The US government has ordered that Chrysler has 30 days to make a deal with Fiat or declare BK.

Therefore Marchionne holds ALL the cards.

 

Gee.... just think....

...all this began with Bob Eaton taking a perfectly healthy, cash-rich, and very cost concious Chrysler, with plenty of good product in it's pipeline and high stock value.... and merged with a much smaller, highly aggresive, then automotive "bit player", Mercedes Benz.... and Chrysler never recovered.

A short time later, Bob Eaton took a very fat cash buyout and retired leaving Mercedes to do whatever they wanted with Chrysler.


That act depleted Chrysler's cash to rebuild and expand Mercedes Benz's entire lineup, fund Smart, give bonuses to all Mercedes Benz employees, shut down Chrysler's pipeline, & laid off up to 2/3s of the company over the time they ran it.

I can't help wonder where Chrysler would be today if it had never merged with Mercedes Benz.... that act affected the car industry in ways that we might never imagine.

Bob Lutz and Bryan Nesbitt (and a host of other Chrysler refugees) would have never moved to General Motors if it wasn't for Chrysler's Mercedes merger.

So it's not a reach to say that while the merger destroyed Chrysler, the guys that built Chrysler in the 1990s helped GM create their best and most memorable vehicles this decade (HHR, Solstice-Sky, Camaro, the new Malibu, the new CTS, the GTO & the G8), and pretty much created GM's global design and engineering network.

 

This is all conjecture, of course ... but Chrysler had a rich history of boom and bust cycles long before Mercedes entered the picture, so it's hard to say if they could have sustained their successes of the early 90s. One thing we do know, is that without Mercedes they wouldn't have had access to the chassis that birthed their most recent success, the LX cars. Without that headstart, would Chrysler have funded an entirely new RWD chassis on their own, or would they have continued evolving the lacklustre LH platform and started their downturn sooner? Chrysler seems to have trouble following up its successful vehicles and works a lot better when their backs are against the wall and they're looking death in the eye.