Can this brand be saved?
Joe Sherlock (November 2) notes:
Fiat-Chrysler intends to make Dodge Ram trucks a separate brand: Ram.
Anybody else besides me ancient enough to remember when Packard decided to spin off Clipper as a separate brand? Look how that worked out.
A Fail just short of Epic, as I recall. Packard had made its name and its fortune as a vendor of the highest high-end cars; in the 1930s they were forced to move downmarket to survive, but in the sellers’ market of the 1940s they kept shipping out the medium-price models. In 1952, James J. Nance took over as CEO, surveyed the scene, and decided that the take would be better with three brands: Packard at the top, Clipper below, and Studebaker, which Packard acquired in 1954. At the time, Nance had yet to find out just how bad off Studebaker really was.
So the Clippers were given new trim and a new badge for the 1956 model year, and they were offered to both Packard and Studebaker dealers. There were few takers. The year was so bad, in fact, that Studebaker-Packard actually turned its management over to Curtiss-Wright, run by Roy Hurley, whose response to crisis mode was to shut down Packard’s Detroit plant and to use Studebaker’s woeful excess capacity to produce Packard-branded cars on Studebaker’s existing platforms. There was no room for the Clipper in this scheme, and the marque died after a single model year. Packard itself would be euthanized in 1958; Studebaker stumbled on for a few more years, then beat a hasty retreat to Canada before its own extinction in 1966.
The Dodge/Ram dichotomy is not strictly comparable, but the level of distress is probably about the same, and Fiat has apparently decided that Ram toughness is a tough sell in an actual car. To me, it would have made more sense to kill the Dodge cars, leaving the truck line intact, and rebranding the remaining non-Jeep Mopars as Chryslers, but Fiat also seems to have notions of pushing that brand somewhere north of Lincoln. Good luck with that.
localmalcontent »
13 November 2009 · 7:35 pm
Meep!
with a Hemi
CGHill »
13 November 2009 · 8:01 pm
Nicely wrangled. :)
McGehee »
13 November 2009 · 9:10 pm
The Jeep Meep could probably be the next Mini Cooper.
CGHill »
13 November 2009 · 9:13 pm
You have to admire their forbearance in not having named anything the Jeep Thrill.