively ruined Chrysler. But the fact is that they took over Chrysler when it was the most profitable company in the world, and sold it when it was on its last leg. I don't have any sympathy for Daimler as far as losing money on this deal...

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Jim,

That is one of the best comments I have read about what happened to Chrysler with Dumbler I have read here. Kudos. I will add that Tom Gale already had replacement for the 300M. The 300N was rwd hemi powered and the concept car was a convertible! Then Dumbler came in and said no use our old E-class suspension bits - that pushed the program back 18 months. Think what a new 300 would have done in 2004 instead of 2005.

As for the Neon, the following article by an engineer who was there explains it all:
http://www.allpar.com/neon/engineering.html

He explains how cost effective it was, how Eaton destroyed it's realiability to save $2 a car, how he went up against Lutz - and won because Lutz had instituted a process that gave the engineers on the ground the last say as long as they met their cost targets, and how Dumbler messed up the development process and got rid of good people. It's a great read.

Chrysler before the takeover was the most "Honda"-like of all the domestics because it had studied Honda's development methodology and instituted it. Then Stalkamp developed SCORE and the Extended Enterprise and Chrysler relations with it's suppliers was similar to the Japanese. Chrysler was the #1 company to work with in the 90's as voted by the major suppliers. Now they rank at the bottom.

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Let's also not forget that Iacocca figures Chrysler had enough money in the bank at the time of the merger to fund it's own take over and he would know since he was envolved in a competing offer. At the time as an Automaker they had everything going for them. The Neon and the LH cars were homeruns. The Cloud cars were competitive and they had almost had a lock on the lucrative Minivan market. The SUV craze was in full swing so owning Jeep was like having a license to print money and the new Ram was still fresh and cool.

By comparison in 1998 Ford had just finally been forced to drop the Aerostar and Aspire due to the new crash guidelines and the Windstar still only had one sliding door. GM was building the god awful third generation Cavaliers, Venture and Astro vans. Out of the Big 3 in 1998 Chrysler seemed to be the one with the best lineup and most promising future. Like all of the Big 3 they needed to address some quality issues but they had the best lineup at the time.

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"just curious, where would Chrysler have been had Daimler not purchased it, keep in mind it'd loose the 300's platform and everything built on it?"

The biggest being what would have been the first 4 door coupe, the 1999 Dodge Charger concept that was set in stone to be built before the Germans killed it and brought out the CLS later on !

MB also use to take 5 years to bring cars to market, Chrysler took 2 years. Mercedes stole that too !

Its no question that Chrysler would be one of the most healthy companies out there right now had none of this happened. They were worth 38 Billion in 1998 and now they are worth nothing. MB should be on tap for enough to put their future into question. Heck, they just sold another 9% to the Arabs to stay above water !!

The only positives I see are that Chrysler can take from MB now but won't have to keep watering themselves down to keep MB looking better. The 2011 Grand Cherokee is a shining star in that regard ! So will the new 300C and Charger !!

And about the MB diesel question, They bought that technology from Bosch, it was actually developed by FIAT !!! FIAT had to sell it because they needed the money.

I wont get into the kind of technology Chrysler will have access to after the Fiat alliance.

We'll save that for another time.

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Because my longer posts here tend to not get posted, I've decided to address the historic aspects of the failed Daimler-Chrysler merger on my own website, Automotive Traveler at http://automotivetraveler.com/jump/408. What I found are a book that everyone keenly interested in this topic should read as well as an academic paper published back in 2002 by the business school at Dartmouth University, that seemed to predict in great detail why the merger was destined to fail. It's available as a downloadable PDF.

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for very different reasons.
for me, it will remove a lot of unions
and...
they deserve it for using Dr. Z in a commercial. Dry humor is gay if not done well.

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The Pentastar V6 and the 2011 Grand Cherokee were co-developed with M-B. Don't you think they already have access to Benz diesels if they thought they could use them?

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Good point, and the outgoing Grand Cherokee did have that blutec diesel. It's as if the small diesels were either kept from us, or the Chrysler side didn't opt for them.

Either way, the plan of adding giant diesels only to higher end SUV models didn't work out for either company here.

Good to see that MB has the E250 coming, which is a step in the right direction for them

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