AUBURN HILLS, MI- The Chrysler headquarters building is in Auburn Hills, Michigan. (Photo by Bill … [+]
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Marriage can be an iffy thing. Especially if you’re an auto company that can’t seem to exist without being coupled, sometimes with a parasite. That’s what the entity commonly just called Chrysler seems to be.
Full disclosure—I worked at the company for 11 years through three of its marriages. One ended in divorce, another as a result of bankruptcy and a third where Chrysler just became the second of its combined name.
I retired in 2016, five years before the company was sucked into another relationship and lost its identity altogether, as part of a blob of corporate Play-doh called Stellantis.
Keep in mind the last three letters in Stellantis are also the final three letters in the suffix “it is” which is a medical term for some sort of inflammation. Appropriate, since the CEO just flamed out and flew the coop with a nice multi-million dollar nest egg.
So this seems like a good time to examine Chrysler’s marriages from both my inside perspective and a more macro view to better understand how this corporate Sadie Hawkins should go about chasing its next partner—or should it?
Merger of Un-equals to Daimler
In 1998 the all-American Chrysler Corp. was joined in a shotgun marriage to the German automaker Daimler AG. It was billed as a “merger of equals.” There should have been a pre-nup. There was nothing equal about the marriage. The Germans were clearly in charge.
I joined the DaimlerChrysler in 2005 as a contractor—hired to ghost write and manage the company’s first corporate communications blog. A year later, having been a broadcast and print journalist since 1973 and covering autos since 1989, a new digital communications team was created around me. I was hired on staff to run it.
