There are reports that FCA turned down a bid for the company recently. The bidder was not disclosed. Apparently Great Wall made a trip to Auburn Hills recently, and that makes them a strong possibility. Guangzhou is also a likely suitor since they already do business together. The Cherokee and Renegade are built in two different facilities by Guangzhou in China. The offer was turned down because it wasn’t enough, but FCA is for sale.
Yeah, Marchionne couldn’t convince GM to partner so one of the Chinese auotmakers may be the only possible suitors. Geely’s done Volvo no apparent harm. That marriage seems to have helped both companies. So much so that Geely is reportedly buying Lotus Cars. Volvo got needed R&D cash and Geely gets western automaker know-how in car building seeing as how they struggle to meet EU crash standards.
More power to them. But I think this marriage is doomed from the start much as the pairing of the US’s lowest quality carmaker with the EU’s lowest quality carmaker.
Hmmm, just when I was getting used to Jungle Green. I don’t know why they want to spend their money since they just copy all the cars anyway free of charge. They’ve pretty much bought out Hollywood though so maybe they just need a place to put their money.
Maybe those Chinese auto companies want a dealer network so that they can sell their cars here. You might say no one will buy a Chinese car, but enough people bought Hyundai and Kia to make them a stable market presence. Go back far enough, and you can add those rust bucket Toyota and Honda cars to the list of cars no one would buy. But someone did.
And besides, they are using the money we paid them as interest on all those US Treasury bonds they bought. They are spending our money in the USA! How good is that?
What @jtsanders said - they’d be buying instant dealer networks and access, and (some) respect, something it would take a looooooong time for Geely to do on their own, for example.
This time, Great Wall is rumored to be interested in buying Jeep, and Guangzhou Automobile Group was quoted as wanting to deepen ties to FCA in the near future, supposedly in advance of moving into the US market. A dealer/service network can be expensive and having one in place already can command a lot of money.
You can criticize and poke fun at Chinese manufacturing all you want, but they are the first country to really challenge American economic domination of world markets, and they are doing a remarkably strong job at it so far. The quality of their products was very uneven, but as the years go by the quality control has improved dramatically. We are all buying Chinese car parts now, and a tour of your neighborhood Wal-Mart is a real eye opener. Many, many of the items for sale are made in China. It’s no surprise that a Chinese company might want to take over an Italian-American auto company that took over a German-American auto company that took over an American auto company that has failed several times and still seems tone-deaf to what the American market is buying.
If Great Wall buys all or part of “Italian Mopar” I won’t be holding my breath
Plenty of companies have bought Mopar, and with few exceptions have built very non-competitive vehicles, no matter who the owner was at the time.
If I were to buy a domestic brand vehicle, I would stick to Ford or GM. Perhaps a Ford Fusion (that is if I could find one with comfortable seats) or a Chevy Malibu.
I would personally prefer to buy a vehicle made in USA, but that’s emotional, not rational
I’m not criticizing Chinese manufacturing at all. In fact, I am well aware that they’re capable of building first-rate products, and are doing so, in many cases.
Is that a generic “you” or were you directing the comment to me? If me, I did not make any value judgements about Chinese goods, and I agree with much of what you wrote. They have so much free cash sitting around from trade surpluses and US Treasure note interest, they can afford to develop a lot of products, some very sophisticated.
Generic “you”. I try not to get in the pattern of getting personal on forum postings. It’s just rude and unnecessary. Sorry if I accidentally poked you in the eye.
This whole thing kind of makes me sad. I owned a 1998 Dodge Ram for years that my dad bought new. They were Daimler Chrysler then, and if they had to be owned or co-owned by another entity, I somehow felt better about them being affiliated with MB. Fiat owning Ram sort of turned me off of them as a purchase option. Nothing against the Italian company personally, but Fiat didn’t scream reliability in my mind. I don’t think I’d want to contribute further to the Chinese economy than I already would be buying another brand that at least isn’t owned by the Chinese. Nothing against the Chinese people, but the government makes me uneasy. Hell, our government makes me uneasy.
Fuller heavy duty transmissions have been sourcing parts from China for 40 years now but no one is the wiser. The Chinese have a government that Wall St envies. Wealthy capitalists at the top and poor communists at the bottom. Maybe the US and China are headed for the same objective but from opposite directions. Similar to this political observation from long ago
A lot of heavy duty truck parts are also made in India and Brazil, and those parts are in use here, in the USA
I wouldn’t necessarily say “no one is the wiser” . . . the parts I’m thinking of prominently state the country of origin on the part. Anybody crawling underneath the truck would know. That includes a lot of drivers and mechanics
It’s likely they are in a continuous process of becoming Chinese one component at a time as are most automobiles and trucks. I’ve been looking at Google Earth searching for a new opening in the Great Wall with an expressway to Europe. That old Silk Road was OK for camels but not truck loads of bearings and door hinges.
Two years ago I drove I-90 west to Seattle and I-10 east from San Diego and the vast majority of trucks and trains seen were hauling containers. The mountain passes in western Montana were choked with semis pulling HAPAG containers in tandem struggling to climb the steep inclines and I wondered if they were loaded or returning to the coast empty. Across Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas the highway ran parallel to a major rail line which was busy east and west bound hauling the containers in mile long pulls.
Gee and just when I was starting to think about an Italian made Jeep. That was hard enough to swallow. Guess I’ll just keep what I have for a while. Not to lecture on the same subject again from a few years ago, but you’ll notice the ownership is a holding company. So its buy and sell by holding companies for short term profits. Has nothing to do with building cars. Somehow folks, we need to get back to people owning companies and building them up to produce wanted products, not to improve their options for a sale to a bank or holding company.
I forget the numbers but saw a chart not too long ago showing that 80-90% of the products we buy are produced by about 11 conglomerates. Like Yum brands that own BK, KFC, etc. We have all these brands but they’re all owned by the same conglomerate. So why would BK compete with KFC against itself to provide a better product?? Then you look at the media and 90% is owned by six conglomerates. Dangerous and counter-productive in my view. So I say we start to do what we did to Bell and begin to break them up somehow. You should not be able to own KFC and BK at the same time, or newspapers across the country and radio and tv stations across the country. This is the canary in the coal mine but it’ll take some years to do anything about it.
No wonder you don’t run a business, @bing. Proctor and Gamble showed a long time ago that having multiple, competing products makes money, and lots of it. If you have one product, you appeal to one group of people. If you have 4 products in the same market, you appeal to 4 groups of people, and maybe enough to control the market. It’s so well accepted, that almost any business that can afford to does it.
