balthazar

I guess ride, braking, acceleration, handling, room, etc are merely secondary now. Either that, or future advancement is basically done.

Amazing that this is what passes for a critical buying criteria now.

Promaster/Transit Connect are emotionless / utilitarian purchases, a consumer scenario not applicable to private pass vehicle purchases.

Look at the sales numbers I posted above- there’s your answer.

Dodge especially is seeped in being American. Theres no fans waving Buick flags, but there are legions of Dodge fans. You swap in some nose-jobbed alfa and that all goes down the toilet.

Why anyone would think Dodge is a potential victim makes no sense. These are numbers people; the numbers point to the FCA Euro brands, not to Dodge. Chrysler is a bit more murky, but they have to be doing better than either fiat or alfa are. Doing Euro rebadges of C/D will be a huge waste of capital as those brands would quickly sink below the waves. Rebadged euro cars don’t work in the USDM.

fiat is dead; a vegetable. Sold 900 vehicles in Dec '18 (U.S.). Alfa sold 1900 the same month. Chrysler sold 12,425 and Dodge sold 32,xxx. Bury the dying and invest in the living.

This is STILL a great-looking car [I just can't get past the 80s interior].

^ I figured that badge was 'something special'. - - - - - Working a theme : Wonder what's behind Door #1 & #2?? I vote for a '69 Mk III and a '57 Premier coupe.

See that caption; stock-bodied '57 Plymouth, with a little help from it's big brother the 300, hit 183 MPH at Bonnevillle.

peugeot & citroen have as much of a chance in the US market as fiat has had.

SO does the EPA.

CX-5 ; be prepared to be sporadically annoyed.

300 wheelbase : 120", overall length : 199" CT6 wheelbase : 122", overall length : 205" Certainly close enough to appeal to the same shoppers. I don't remotely care what the Environmental Protection Agency arbitrarily classifies their respective interior cubic space as.

Its not like platforms are weak, or lacking crash performance design, or ride poorly (platform is a strictly minor factor in that), or are still using decades-old suspension, or ANYTHING like that. And the other issue is that the SOP here is a ‘clean sheet’ redesign. All that says is the previous one they advertised & sold for years is garbage. We’re way past the need for completely new platforms for the same brand/ model.

The idea that a platform is too old after 5 or 7 or even 10 years, just because of that, seems ridiculous to me.

^ Correct on all points above. Biscayne was bottom rung, top Impala got triple tails.

Very clean 2nd gen Aurora :

Don't forget lancia- the brand sold 300K units in 1990, it's down to 48K in 2018, 80% of those sales in just Italy. FCA has allowed it to die on the vine. Kill Lancia; the money is better utilized at Chrysler.

Of course not. But how much did it actually cost? Recall the Benghazi committee hearings, how they cost $8 million or whatever the number was? Know how that number was computed? They took the time each rep spend on the committee, then extrapolated their salary to that time, times the number of reps. When you look up the actual accounting of that committee, it was like $1500 for copying & mailing documents. Senators/congresspersons do not get paid anything extra to sit on committees. It's an extrapolation, not a dollar amount. I suspect a lot of the same here. Vehicle production rates are not static; future production can and will be increased to bring supply back up. 4th quarter results are more 'up in the air' due to the strike than any others. End of fiscal period will tell the bottom line. You cannot lose money you never made. Only the potential to make that money.

You mention this frequently. I disagree that it's that automatic. Lots of brands sell far fewer vehicles here and seldom / never get talked about with the sentiment 'hanging on by a thread' [which is frequently how these comments red to me]. Buick does not have to stand on it's own.

Sales are abysmal.

They’re cool looking, but it took ‘industrial appropriation’ to pull it off. It would be simple to make a tight seal twixt tractor & trailer; make the gap concentric with the pivot point... but then it’d always have to be hyundai tractor AND trailer together.

I question how these estimates are computed.