Professor Elam

Jason McClary made a post noting that Chrysler was an assembler and there was not a Chrysler product left worth buying, my comments below.

Actually it was American Motors that mixed the parts. Dad bought my sister a pretty nice AMC Concord. Nice car with a 4.2 L straight six, a Ford carburetor and ignition sytem and interestingly the best auto tranny ever built, the Chrysler Torqueflight. (Ok so I aged myself with that one). Chrysler was somehow capable of some great engineering in engines, (the Beach Boys song shut down mentions the wedge combustion chambered 413) the hemi dates to the 1950s and the original Chrysler 300 and the Torqueflight was the best auto transmission easily capable of handling the 425 bhp hemi engine. Viper is made in very small numbers and has that expensive Lambo 10 cyl engine so the price i s high. Chrysler never got the bodies on the older cars right, lots of rattles and squeaks and the other stuff like power windows were somewhat problematic. American Motors never had the money to make the switch to front wheel drive as the Americans did in the 80s and so Chrysler bought it to get Jeep and junked the rest. Fail to innovate and you die. My personal favorite all time American Motors was the 1968 AMX two seater that never sold in any volume, what a shame.

It would have been interesting if a real company like BMW had bought Chrysler, straightened out the electric and body problems and then really given chevy and ford a run for it in the truck business.

How is it that Mercedes paid $36 B and now it is worth $0-14 B, I would say the lack of a devil’s advocate during the bargaining process, everyone in the room was just there to validate the forgone conclusion. Think how often that is true of meetings you have been in, no one to object, everyone there becomes a bobble head doll for the foregone conclusion.