What ARE we going to do, Chrysler?

Obviously, Lloyd, you have never driven a 4.0L Cherokee. It's hardly slow. As a matter of fact, out of all the different non-V8 SUVs and light trucks I've driven, the 4.0L Cherokee had the best seat-of-the-pants acceleration of the lot. It even felt strong enough to whip a V-10 powered Excursion, although I've not compared the two back-to-back. And it's sure as hell quicker than any Ram I've driven, although I've not sampled either an SS/T or a Hemi. I'd hazard that it's close in acceleration to the '03 5.4L F150 Supercrew I had for a few days last summer, although I was really impressed with the torque that thing put out.

"It doesn't rev?!?!?" What the hell kind of criteria is that for an SUV motor? You don't think that the typical SUV driver makes purchase decisions based on what RPM the red line is at do you? For the few that buy them as off-road vehicles, it's low-end grunt that makes the sale. 4.0s have plenty of that. That it happens to excel in the SUV stoplight races is a nice ancillary benefit. But you've bought the marketing line that what's important about an engine is the redline, eh? Not surprising for a magazine-educated fool.

As to crudeness and noisyness, that's an interesting comment. Jeeps aren't intended to be pussy SUVs (well, up until the Liberty) like the X5 or Lexus. They also aren't priced like an X5 or a Lexus. People with a taste for your brand of 'refinement' shop elsewhere, as well they should. They also need to carry a AAA card when it snows heavily or if they by some chance wander too far into the back of the unpaved parking lot at the cider mill. But then again, I doubt the typical X5 driver ventures forth to rub elbows with the common folk noshing on cider and donuts.

For the blue jeans and t-shirt crowd, your standards of refinement and good engine design don't amount to a hill of shit.

Thank God.

--Geoff

Reply to
Geoff
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I remember one T.V. ad for the Dodge Spirit. It featured Iacocca touting that the Spirit was as good as Honda Accord, only safer because of the driver side air bag. There was a variant of the ad, featuring a Spirit R/T, proving that Chrysler was also a *peformance* company.

Kirk Matheson

Reply to
Kirk Matheson

And why do you think we want to read your racist, bigoted slurs here?

Reply to
Lloyd Parker

Huh? BMW is independent. GM bought SAAB, and has part of Suzuki, Subaru, Isuzu, and Fiat.

Reply to
Lloyd Parker

The S & P could have changed their rules. DC stock is still listed on the NYSE, as is no other stock of a company not headquartered in the US.

Reply to
Lloyd Parker

Really? Compare a Grand Cherokee 4.0 to any other 6-cylinder SUV.

Since most drivers drive them on the road, yes, an engine that revs willingly and easily is better for acceleration, passing, quietness, etc.

And continuing to cater to those few may be why Jeep sales are low compared to what Ford and GM SUV sales are.

Or an Explorer, Trailblazer, 4Runner, Pathfinder, etc., apparently.

Also aren't selling all that well compared to Ford and GM, are they?

Reply to
Lloyd Parker

Ah, Lloyd, not more of your misconceptions,

OK, now your falling for the idea that the only efficiency that counts is on the production line. You and a lot of other stupid managers.

What matters is how much factory man hours are spent on the car during BOTH manufacture AND the warranty period - since the factory foots the bill for warranty repair.

If the extra man hours they are spending in the factory to build the car are being spent in doing a better job putting the car together and better job of designing it and testing it, there's likely to be fewer problems during warranty, so the savings on spending money on warranty work will greatly offset the additional man hours spent building the car.

Now I don't know that in Chryslers case during that time period that the extra hours they were spending resulted in less warranty claims paid out. Considering that the data for this is probably just starting to become available now, nobody really knows the answer yet.

This is 20-40 year old ossified thinking. Today the global economy is so tightly tied together that the scenario of a depression in one country and a boom in another doesen't exsit anymore. Today if your US sales go down due to depression, your overseas economies are all going to go into depression to, so having overseas sales doesen't provide any cushion. Certainly, Damlier buying Chrysler (and overseas company for Damlier) didn't help them any.

No question there, but the point is why does this management have to come from Damlier? For starters, why didn't DC promote someone from within Chrysler? You are obviously operating under the mistaken assumption that the entire management team at Chrysler had bought off on the same vision, and were all incompetent. In reality no management team is like this. There were probably plenty of people in the management team at Chrysler that were pissed of at the stupid decisions their bosses were making. Those people have far more expertise at what not to do with Chrysler than some DC execs that have never worked a day at Chrysler in their lives before.

And furthermore, past performance is no indication of future performance. Those DC execs may have done well where they were, but that does not guarentee that they are going to do well at Chrysler.

Cost cutting is not the only way or even the best way to bring a company into profitability. Sure, if there is some gross problem, you have to cut. But it is always much smarter to spend your attention figuring out how to increase sales than to spend time cost cutting.

The problem is that spending time and money on increasing sales does not have immediate payback. Cost cutting does. But in the long run, cost cutting generally does nothing to help increase sales, your mortgaging your future for the present.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

Personnally, I think Chrysler was obviously in trouble with the second version of the LH cars. Although high in quality, except for perhaps the 300M, none were as nice looking as the older versions and the new Concord, Intrepid and LHS were too similar. For some reason Chrysler went for revolutionary changes instead of evolutionary improvements like the Japanese. If Chrysler had kept the old LHS body design and fixed its quality problems, I would have one in the garage next to my

300M instead of a Toyota Avalon.
Reply to
Art Begun

I am not sure if I have misinterpreted your statement "BMW(still can't believe they let GM buy them out)" or whether I have missed an announcement.

Did you mean to imply that GM own BMW, if so when did that happen?

All I can find is a reference to a joint development agreement on Hydrogen fuelled engines.

-- Rickety

Reply to
rickety

From my reading on various forums (including this one), they cut costs on the line *and* in the warranty end (no reimbursement for diagnostic time, below subsistence compensation to the dealer for actual repairs), so in effect the customer got it at both ends - in intial quality and in getting those initial problems remediated, and dealers suffered and lacked initiative to genuinely take care of the customer (there are exceptions to that).

Oh, Ted - You'd never make into today's business world! Don't go for that MBA! (That's not a criticism of you, but it's reality.)

Yep anyone can create short-term gains - but for how long?

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Reply to
Bill Putney

What's a "pussy SUV", and where can I get one?

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Reply to
Bill Putney

(checked) - my bad. Just some joint-ventures. BMW is still good to buy :)

Reply to
Joseph Oberlander

The S&P rules have served it well.

Lloyd, that's not true; you are incorrect once again. Many companies not headquartered in the US are listed in the NYSE. Some examples of NYSE listed companies include:

SYMBOL COMPANY HEADQUARTER COUNTRY

-------------|------------------------------------------------------------------

NYSE: FTE France Telecom FRANCE NYSE V VIVENDI UNIVERSAL FRANCE NYSE: TI Telecom Italia ITALY NYSE: BAB British Airways PLC UNITED KINGDOM NYSE: BGY British Energy PLC UNITED KINGDOM NYSE: SNE Sony Corp JAPAN NYSE: ASX Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. TAIWAN NYSE: AUO AU Optronics Corp. TAIWAN NYSE: TSM Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd. TAIWAN NYSE: CHA China Telecom Corporation Ltd TAIWAN NYSE: CHT Chung Hwa Telecom Co Ltd TAIWAN NYSE: DB Deutsche Bank AG GERMANY NYSE: DT Deutsche Telekom AG GERMANY NYSE: SI Siemens AG GERMANY NYSE: CNI Canadian National Railway Co CANADA

There are many more.

Reply to
Greg Johnson

Because your obviously reading it since you responded to it, you goofball.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

Not true, Bill. You need to keep up with your reading. There's a lot of people now who have been looking at this over the last decade and are starting to point this out. They have researched all of the companies that have gone bankrupt or been forced to sell out to a competitor and they have found a huge number of them have had layoff after layoff and product reduction after product reduction in a vain attempt to get the company into the black. While this doesen't prove that spending more money when the company is in the red is the right answer, it seems to show that cost cutting only delays the end, not reverses it.

The problem with cost cutting is that it starts out by cutting fat, and that's good. A company that is running in the red does not need to be financing "morale improving" trips to Hawaii, or new desk furniture, or some executive's pet project that has run for 5 years and "I know next year it's going to make money" But what can happen is that managers get positive strokes for cutting costs over and over and it seeps into the culture and gets institutionalized. Eventually they run out of fat to trim and they start cutting in places that aren't really losing money, but aren't really making money. Over time it's a viscious circle that makes the company smaller and smaller.

This is why back in the bad old days most CEO's came up through the ranks from the sales end. Our fathers and grandfathers in the old boys club understood that making your sales numbers was always more important than bean counting. It wasn't until it became out of fashion to promote people from within (based largely on a generation of moron "feel gooder" personnell people who have chanted the mantra of let's not hurt anyone's feelings by promoting their coworker over their head) and companies regularly embarked on these circus "executive searches" that you started getting a lot of these moron CEO's who were out of touch with what their customers really wanted and instead concentrated on "remaking the business" and you started seeing a lot of these non-sales types getting control of companies and their navel introspection running them into the ground.

Show me a company that is fixated on cost-cutting and I'll show you a company that has a CEO and exec staff that are a bunch of control freaks who spend more time inside the company trying to get inside the heads of their employees, than outside among potential customers in their market trying to get inside THEIR heads. While they may be able to hold the line on sales figures, every year their market share gets smaller and smaller.

Exactly, and one more item in my personal rant against non company types running a company. When companies bring these CEO's in from competitors they have absolutely no loyalty to anyone but themselves and all they do is milk the company for what they can get out of it then skip off to the next company the year before the one they are in smashes up. People are deluding themselves when they think that just giving the new CEO a bunch of stock is going to buy loyalty, that's a joke. All the CEO does is milk the company dry then quit 6 months before it smashes up, then once he's officially out of the company the SEC regulations don't hold him anymore, and he just dumps all his stock and that is that.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

All good points.

To repeat a previous rant of mine on this ng, I also observed that the catastrophic cost-cutting myths trickle down (more correctly, are

*RAMMED* down) thru the supply chain.

Just to give one simple example: Ford's mandating 5% (some years I believe 8%?) reduction in prices of supplied parts each and every year - they don't care how you have to do it, and pretend not to realize that certain overhead costs (health insurance, etc.) continue to rise. They even publish quotes in the trade journals that their plan is to run all but one or two suppliers of any given commodity out of the market with their price cutting.

In addition, they mandate new (in many cases completely non-value-add) quality controls onto the supplier which are more designed to shift blame and financial responsibility for quality spills onto the supplier and have little if nothing to do with actually improving quality (hell - the customer themselves even fake the design FMEA's right in front of you because they don't have the manpower to do them, but wink at you and insist that you do your FMEAs on the same product even though that's absolutely impossible to do without their design FMEA's as a starting point for your FMEA's).

The supplier is forced to either quit doing business with Ford (can't do that when you only have three primary customers who are playing their own dishonest cost-cutting game with you - for example GM's "PICOS" process), go out of business, or go into the same cost cutting-even-if-it's-cutting-something-useful mentallity to achieve that impossible 5% cost reduction each year, and eventually the only thing left is to cross your fingers and fake the quality checks because you can't afford to hire the 10 new quality people you needed to administer the new programs - I give you Firestone/Ford. Then you get a quality spill, Ford backcharges your invoices $400,000 for their troubles on a $0.10 part. More cost cutting to make up for that loss, and more quality spills - it's a downward spiral from there.

I hope things do change in the MBA world, but I did personally witness what they did industry over the last 20 years.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Reply to
Bill Putney

What is needed is an immediate revocation and cancellation of all MBA degrees issued in the last 25 years and a no-exceptions moratorium on new ones for the next 25 years.

DS

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

Heh heh! I guess everyone's seen the Fed Ex TV commercial that is currently running in which the new hire has an MBA. A woman asks him to ship something out by Fed Ex, and he replies that he doesn't "do shipping". She tells him again that he needs to get this shipped out today. He says "I'm sorry, I have an MBA - I don't do shipping!" She says "Oh - you have an MBA - in that case, here I'll show you how" as she sits down at the computer.

Everyone where I work was talking and laughing about that commercial.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Reply to
Bill Putney

Oh, that's *good*. Almost good enough to make me start watching TV again. ...almost.

DS

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

So you don't think it's a good engine for the GC?

Creeping along in first gear, sure, why not? An IL-4 would be adequate.

Like catering to those who want rear air-cooled engines, though. The requirement today is making profit, and that means making sales.

All of which excel in what 95% of the time an SUV is used for. Designing a vehicle for what 5% use it for and ignoring what the other 95% use it for is a recipe for low sales and losing money.

You might note the new Range Rover, though, with 4-wheel independent suspension and a dohc V8, is still more than capable off road. Everything I've read says the VW Toureg and Porsche Cayenne, with the right tires, are too.

Come on, the Jeep name ought to be enough to outsell Ford when it comes to SUVs!

But they aren't. You need strong sales to be profitable. Where's the GC's independent suspension for better on-road ride and handling? Fold-away third seat? 200+ hp 6-cylinder? Push-button 4wd selection?

No, it needs a major auto maker to become a niche player, apparently.

That could describe AMC. We know what happened to it.

Reply to
Lloyd Parker

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