Oh my! You do invent your own reality, don’t your? I was there when Daimler and Chrysler “merged," working on the Chrysler ad biz, so I’ll educate you. Chrysler never owend" Daimler. Eaton and the rest of Chrysler mangement sold out to Daimler for a huge amount of cash. Daimller was calling all the shots. Hell, they sent Dieter Zetsche, who is now Daimler CEO, here to run the Chrylser group. (Zetsche was a nice guy. We had a good time at Daytona when Dodge premiered in NASCAR, but his loyalty was definitely to the motherland.) At the time, Mercedes was not doing well, but Chrysler had 9 billion dollars in the bank. Daimler emptied Chrysler’s piggy bank in a matter of years, then left town, leaving a broke and decimated Chrylser behind. Cerebus dragged the carcass around for a few years, then Marchione came to town and saved Chrysler. Unlike Daimler, Marchione really means it. He wants Chrylser to succeed. And they are.
I worked on the Mercede-Benz ad biz as well at McCaffrey & McCall in the 1980s. (My commercial, “Interview” iis still considered the best Mercedes spot of all time and it won the Gold Clio for best automotive spot of 1990.) Mercedes was on a roll when I wrote that commercial, but withing months Lexus and Infiniti came on the scene, and Daimler panicked. They told me they could no longer be “Emgineered Like No Other Car In the World.” It was too arrogant. And they took a lot of content out of the cars so they could match the prices of the Japanese cars. I bailed and went to Detroit, and Mercedes quality declined. But the Germans are smart and they have a huge pool of engineering talent to draw on. Mercedes has made gains in recent years, but they never quite recovred. In many ways, they still trail BMW and Audi. And of course it’s heresy in the PC world, but Cadillac is producing better products than Mercedes for some segments — the ATS vs. the C-Class and the CTS vs. the E-class. Mercedes has a future, but they’re not the world leader they were in the 1980s. Here’s “Interview,” if you’d like to see it: http://stenquist.org/Paul/MercedesEngineer.htm On Apr 27, 2014, at 4:13 PM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <godfreydigio...@me.com> wrote: > Plenty of them around here. But their quality did suffer a bit through the > years of Chrysler ownership. They were sensible to get rid of Chrysler, even > at a loss. > > G > > > On Apr 26, 2014, at 2:42 PM, Paul Stenquist <pnstenqu...@comcast.net> wrote: > >> Not many ten year old Mercs though. Intimately familiar with that company. >> Unfortunately. > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
