http://www.reuters.com/article/marke...0080602?rpc=44

 

Did you see that one of the buyers was the Aozora Bank of Japan! [:@]

All I can think of now are those horrible Misubishi Challengers of the late 70s!!

 

Hopefully these jokers will focus on the dark science of high finance and keep their hands out of the operations of running a car company.

They should just haul the proverbial trucks to the back door and have the cash loaded into them....provided they start making profits again. And I can only imagine that will happen as long as these brain scientists (sic) stay out of the ops.

Bad investment SNAFU.

 

the BEST thing that could happen to chrysler is to be purchased by a japanese company, who actually has some money to spend. look at the number of factories of "japanese cars" located in the US.

i should also point out something interesting...from the time when the muscle cars from chrysler were watered down (and discontinued) in/around 1973-1974...until the srt lineup was introduced...next to the viper, what were the fastest full production cars (stock) sold by dodge, chrysler, or plymouth? for dodge, it was the stealth RT/TT, and from plymouth it was the laser RS-T. what do these cars have in commoin? they were both built by mitsubishi...it seems to me like mitsubishi should be making MORE cars for dodge, not less...

 

The only trouble is, Mitsubishi has had big financial troubles of its own, starting with its program of a few years ago where they would basically give you a car for no money down and no payments for a year. A highly popular program -- for a time, all you saw on the streets were new Gallants. Needless to say, though, at the end of that year, they were swamped with used, unpaid-for cars. I don't think they've recovered from that fiasco yet.

 

i agree that mitsu is not headed in a great direction financially...

 

I believe the caliber is built on the previous mitsubishi lancer platform. I also think the deal they've got going with nissan to build a small car is a good one for them. Considering that's the direction the market is taking they have much more to gain than nissan does from them. What will they get, the hemi? Ford, Chevy, and Dodge are all struggling with pickup sales right now so what chance does nissan have? Dodge desperately needs a 40mpg small car. They also need to get somewhere with their hybrids. . . a hybrid durango that gets like 15mpg instead of 14 is not a start.

Unfortunately I don't see the caliber ever competing with the civic, corolla, mazda3 or focus and the avenger and sebring are miles behind the accord, camry, fusion etc. The outhorsepower the competition strategy won't work much longer. Especially when they barely outhorsepower them in the first place.

 

40 mpg, do they have a 35MPG vechicle? aside for the Avenger/sebring ( 21/30 hwy) they dont have any real fuel efficent vehicles.

 

Yeah...how could they have been so inept even before the gas crisis...not having an econobox makes sense how?

Ford used to lose money on Escorts..but they sold them to get first time buyers into a Ford, hoping they would buy up the next time around...