Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Group Are Merging To Become World's Fourth-Largest Automaker (arstechnica.com) 87
williamyf writes: This puts Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Chrysler, Dodge, DS, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, and Vauxhall under a single corporate parent and merges operations. PSA Group boss Carlos Tavares will be CEO of the 11-person board, with FCA's John Elkann as chair. Fiat Chrysler and PSA said that the 50:50 merger should save more than $4 billion a year from "run-rate synergies without any plant closures." Why is this news for nerds and stuff that matters? Because there are car nerds too, and cars use a lot of software nowadays.
Set Jeep free (Score:3)
I wish they would spin out the Jeep brand as an independent company, not merged with any other automaker - free to manage its own destiny without any interference.
Re:Set Jeep free (Score:5, Insightful)
The destiny of a standalone retro SUV-only automaker would be to go bankrupt and get sold off to some Chinese or Indian conglomerate the next time oil prices spike.
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Not India, as Mahindra already builds and sells a Jeep-like vehicle called the Roxor, which is descended from Willys Overland's military vehicle so can be said to share some of today's FCA Jeep's DNA: https://www.roxoroffroad.com/r... [roxoroffroad.com]
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I only wish they could sell a street-legal version of that here in the USA. It's exactly what I'd like to use as a towed vehicle for RVing, it's literally perfect. Light, fuel sipping, 4WD. I don't give one shit about crash standards. I do wonder if there's any way to make it street-legal... like, how much of it do I have to change before I can claim it's a custom vehicle, and register it on that basis? Obviously it needs signals and such, but that's trivial.
I suppose I should just get a frame and build my
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Who cares? The bus has a Cummins ISC 250 and Allison B300R to do the highway part.
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I only wish they could sell a street-legal version of that here in the USA.
I wish that too. The Roxor is a lot like the old CJ7 but without the bigger gasoline engines. Nowadays, FCA's traditional Jeep (a.k.a. Wrangler) has just gotten bigger, thirstier, and daintier with every new version since the YJ. FCA keeps nuiscance-sueing (and losing) to Mahindra over the look of the Roxor's grille, so I don't imagine FCA would go easy on Mahindra entering a street legal version to western economies out of terror of lost market share.
Anyways, FCA & Peugeot PSA would never offload the J
Re: Set Jeep free (Score:3)
"Not India, as Mahindra already builds and sells a Jeep-like vehicle called the Roxor, "
I might rather have said "because Tata already bought Jaguar Land Rover 11 years ago".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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Indeed, and China also has a few 4x4 utility vehicles already on their domestic market, but I was comparing one flavour of authentic FCA Jeep with another flavour of authentic Jeep-descendant from Mahindra.
Re: Set Jeep free (Score:2)
Yeah. Because Jeep is a toilet brand with no brand loyalty, horrible resale, and has no place in the modern car market. Sure thing.
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It sure would be if gas were ever to hit, say, $7/gal.
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It sure would be if gas were ever to hit, say, $7/gal.
If fuel became that expensive then the comparative economics on EVs would result in everyone demanding them, and you'd get electric Jeeps. And, presumably, trailers that unfold into a crapload of solar panels so that you could charge your off-road vehicles when you're out in the sticks. That sort of thing is possible now but the current economics of liquid fuel in the USA make them unappealing. You'd see massive investment in battery factories happen overnight. Automakers are just trying to push that date b
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Yeah, but automakers have demonstrated time and again that it takes years to crank up production on new technologies, whereas it only takes a couple of quarters to go bankrupt because their current production mix doesn't match a change in market conditions.
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It sure would be if gas were ever to hit, say, $7/gal.
If fuel became that expensive then the comparative economics on EVs would result in everyone demanding them, and you'd get electric Jeeps.....
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] $1.85 per litre ($7.0/US gal) is not uncommon in Europe, and current Canadian prices are not much less than $1.40 CAD/litre which is around $6.90 USD/gallon.
Perhaps the EV demand in these high-gas-price regions is greater than in the USA, but not dramatically so. My guess is that if the rise in gas prices happened over a few years rather than suddenly, people's behaviour would not change a whole bunch.
Re: Set Jeep free (Score:2)
Or if the Earth exploded.
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Were you born after 2010 or something?
Look, this company has already gone bankrupt and been sold to a crappy foreign conglomerate, and that's with a run-of-the-mill economic crisis.
No matter how many SUVs this division sells now, when the shit hits the fan, they'll be sitting on massive amounts of unusable production capacity. That's because people won't have the luxury of buying highly marked up, inefficient, unreliable vehicles that are overdesigned for just one particular lifestyle activity that few peop
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They need to do an EV. The technology is perfect for off-road vehicles.
Masses of torque, precisely controlled. No need for air intakes for the engine or cooling, no need for an exhaust, so wading is no problem. Extremely reliable and simple drivetrain, easy to do maintenance on. Position the battery to move the centre of gravity to the best spot for off-road stability.
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They need to do an EV. The technology is perfect for off-road vehicles.
How many charging stations are there off-road?
Off-road vehicles will literally be the last to be fully replaced by electric. There are already electric OHVs, and they work fine in certain contexts, but not out in the boonies. It's hard to get enough solar to charge them with any vehicle that can get there, and it's not efficient to do it by generator.
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How often do you do more than 300 miles off-road in a single session?
Actually Jeep have apparently announced a fully electric model for next year. There is also the Bollinger B1: https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-... [autocar.co.uk]
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If you include the drive there and back, pretty much every time even just for camping out by the lake. There's a reason that you often see jerry cans mounted on Jeeps and it's not just for style.
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Assuming you have no other source of electricity you can still bring the jerry cans. Just fill up your generator.
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If I'm going to have to bring a generator and fuel on most trips, why don't they just build a generator and fuel cans right into the vehicle?
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It even better at the place you are going to, then you can have electricity there too.
Out of interest, how many people buying Jeeps have somewhere they want to go that is >150 miles from the nearest power socket? And how long does it take to do 150 miles on that kind of terrain?
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A major point of going off-road is to get as far away as possible from places that are wired for electricity, so ... quite a few, at least.
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Okay but can you name one?
In my experience many people vastly over-estimate distances. I first noticed it years ago when I had an original Leaf, typical range around 80 miles. People would question my sanity for driving to a town 20 miles away in it. They seemed to think that it was much further away than it really was and were surprised when I showed them on a map that it wasn't.
They also seemed to think it was some kind of pre-industrial settlement that hadn't got electricity yet. Really bizarre.
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How often do you do more than 300 miles off-road in a single session?
Off-road mileage bears little resemblance to on-road mileage.
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True, you will vastly exceed the EPA range rating off-road.
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lol no. Just driving over bumpy dirt roads can consume 40% of your energy expenditure going down the road. That's why someone experiments with active hydraulic suspension every so often, but unfortunately it never actually becomes practical. One also typically airs down, which costs further range.
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No need for air intakes for the engine or cooling, no need for an exhaust, so wading is no problem.
It remains to be seen whether electric vehicles will be happier in deep water. I can still see potential issues.
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It remains to be seen whether electric vehicles will be happier in deep water.
Especially salt water.
It could be done - careful sealing everywhere - but that would boost the price sky-high.
I think we will see an electric RangeRover before we see an electric Jeep.
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Jeep's only retro vehicle is Wrangler. Wrangler is also probably one of the best sold Jeeps. Step into a small town, some place in Texas or Colorado, and it seems like there is a Wrangler parked around every corner.
And if you haven't been following, retro-ish off-road vehicles have a huge fan following across the world. The Land Rover Defender traced its roots to post-WWII jeeps and its production was just discontinued because such an old design had trouble meeting safety and other standards. Toyota's Land
Re:Set Jeep free (Score:4, Insightful)
I wish they would spin out the Jeep brand as an independent company, not merged with any other automaker - free to manage its own destiny without any interference.
FCA would have gone in the toilet without Jeep, so that will never ever happen. They're literally more likely to sell off or spin off any other brand. Jeep prints money.
Re: Set Jeep free (Score:3)
Yeah, I know.
Fiat bought Jeep and got the rest of Chrysler for free.
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After Daimler emptied all the cash out of Chrysler into their own pockets and dumped the corpse.
Re: Set Jeep free (Score:2)
Do not be jealous.
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Chrysler was on the cusp of no longer existing when Daimler bought into them and the primary fallout of the merger was Mercedes-Benz vehicles becoming highly unreliable and rust-prone.
The Germans discovered that you can't reanimate an American Zombie.
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Only independent car makers that make any amount of sense are small boutique l
Re: The late 1990s seems like a utopia compared to (Score:1)
Moron.
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What do you get when you combine losers ? (Score:4, Insightful)
A really damn big loser. Might as well say goodbye to these brands now.
Re:What do you get when you combine losers ? (Score:4, Informative)
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There is still a lot of brand loyalty, and even loyalty to cars built in each country in Europe.
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Heck even Fiat has the 500, which is the best selling City car in Europe. They practically own that class.
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because they are cheap options, not because they are great cars.
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because they are cheap options, not because they are great cars.
A distinction that is completely irrelevant when determining market winners and losers. Build a great car, if no one buys it, you're a loser. In the meant time both groups which just merged are hugely successful and the OP is just a jealous dick.
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Saab had a huge brand loyalty.
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Funny thing. FCA cars are terrible in North America. Fiat 500? Forget it, it's a money sinkhole. And forget anything Chrysler, they're just vehicles begging to fall apart.
Maybe they're better made in Europe - that's always something that could be different since they're crap brands over in North America.
Of course, the fact that Fiats and such are imports and cost a crap ton of money to fix also has an impact - I suppose if they break in Europe, they're cheap to repair, whereas here the parts just cost a ton
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"Maybe they're better made in Europe - that's always something that could be different since they're crap brands over in North America."
Nope. It has a LOT to do with the standards of vehicle maintenance and the demands of the customers ("Do it as cheaply as possible") - bodge jobs are everywhere.
in particular in the USA, dealership workshop workmanship standards are appallingly poor and such dealers would be stripped of their accreditation pretty quickly in Europe. One of the laws which keeps dealers honest
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A really damn big loser. Might as well say goodbye to these brands now.
Yeah, a list of all the most unreliable European brands mixed with a list of all the most unreliable American brands. The new Fiat group is a verifiable whos who of all the world's worst brands.
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PSA is doing OK in China with their DS marque at the moment. CitroÃn, Peugeot and Alfa Romeo have a decent presence in Australia, far more than you used to see of them in the '80s and '90s. Fiat commercial vans are reasonably popular, and you see a fair number of Fiat 500s and Maseratis.
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I wish I was a big enough loser to sell close to 5 million cars while having a completely dominant market share in several of the wealthiest nations in the world.
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These brands and makers have survived the Japanese onslaught in far better shape than US marques did. They learned and adapted early - US makers didn't.
These days the Europeans are out-japanesing the Japanese whilst US domestic makers are almost as bad as ever - in case noone's noticed, Honda's shrinking, Nissan went bankrupt and merged with Renault, Mazda is struggling, Mitsubishi exists in name only and Toyota is stagnating.
At the same time, vehicles are lasting longer, on longer service intervals with ma
I keep hearing about RAM trucks (Score:4, Funny)
But nobody ever specifies if they're based on SRAM, DDR3, GDDR5, etc.
Re: I keep hearing about RAM trucks (Score:5, Funny)
That's because they always Dodge the question.
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Yeah the Hemi marketing have been quite effective, just like that of Cummins. Ofcourse both brands of engines have had good and bad model years but they sit well somewhere in peoples consciousness.
Unintended consequences (Score:2)
This has the odd side effect of Chrysler now being in the business of selling Chevrolets.
Another reason it's news for nerds (Score:4, Informative)
PSA group has a service called Free2Move [groupe-psa.com] that tries to offer end-to-end trip booking. In theory you can use one site to book every stage of a journey that puts you in a rental car, on a train, on a bus, and finally on an electric scooter. And they're sufficiently agnostic that they don't care whether they own the services or not, although obviously they want to do that, too. But they get a piece of the trip either way.
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Wow, slashdotted by a link in a comment. That is impressive.
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It's almost like the old days.
What abouy Mitsubishi (Score:2)
Back in the day, Mitsubishi used to be involved with Chrysler, at least in the Southern Hemisphere...
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I think Chrysler's share of Mitsubishi was spun off a long time ago. Speaking of which, Mitsubishi was a half-dead money losing brand just like Chrysler during all of this century. They have now formed some kind of an alliance with Renault and Nissan, and they plant to make only trucks and SUVs in future.
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What does software have to do with anything? Nerds like things like homemade scanning electron microscopes, oscilloscopes, radio transmitters and robotics.
These days all of those things are typically implemented with a lot of software involved.
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And very little of it written by 'IT Professionals.'
'IT Professionals' are the people who are banned from touching any of the machines in the firmware lab. They'll screw up the emulator that is very fussy and needs to run on Windows 2000.
That's a big mess of mediocre (Score:2)
Great...they can all die a prolonged death, dragging several brands into the toilet, and with them the suckers that were their customers.
Bugger me (Score:2)
How are Jeep going to keep that bunch of clunkers afloat?
From the FCA board minutes
"Look, we've got one good brand and a bunch of crap ones. Let's buy some more crap."
Dead company walking (Score:2)
Not that there weren't any efforts by the con
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If you look at all the constituent companies/brands involved you quickly start to see a pattern. They're all companies who were either hesitant or flat out refused to invest in hybrid and electric vehicles even after it became obvious that it was necessary for long term survival.
FCA is selling mild hybrid RAMs now, and is working to bring out more mild hybrids across their lines.
Unfortunately however the "green" technology they invested very heavily into was "green diesel", which has now been found to be a complete dead end after it came to light that the technology had hit a dead end and the last decade of advancements were just cheating.
Green diesel is diesel fuel made from lipids by hydrocracking instead of esterification. Did Chrysler or FCA make substantial investments into that? FCA is also the only company selling a half-ton diesel in the US, though it is not without its flaws [caranddriver.com]. (Why does almost everyone screw up cooled EGR? Cooled turbos tend to last just fine, and they get just as hot.) People want to buy it, and the emissions laws f
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FCA is also the only company selling a half-ton diesel in the US, though it is not without its flaws [caranddriver.com].
Chevrolet has the option for a diesel engine in the Colorado and Silverado. The Colorado has a 2.8L I4 diesel, the Silverado 1500 has a 3.0L I6 diesel option. If you prefer Ford, The F150 has a 3.0L V6 diesel.
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Yeah, you're right. I should have said they had the only one until recently.
P.S. I don't prefer Ford :) Although I hear their 6.7 is pretty good... but I'd far rather have the ISB 6.7.
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FCA is selling mild hybrid RAMs now, and is working to bring out more mild hybrids across their lines.
Sure, they're selling hybrids now alright, but those should have started coming out years and years ago. Now it's just too late, particularly when they're completely reliant on suppliers like Bosh rather than having technology they could develop further to catch up with the competition.
Green diesel is diesel fuel made from lipids by hydrocracking instead of esterification.
If you read what I actually wrote you should have realized that I was talking about diesel cars being environmentally friendly low emissions and fuel consumption, not the particular fuel production method. The French car comp
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i believe they are going to use the VAG MEB platform for their EV's.
it's not mentioned on the wikipedia page, but i do remember reading about it somewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Just the beginning. (Score:2)
They need to shed all assets associated with design, testing and manufacturing of internal combustion engine.
The Most Unreliable Cars! (Score:1)
"Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Chrysler, Dodge, DS, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, Opel, Peugeot, Ram, and Vauxhall"
New company name? (Score:1)
Fiat, Chrysler, Renault, Alfa, Peugeot = FCRAP