Chrysler needs product (and a product guy)

Dan Carney • E-mail

The New Chrysler.

Remember when Lee Iacocca christened the company by that name following the car maker’s near-death experience in the early 1980s? The old Chrysler boss wonders in his new book, “Where Have all the Leaders Gone?” Well, where have they all gone?

In the case of Home Depot, the company’s former leader Bob Nardelli has gone on to run the new Cerberus-owned Chrysler. Nardelli — named the CEO on Aug. 6 — may prove to be just the guy for the job. But he faces an uphill battle because Chrysler’s current problem lies in the area of Nardelli’s weakness: automotive product.

General Motors’ Rick Wagoner faced a similar situation and recruited former Chrysler vice president Bob Lutz to oversee that company’s product development. Lutz was tasked with undoing the damage wrought by previous executives whose background lay in consumer goods like toothpaste. Nardelli’s lumberyard history is worrisomely similar to that of those failed GM execs.

Obviously, Nardelli didn’t get Chrysler into it current fallow product cycle, but he may be ill-prepared to undo the damage wrought by the Teutonic green eyeshades who wrung all of the quality and desirability out of Chrysler’s new models while they were extracting cost.

The problem is that when then-Daimler-Benz took over Chrysler in 1998, it thought the company was a cash cow. But in the cyclical automotive market, the company’s profit abruptly swung to loss and in reaction the German overseers installed to manage the U.S. subsidiary. They slashed the cost out of all of Chrysler’s new product development programs.

The result has been a generation of new vehicles that are either warmed-over versions of their predecessors or noticeably inferior replacements that are designed to be cheap to manufacture. It’s hard to conceive it, but one of those German overseers looked inside the cabin of the Dodge Neon and said, “Nein, this is too lavishly expensive.”

The “new” Jeep Liberty and the Dodge Nitro compact SUVs are just stretched and pulled versions of the old Liberty, a vehicle that was last-in-class in most on-road characteristics when it was new. It has fallen further behind since then.

The PT Cruiser, introduced in 2000 as a 2001 model and derived from the still-older Neon, is the company’s most desirable small-or medium-sized car. Shoot, it is the company’s only desirable small- or medium-sized car.

The wagon/hatchback Caliber could have been a contemporary replacement for the PT Cruiser, but the newer car fails in the execution. Its cabin is relentlessly, inescapably, inexcusably cheap. The exterior design which worked well on the concept version ended up ill-proportioned and hunchbacked in production, perhaps recalling the detested Pontiac Aztek. On the road the Caliber is a disappointment, with undistinguished ride and handling that seem to have enjoyed little development time.

The same is true for all of Chrysler’s other recently introduced cars. The Jeep Compass and Patriot are based on the Caliber and suffer the same issues. The Compass, especially in the green hue favored by its product planners, resembles nothing so much as a road-going toad. The plan had been for the Compass to carry Jeep into Subaru territory, but Chrysler seems to have overlooked the fact that Subaru abandoned the “so ugly its cute” school of design a couple decades ago.

The Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Avenger are similarly flawed. The ungainly exteriors are likely to ward off most prospective customers, and any that penetrate that first line of defense will be repelled by the hard, shiny cockpit materials. The inside of these cars appears to be constructed primarily of plastic rejected as too cheap for the batch of recently recalled Chinese toys. A rear molding around the folded roof of a recently tested Chrysler Sebring convertible had such a sharp edge on it that it was a hazard.

“Those cars are about $400 in interior cost from being competitive instead of worst-in-class,” observed a product planner at another company, who requested anonymity. Most companies would view that as a good use of the money, he added.

“Their interiors were ‘dumbed-down’ in the Sebring-Caliber go-around, almost as if they were blissfully unaware that even affordable cars have smart, high-quality interiors these days,” charged industry observer and gadfly Peter DeLorenzo, who blogs at Autoextremist.com. “It wasn’t just the cheap materials in the Sebring interior, or the poor vehicle dynamics, but the fact that Chrysler took several steps back with the car from where they were.”

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