Daimler & Chrysler

Business Week 15Aug2005 issue (last week) has several interesting
articles on the troubles at Daimler and the thoughts they may dump
currently successfull Chrysler.

 

In rec.autos.makers.chrysler on Tue, 16 Aug 2005 06:27:55 GMT Moon Guy

That would be fine with me.


If you email me, please let me know whether
or not you are posting the same letter.
If necessary, change domain to erols.com.

Directions are given as if you know nothing.
There's a big range here but I don't know who knows what.

 

And, I would venture to add, with the Mercedes-Benz car division management.

However, there is/was some logic to the merger/take-over. Chrysler's unit
car output for its domestic market is double that of the MB brand worldwide.
So if you want to multiply your unit sales, especially in the US, you buy a
US car company. Still, BMW did not find it necessary, but then they
probably didn't have the recources.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[...]

 

Oh, it'd be fine with me as long as in doing so, they didn't suck Chrysler
dry and just dispose of the remains...and as long as the Chinese don't buy
it.

 

Why, can't they handle getting thrashed by the "low-end" American
division?

 

It's a good quip but I can tell you that I don't think MB's managers were
ever happy with getting involved with Chrysler. Another adventure that
diverts top management attention from making the good cars that made the
reputation of the 'Star'. Maybe the Chrysler division is making more money
than Merc Cars at present, but that is because MB cars need attention, what
with quality and dealer service issues, not least in the USA.

I am not sure the 'integration' was greeted with much enthusiasm in Germany.
I would not be surprised if there was still little cooperation among the MB
& Chrysler dealerships, for example.

The Mercedes brand is intimately involved in the evolution of the motor car
and has been responsible for the introduction of many automotive
innovations, whether developed in-house or elsewhere. The new S-Class, for
example, is a signpost of what will become commonplace technology in the
next few years. It cannot be allowed to go down the tubes... and top
management has finally publicly acknowledged that there are problems, and
Juergen Schrempp -- widely blamed for many problems -- has finally stepped
down as CEO with less than full honours.

I guess we all know that the man stepping up to the top job is Dieter
Zetsche, who was more successful in his job as Chrysler head than expected.
As he is a completely different character to Mr Schrempp, it is possible
that MB Cars will recover.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling

 

You don't understand Chinese! If they want to buy something, they will
choose top brand name like Maytag or IBM, not Chrysler. They are smart
enough to just sell Chrysler parts to make shitty cars and then save the
money to buyout MB to BMW if they had financial trouble.

Read the most recent Business Week--the raising of China and India.

I have Chinese blood with American minds because my root is here now. I am
afraid of seeing Chinese economical/military threat to US as much as you are
if not more. Instead of simply resisting/avoiding them, American need to
work harder and smarter to stay competitive. In the last ten years, I
bought three American cars simply out of patriotism and I am now learning
lessons in a hard way.

If the only thing American auto industry can only do to compete with
Japanese is selling cars at employee discount, we should welcome Chinese to
buy Chrysler and start making another high-end American BMW locally in US.
That's the only way to stay ahead while maintaining high living standard.

 

But, China isn't smart enough to really understand what the US long term
game plan is.

Former President Clinton actually came out and admitted one time on
David Letterman that the entire point of NAFTA, and the other free
trade agreements, and the entire point of economic embracing of countries
like China is to get their economies so interdependent with that of the
United States that eventually, going to war with the US would be
cutting their own throats. And, the same is done in reverse, to us, as
a way of curbing the hawks here at home.

are

As long as China remained independent of the rest of the world and had their
own economy, they could pose a credible threat.

But look for example at a very basic thing - steel manufacture.

More and more, Chinese steel is simply melted-down scrap from the
US. If tomorrow they went to war with the US, that flow of scrap would
halt, and it would put a serious crimp in their ability to make the steel
needed to make the guns used to go to war with us in the first place.

And it's not just steel, it's hundreds of different products.

No, not at all. What Americans need to do is work really hard doing
the things that Americans do far better than Chinese do because of
fundamental cultral differences. For example, entertainment. The US has
the top position in the manufacture of entertainment. Scientific research
is another one. This isn't competition, this is dominating markets that we
can do better than China. By contrast China dominates markets that
we are are weak in. Ultimately this makes China dependent on our
continued well being.

Ted

 

What I call the WalMart factor.

What I can't figure out is why, for Clinton, this also included letting
China in on military secrets. I knopw Gore needed funding for his
presidential bid.

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

 

....which is why they've bought Rover, the dowdy UK maker of dowdy UK cars.

Dumb basis for selecting a car.

 

Thanks And like all "good quips," I'm afraid it holds a core grain
of truth.

Of course MB's quality slide began in about 1990, LONG before the
"merger" came about. In fact Chrysler's modern computer-oriented
industrial design capability was touted as one of the "plums" of the
deal, for MB. I don't know how much actual usage of the Auburn Hills
facility the Mercedes group has actually been allowed to have, though.
If there's been any, it hasn't been very public and the dated look of
the MB line doesn't show any marked leaps forward either. The Chrysler
line has undergone some major re-stylings, several engine introductions,
and a platform introduction since the merger, and the MBs look...well...
a whole lot like the '99 models.

There was certainly NO enthusiasm for it in the US.

Much like BMW drivers and Mini drivers, they don't even acknowledge each
others' existence.

 

Bill,

Finally I found someone who understands what I am trying to say here.

And how China saved $700 billion US dollars in a few years.

Politician's mind is similar to a lot of nasty businessman. As long as
there is $ today, they would go with it without further thinking. When did
they care about ordinary people's tomorrow?
Clinton also OKed some US satellite to be launched by Chinese rockets simply
it is cheaper and he got to make some friends there...

 

Time will prove everything pretty soon.

China is capable of making good steel started right before WWII. Their
weakness is not on steel, it is on high tech electronics, semiconductor and
material science. These are the areas US ia still ahead but losing the
advantage really fast!

Would you please give some examples on what kind of entertainment industry
US is leading China? I hope you don't mean Hollywood. Very few people are
buying legal DVD there...
Scientific research is a good example but I don't think it will still be for
too long. With their $700 billion foreign exchange savings plus hundreds of
billion of foreign investment poring into China, they can afford to hire top
brains to do whatever they are trying to achieve.

Super high tech can help to make top weapons to gain temporary advantages
but not necessary winning--Vietnam and Iraq are good examples.
At the end of day, American need to transform those heavy investment into
money making business to improve standard of living for general public.
What's good to American when you invented TV and cars and eventually let
Japanese and Chinese to make the money?

 

I am not surprised, but this would be for somewhat different reasons. Why I
find the lack of enthusiasm among German MB staff more interesting is that
they could consider themselves the 'senior partners' (or owners) of
Chrysler, and therefore perhaps take a benign view, but they don't,
considering it an unnecessary diversion.

On the reasons I subscribed to this NG was exactly because of this issue. I
wanted to follow a US car group and I selected Chrysler because of the added
interest caused by the Merc issue. I wanted to see how the core group of
customers/fans/enthusiasts take to this.

Plus I am a Merc fan and so the Chrysler 'situation' has an added interest
because of the effect (potential or real) it has on the MB business. As a
result I try to rent Chryslers when I am in the US or at least pay special
attention to them. The full product range is not yet available here in the
UK.

For example, not so long ago I had a Sebring convertible in LA.

DAS
--
For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[...]

[...]

 

That was rather a joke as since entertainment is non-necessary it could
easily be forgone in a war. And entertainment really is one of the
industries
that the US dominates. That is, if you care to consider it a legitimate
industry, I mostly don't.

Everyone says that but this ignores a fundamental and obvious thing, and
that
is the top brains, because they are top brains, make a lot of money and so
can choose where they want to live. And nobody chooses to live in a
totalitarian country. If China's political system changes into a democracy
then
we would have something to worry about along those lines.

And you also forget another thing - investors don't "give" money. If $700
billion
of foreign investment is pouring into China now, that means all those
investors
pouring it in are expecting to get several trillion back. That's money that
Chinese
companies are going to have to be repaying foreigners for a long, long time.
If China were home-growing all those businesses and refusing foreign
investment
then we would have a problem.

If TV were to drop off the face of the Earth tomorrow it would probably
increase
the net intelligence of the population of the US by at least a billion
points or so.
Don't forget that TV was created to allow large corporations and politicians
to program the US populace into believing what they wanted. Nowadays
that's starting to fall apart and the brainwashers, I mean advertisers, are
all
running scared about it.

And cars, well sure we all like to drive them - or so we say - but what
about
that daily commute you are stuck doing every day of your life. I certainly
wouldn't
miss it. And slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly, the infrastructure is
being built to allow companies to go 100% virtual, and some are doing it
already. It's not out of the realm of believability to think that someday,
our
need for cars will be much less than it is today.

The point I'm making here is that you shouldn't forget the point of the rat
race.
The entire point of more and more technology and more and more civilization
is
to make life more and more enjoyable for the majority of humanity walking
around. For millions of years, humans managed this quite nicely in the
hunter-gatherer societies. People got lots of exercise, population levels
were pretty constant, plenty of space was available to spread out. Then,
something happened in the last couple thousand years and today, much of
our technology we create is used merely to deal with side effects of the
wildly out of control population growth we have in the world. And as fast
as new technology enhances our standard of living, our standard of living
is torn down by side effects of that population growth.

So, these days China is jumping on the technology bandwagon as fast as
they can. Very impressive. They might even finally make it to the Moon and
Mars without our help. In the meanwhile their population lives in one of
the most crowded countries on Earth. They need that technology simply
to keep this population alive and still eating.

The US population went down that road, and it cumulated in the Fifties, and
early Sixties. Then in the Sixties millions of people in the US started
realizing
that while this technological advancement did some really great things, it
also in many ways harmed the standard of living.

What good is advancements in farming that increase the food supply when
all that does is make it easy to have more babies, and those babies grow up
and now we have a lot more population chewing up power, oil, space,
and everything else?

What good are advancements in understanding nutrition when they are
used to fortify sugared cereal so nowadays the kids don't get anemic from
eating junk food for berakfast, they just get to be fat as pigs?

What good are all these safety improvements in cars like a radar that
beeps if you cross the center line, when all they are used for is now the
dumb bitch can spend even more time and attention on her cell phone
call instead of driving?

What good are all these advances in medical technology that prolong
life when we prolong it to the point that a person can become a
mindless, living skeleton in an Alzheimers wing in a hospital that
is draining the life savings dry that they wanted to leave to their
children?

What good is it to have 1000 music songs on an ipod you can carry
around, if the reason your listening to that music all day long is
because the enjoyable sounds of nature, birds chirping, babbling
brooks, wind in the trees - are all drowned out by glass and steel
and concrete, and the roar of bad brakes on the buses?

We cut down the forest to feed the furnaces to make the power to
run the factories that produce the personal CD players that we use
to play CD's of the sound of the forest that we cut down. So,
where did you say this advancement in the standard of living is?

One of these days you will understand that the standard of living we have
today doesen't need to be increased anyore. It's arrived, it's there. What
do people value the most today? TIME. But do you see the workweek
dropping from 40 hours to something lower? I don't. Instead I just see
greater and greater production, which makes more and more consumer
goods, and the US population having those goods stuffed down their
throats until the only time anyone has left anymore after working, they
spend using their giant house full of stuff that all the other overworked
wage slaves have been going full blast to produce.

We are turning into an economy that survives by producing pointless
products that nobody really wants to buy and that are advertise-hyped
to the point that people buy them with the money that they made
at a job producing pointless products that nobody really wants to buy
and that are advertise-hyped to the point that people buy them with the
money that they made at a job producing pointless products that nobody
really wants to buy and that are advertise-hyped to the point that people
buy them with the money that they made at a job producing pointless
products that nobody really wants to buy and that are advertise-hyped
to the point that people buy them with..... well I think you get the idea.

Our standard of living today is so advanced that now people don't have
any more time left to enjoy the things in life that this so-called advanced
standard of living was supposed to bring to them.

I'm happy to let China go down that path. In a few more generations they
will be so busy with their own advanced standard of living that they won't
have time to bother anyone else, and their population will be so addicted to
all the crap that they are producing that their population will be doing
just
what the US population is doing, they will be sucking every available scrap
of money and resources out of their military and diverting it into ever
higher
consumer production.

I'll leave you with a final thought. Who today are the absolute best
warriors, who will fight to the death, and who are some of the most
efficient warriors on the planet, can survive on next to nothing for
years at a time, and for every dollar that they spend they can do
1000 dollars of damage against the enemy? I'll tell you, it's not the
Chinese. It's the guerrillas in the Mid East. And those people are
some of the poorest on the planet. When you have nothing, you
have nothing to lose and you can throw your all into war. China used
to be like that, and is running as fast as they can away from that.
So I don't think we will be worring much about their military in
another 30 years or so. And if you still don't think this is a deliberate
plan by the West, you are very, very, very naieve.

Ted

 

Nobody "lets" anybody do anything. It's called a free market.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling[/QUOTE]
[...]
What's good to American when you invented TV and cars and eventually let

 

I think we're slidinginto the realms of fantasy...

I had always thought TV was invented by someone who was interested in the
transmission of pictures...

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[...]

[...]

 

Depending on their ethics (or lack thereof) and the money offered them,
I suspect they can be persuaded to live pretty much anywhere - certainly
for a finite period of time (until the contract is completed). IOW,
what a totalitarian country is willing to pay such an individual to
bring the entire country forward a bit could be enough to keep an
individual very very very comfortable for a very very very long time
(i.e., the short-term discomforts and the risks of being imprisoned or
killed could be considered worth taking).

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

 

Dori A Schmetterling wrote:

By the David Sarnoff Research Institute (now know as RCA Labs).

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

 

I thought that TV was invented by a Scot, John Logie Baird. When did TV
broadcasts start in the USA? There was TV in UK before WWII (so they
tell me: I wasn't around to see it), but the broadcasts were suspended
and didn't recommence until 1948 or so -- one channel (BBC) only.

Perce