But I have to say I have an emotional soft spot for Chrysler, and want them to make it. That wasn’t always the case.
Back in 1979, when I was a young reporter on the fringes of Chrysler’s first near-death experience, I thought they ought to be allowed to fail. The company had been so poorly mismanaged for so long, and its cars were such clunkers, that I thought it didn’t deserve to survive. I knew something of its history.
Chrysler had a meteoric rise throughout the 1920s, and shot past Ford to become the nation’s number two car maker.
After that, it drifted into decline. I am sitting here looking at a excellent book, “Riding the Roller Coaster: A History of the Chrysler Corporation,“ by Wayne State University history professor Charles Hyde. The cover has a photograph of an extremely ugly car, a 1937 Chrysler rolling off the assembly line with a beaming Walter P. Chrysler himself at the wheel, the millionth car Chrysler had built that year. Lined up next to the car are Chrysler’s top executives.
Every one of them is a pasty-faced, fat, unlovely old man in a drab and ill-fitting suit. That’s how Chrysler was seen when I was young. It was a car for the old, the poor, the unstylish and usually undereducated. Chrysler’s luxury car, the New Yorker, was a joke compared to a Cadillac or a Lincoln Continental.
Hundreds of thousands of Chryslers came trundling off the assembly lines at cavernous old factories like Dodge Main in Hamtramck. The company then stacked them up in parking lots till they could pressure dealers into taking them.
That nutty system almost did the company in. But they were saved, not so much by the government loan guarantee, but by Lee Iacocca, who reinvented Chrysler as a manufacturer of minivans, trucks and sport utility vehicles. For my money, two of the sexiest cars on the road today are the Satellite Sebring and the Crossfire.
They also have had a hit with the fun and highly functional PT Cruiser. Exactly ten years ago, this week, however, Chrysler took the fateful step of selling itself to the Germans. Daimler, that is. Though it was billed as a marriage of equals, it was anything but.
Daimler chewed Chrysler up and spat it out two years ago, palmed off to a venture capital firm. Then came last year’s financial hurricane, and the collapse of the car market.
Give Chrysler management credit for this. They went out and found Fiat, and worked hard at putting together this new alliance, to give themselves a chance to survive.
But ... will it work?
Will being a captive of the Italians prove better than being a captive of the Germans? We won’t know for awhile, but we do know that Chrysler has been left for dead before.
And then somehow, it has always sputtered back to life.
Well, here we are. Bankruptcy reoganization. Weeks and months after Governor Jennifer Granholm said that a "bankrupt automaker can't sell cars; nobody will buy a car from a bankrupt automaker," as she chided Republicans for suggesting use of Chapter 11 tools to reorganize Chrysler into a more efficient vehicle for (hopefully) turning a profit.
Now, Granholm is a cheerleader for Chrysler's recovery-through-bankruptcy plan.
Mostly, because it isn't a real bankruptcy, yet.
As Paul Ingrassia reports today in the Wall Street Journal, the people who invested in GM -- its investor-creditors -- are being taken to the cleaners in this reorganization. You know those guys. "Hedge fund managers." Those dastardly figures that invest money to help build companies they think will be profitable. What a concept. What a country.
I just finished listening to President Obama in an NPR report on the Chrysler bankruptcy filing. Obama let loose with a string of the most bald-faced lies of his Presidency; he said that the bankruptcy was forced on the company and all of its stakeholders by the aforementioned hedge-fund managers. Who, he said, insisted on giveing up "nothing" while all other Chrysler stakeholders gave up plenty. He singled out for compliment the working families of Chrysler.
This is enough to induce vomiting. It is a lie. A complete, utter, total fabrication by the President who, I presume, will be excoriated in the financial press for his lying, while the rest of the world reads reports like the one Jack Lessenberry wrote above.
Anyway, here's Jack's favorite atuomotive reporter at the Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124104678893870699.html
Posted by: Anonymous | April 30, 2009 at 05:57 PM
Obama uttered the same political nonsense as the apologists for Chrysler and the media slugs in this region becuase of the ad budgets of the Big 3 ignored the worthless CEO"s of the Big 3 but instead provided us with the usual tabloid driven anti-Black Detroit hating tales..
The Financial press i.e WSJ is as worthless as our local media papers the yoyo's at WSJ were brain dead during Maddof's carnage..
Fact is as I have posted many times in here the Big 3 and our planet must change thier entire paradigms..
Automobiles are obsolete on a planet now suffering from global warming and emerging markets..Our future and labor growth is in mass transit modes...
Wasting time on pointing fingers is what people do who lack vision and focus...
Posted by: Thrasher | April 30, 2009 at 08:44 PM