Throatwarbler posted:

- Camaro ZL1, with the LSA engine and magnetic dampers.

Throatwarbler posted:

- Charger SRT8, with the 6.4l Hemi. This one looks really good.

Q_res posted:

Those are pictures of the 8C, they're only speculating that the 4C will look like it.

Cream_Filling posted:

Also, no love for the Veloster Rally Car? I think that debuted at Chicago, right? Or are we only discussing production cars?

Throatwarbler posted:

A whole bunch of poo poo just came out at the Chicago Auto show.

- Camaro ZL1, with the LSA engine and magnetic dampers.

Throatwarbler posted:

Throatwarbler posted:

The angle and the lighting on the photo sort of emphasize the grill a bit too much, and the new swoopier styling makes the rest of the car look small by comparison. It's not as bad here.



I'm not married to the styling, it serves its purpose.

quote:

Over the past decade, rap legend Eminem has been approached over 100 times to license his classic "Lose Yourself." Up until now, he has refused all bidders, turning down millions of dollars along the way, according to Joel Martin, who controls the Eminem music catalog and has one-third of the writing credit on the song.

But that was until Chrysler chief marketing officer Olivier Francois started selling Martin on how much he wanted the music, and how he had an idea to show off Detroit to the Super Bowl audience, the largest TV audience of the year. To seal the deal, Francois drove a new Chrysler 200 to Martin's office in the Detroit suburb of Ferndale a few days into the New Year. The car was fresh off of the assembly line in neaby Sterling Heights, and hadn't even gone on sale. Francois had Martin and Eminem (whose real name is Marshall Bruce Mathers III) drive the car, as well as a new Chrysler 300, to try and get the music legend to play ball.

"The 200 was like $18,000 and felt like a BMW... We were really impressed," says Martin, who told AOL Autos they agreed to take millions of dollars less than what they had been previously offered in order to be part of the Chrysler ad. "[It was] about 20 percent of what we could have gotten from someone else," he said.

Martin said the idea for the ad that would show Detroit for what it really is, from hard working people to the abandoned buildings, as well as the art and music scene, appealed to them. "The script they showed us was like nothing I had ever seen before," he said, "and Marshall felt the same way."

based in Portland, Oregon. They didn't think "Imported From Detroit" would make it through the bureaucracy at Chrysler. To them, it sounded like one of those ideas that a company gets ginned up about, but then kills for being to crazy and bold. "We just didn't think it was going to fly," said Martin.

The first phase was allowing Chrysler to use the song (though not the lyrics) for a press conference at the North America International Auto Show in Detroit on January 11. Composer Luis Resto, who has the third credit on the song, actually came to Detroit's Cobo Hall and played the music live to go with Francois' presentation. Though the Super Bowl ad deal was not in place yet, Martin and Resto did not charge for the auto show usage. "We were into something pretty interesting, so we wanted to see where it was going," says Resto, who agreed to make some changes to the music based on what Francois was asking for -- an unusual role for the CEO of an auto maker brand to play.

In the week following the auto show, more negotiations about a Super Bowl ad continued. When Eminem eventually agreed to not only have the music be used in the commercial, but to appear in it as well, Francois was on the west coast at a press junket. He had to rush back to Detroit and start overseeing the shooting the ad the week of January 23 -- just two weeks before the game. It would show Detroit at its grayest and grimmest.

Which car would be used in the ad? The whole idea of the ad is to position Chrysler as a legitimate luxury brand. But the Chrysler 200 has a starting price under $20,000, and it has not enjoyed terrific reviews in the press. It was adapted from the Chrysler Sebring, a much-derided model that had questionable styling and a sub-par interior. While the new 200 is vastly improved, perhaps the more obvious choice to star in the Super Bowl ad alongside Eminem would have been the Chrysler 300 sedan. This is a first-class redesign of a well-loved product that reaches a fully optioned sticker price of around $46,000. The problem is that the 300 is built in Brampton, Ontario. Though not far from Detroit, Chrysler felt it could not launch the new brand idea to a Super Bowl audience with a car built in Canada.

Even after settling on the car and getting Eminem's full involvement, there were a few more wrinkles to iron out. The NFL had not allowed two-minute ads, establishing a limit of 90-seconds. The script, which called for taking viewers through numerous images of the city of Detroit and winding up at the Fox Theatre with Eminem and a local African-American choir, required two minutes to be told properly, Francois believed.


Then there was the iced tea issue. Eminem was appearing in another Super Bowl ad -- sort of. Months before, Eminem had agreed to have a claymation image of himself star in a Lipton Brisk iced tea ad. The script calls for the clay Eminem to act like a diva, complaining about the demands of doing a commercial, and how he insists in shooting in his own house so he doesn't have to go anywhere, and records his own songs. When a claymation corporate executive in the ad tells him he can't rename the product, the rap star shoves him off the roof of the building. Ouch.

The ad was anything but serious, and would be juxtaposed against the much more earnest message from Chrysler. It would also mean that Chrysler would no longer be unique in using Eminem. "We felt so strongly about the idea and script that we looked right past it," said Francois.

It paid off. "Chrysler 200" was the number two search term on Super Bowl Sunday on Google, beating out the Black Eyed Peas, the band that performed during halftime. Search traffic for the Chrysler 200 on AOL Autos was 685 percent higher than normal on Monday and it topped all vehicle searches on AOL's Autoblog.com. NBC Nightly News did a feature on the ad. And a poll conducted by auto industry trade weekly Automotive News, which asked readers to rank all the auto ads in the big game, chose the Chrysler ad by a long-shot, with more than 40 percent choosing it by Tuesday after the game. At publication, the ad had received over five million viewings on YouTube, a number that will likely grow, as Chrysler was one of the only advertisers not to make their commercial available before the game.

"In a way, the Brisk ad kind of set up the Chrysler ad because the character talks about why he never does ads," said Martin.

Indeed, Eminem had appeared in an Apple iTunes ad several years ago, though it was just to promote the iTunes release of a greatest hits album. Apple, says Martin, asked to use "Lose Yourself" to promote the whole Apple product line. Eminem and Martin turned down Apple and its celebrity CEO Steve Jobs.

"The city of Detroit is really important to Marshall," says Martin. "Two years ago, Marshall was down for the count, and he understands what Chrysler is trying to do," says the rapper's partner, referring to the extremely poor reception of his 2009 album "Relapse," which was released after a five year hiatus.

That was the same year that Chrysler was forced into bankruptcy and accepted a bailout from the Federal government to stay in business. "I felt very strongly about this piece of music and Eminem," says Francois. "I don't believe in using celebrities and famous people just for the sake of it... Their story has to make sense in the story of the ad."

Francois was born in France, and has been running the marketing for Fiat in Europe, as well as the overall business of the Lancia brand in Europe. His job in the U.S. is similar, running all marketing for Chrysler, as well as all the business of the Chrysler brand. As a foreigner, and only a part-time resident in the Detroit area, his interest in the city's plight and story ironically runs deeper in some ways than auto industry executives who have spent their whole career around the city.

Eminem has been doing more publicity and promotion work in support of his latest album, "Recovery," with the National Hockey League, video game company Activision, and Pepsi, which markets Brisk. He is also performing on this weekend's Grammy awards show, where he has eleven nominations, the most of any artist. But his anthem, "Lose Yourself," is only going to be used for Chrysler. The ad will run in shorter versions on other TV broadcasts.

Advertising Age magazine referred to Eminem as "the comeback story of the year," which is another association Francois would like to see for Chrysler, as well as the City of Detroit.

Throatwarbler posted:

I guess I should come out of the gay-for-Chrysler closet. I like our Intrepid a lot and the new stuff they've come out under FIAT management, new Grand Cherokee, Durango, 300, has looked really good.

Peter M. De Lorenzo posted:

No matter how much good Marchionne achieves – and by no means is his “blending” strategy of Fiat and Chrysler vehicle architectures guaranteed to be a success – he has well and truly revealed himself to be just another in a long line of industrial pariahs, a carpetbagging opportunist whose sense of entitlement and spectacularly deep-rooted hubris knows no bounds, and one who ultimately has one interest and one interest only: Dining on the wreckage of a failed company for personal gain.

quote:

If this is a business about product cadence – which it most definitely is – then the “new” General Motors is on a runaway train to Hell. After all, this is a guy who has proudly admitted “I’m not a car guy” from the get-go, underlining that statement by making some plainly horrific comments to the Wall Street Journal in a revealing interview conducted right before the Detroit Auto Show.

Do you want to know just how dangerous this guy is to the future stability of GM? In that interview Akerson insisted that GM has too many engines globally, and he’s going to “fix” that. Uh, and he’s basing that on what, exactly? Secondly, Akerson is quite certain that GM is spending too much time and money differentiating sheet metal between the divisional nameplates, when a little creative marketing would suffice.
...
Guess what? I’ve seen this movie before and it doesn’t end well. The only difference between GM then and GM now is that this is a company that has only recently emerged from the Abyss of bankruptcy, one that can ill-afford a single misstep brought upon by misguided leadership, even though it has the most competitive lineup it has had in decades. And make no mistake: Dan Akerson’s “leadership” is at the very least misguided.

How misguided? The provocative statements Akerson has made to the press - implying that he has ordered the product development troops to cut $10,000 worth of cost out of the Volt, for instance - don’t even come close to the bone-headed orders he regularly fires off behind closed doors.

Cream_Filling posted:

However, I still don't have a lot of confidence in Marchionne. He's too slick, and we've seen this story before. I worry he's just going to finish the job MB started and eventually gut Chrysler forever. Oh well, at least he's not a total mouth-breather like "Lt. Dan" Ackerson.

I like Autoextremist's take on it:
http://www.autoextremist.com/current/2011/2/6/the-autoextremist.html


And a link to his excoriation of GM head Ackerson:
http://www.autoextremist.com/current/2011/1/23/the-autoextremist.html

Sergio Marchionne posted:

“That car was unfit for human consumption,” Marchionne said of the Commander. “We sold some. But I don’t know why people bought them.”

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

That article about Marchionne is mind blowingly stupid for a litany of reasons, but I don't get what the gently caress De Lorenzo thinks should have been done instead of selling Chrysler to Marchionne and appointing a temporary CEO for GM.

Edit: I don't exactly have "confidence" in Marchionne but it's not like anyone has much of a choice, do they? He was willing to take a risk on Chrysler when nobody else was.

quote:

Here’s a guy who strolled in back in early 2009 knowing full well that the U.S. government had exactly zero options on the table to salvage Chrysler, and that if they allowed Chrysler to sink that it could conceivably drag the rest of the U.S. auto industry – and its supplier network – down with it. So Marchionne basically fronts very little of Fiat’s cash and in turn is handed the keys to Chrysler lock, stock, and barrel.

It was shrewdly calculated and there was no mistaking what Sergio had in mind for the End Game all along – which I emphatically stated from Day One, by the way – and that was to merge the companies – whether the merged entity was called Chrysler-Fiat, Fiat-Chrysler, Fiat North America or just plain Fiat it didn’t really matter – and successfully launch a second-tier global empire on bundles of U.S. taxpayer cash and on the backs of Chrysler employees, at least the ones still left at any rate. Oh it was a beautiful plan alright, as long as no one bothered to look at it too closely to see that Marchionne was getting the steal of this or any other decade.

And now he has the balls to complain about the interest rate he’s paying on the government loans? Really? (Marchionne’s Minions are feverishly trying to negotiate a better deal with the government in order to get a reduced interest rate as you read this.)

Marchionne no doubt has to be considered the Opportunist of the Century so far at the very least, intentionally weaseling his way into a situation that the government was finding completely untenable – knowing full well that he was their only option – while walking away with Chrysler for a song. But complaining about a flat-out gift that allowed him to seize control of one of the Detroit Three for basically nothing? How heroic is the sense of entitlement that this guy must have? Just because he has no life and works himself and his troops 24/7 he thinks he can blithely step up to the plate and say he’s getting shafted by “shyster” interest rates? Wow.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

He's a marketing guy, so he would think that the small value in being able to differentiate between brands based on engines would outweigh the cost of tooling and production and development of entire engine lines.

Forgive me if I tend to think that a marketing guy knows jack poo poo about... you know, roughly anything.

Cream_Filling posted:

Well he admits that selling to Marchionne was basically the only real alternative, but he's saying not to buy into the current media hype that he will save the brand. The article itself is a response to Marchionne's comment that the government bailout that basically handed Chrysler to FIAT for free were "shyster loans". What the hell?

Throatwarbler posted:

What? Ackerson is the one who wants to use fewer engines (i.e. rely more on marketing to differentiate the brands), Delorenzo is the one who wants to keep all the different engines.

Cream_Filling posted:

And as for GM, what he wants is for the Board of Directors to not be a pack of idiots and for them to find someone to be CEO who has SOME sort of experience in the auto industry. Someone. Anyone. Ackerson had a degree in engineering and was in the Navy. Good. But then he's worked at MCI, General Instrument (a semi-conductor manufacturer), Nextel, XO communications (now bankrupt), before jumping to private equity. Notice a hole in this resume? It's 100% telecom and electronics. The guy's hardly ever even worked selling stuff to consumers. He does not understand the auto industry, yet he seems unwilling to learn - he thinks he can just walk in and fix everything because he's such a genius.

quote:

It was shrewdly calculated and there was no mistaking what Sergio had in mind for the End Game all along – which I emphatically stated from Day One, by the way – and that was to merge the companies – whether the merged entity was called Chrysler-Fiat, Fiat-Chrysler, Fiat North America or just plain Fiat it didn’t really matter – and successfully launch a second-tier global empire on bundles of U.S. taxpayer cash and on the backs of Chrysler employees, at least the ones still left at any rate. Oh it was a beautiful plan alright, as long as no one bothered to look at it too closely to see that Marchionne was getting the steal of this or any other decade.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Yes, I'm saying that DeLorenzo, as a marketing weenie, would think that having more engines would be better.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

Yeah that guy Mulally at Ford who didn't have experience in the auto industry sucks.

I might be willing to take DeLorenzo slightly more seriously if 1) I thought he had any clue what he was talking about and 2) he could make a cogent point without degenerating in to poo poo like


where he doesn't say anything new, comes across as whiny, and jerks himself off for good measure.

quote:

Let’s see, carpetbagging interloper plucked from corporate obscurity by a flat-out incompetent board of directors and then handed the keys to the candy store just for showing up that day? Check.

Instant "expert" who has studied the business for oh, about ten minutes, and who now boasts as to how he will set the industry straight and show everyone how it should be done? Check.

Talking “customer-focused” decision making while putting product development on a cost-cutting binge that takes precedence over everything else, because after all, we’ll fix it in marketing, right? Check.

Throatwarbler posted:

Oh. DeLorenzo's complaint about Ackerson is that Ackerson is a marketing guy. I forgot that DeLorenzo is too. Anyway all his complaints about Ackerson or Marchionne are either wild extrapolations that are impossible to substantiate or straight up nonsense.

Cream_Filling posted:

In part I'm biased by my love of attack articles instead of the typical press pussyfooting or outright fellation that you see when talking about corporate managers. But at the same time, when taken in the context of Ackerson's various comments in the media about his thoughts on product development and planning, I think that his analysis of Ackerson's character and ability is quite accurate.

A5H posted:

That's hideous. That lines in the side make no sense.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

I like a good attack article as much as the next guy if not more so, but you have to understand that attack articles rarely offer anything of value whatsoever.

Without the ridiculous hyperbole, your little checklist criticisms basically apply to Mulally. I'm not willing to criticize Ackerson over things he's correct about just because he happens to not be Bob Lutz. I don't think that DeLorenzo has any better analysis of Ackerson's character than you or I do.

Preoptopus posted:

Viper

Preoptopus posted:

Viper

Dave Inc. posted:

Question: How insane would one have to be to buy a first year model from Alfa?

(I'm already toying with the idea of getting a used one a few years after release)

A5H posted:

That's the other way up, and it actually flows, and it's in front of the door, and it's an actual vent.

Q_res posted:

Try late 60s Charger.

Throatwarbler posted:

The angle and the lighting on the photo sort of emphasize the grill a bit too much, and the new swoopier styling makes the rest of the car look small by comparison. It's not as bad here.



I'm not married to the styling, it serves its purpose.

ozziegt posted:

WTF it's like a GTR and a Charger had a baby.

quote:

Mr. Akerson isn't a "car guy." Call him GM's accidental CEO. The job "is not something I expected or sought," the former telecom executive says. "I'm not that special, but someone had to stand up."

Dan Akerson posted:

"Nobody cares about fuel economy. When it's empty, you fill it, period. Why are we advertising something that nobody cares about?"

quote:

At a recent meeting with his executive team, he interrupted a technical discussion on a future vehicle. "See this can?" Mr. Akerson said, picking up his Diet Coke. "It's a consumer product. GM has to start acting like a consumer-driven, not engineering-driven, company. We sell a consumer product—our can just costs $30,000."
...
Mr. Akerson's moves so far suggest where he is taking the company. He killed a vehicle nearing production whose exterior didn't excite focus groups, even though they loved its interior. "It's like a pretty girl. If you don't like the outside, you won't get to know the inside," he says.
...
When he saw that several promising vehicles wouldn't be ready until 2014, he said, "During World War II, GM produced tanks and equipment within four years. Why should it take four years to put a car out?"

The CEO liked some new Corvette styling but noted that it wouldn't be available until 2014. "If you make this happen by 2013, I will make you a vice president," he told a design director. Reviewing engine plans, Mr. Akerson stopped managers in mid-presentation. "Why do we have 18 types of engines? We have only four brands," he said.

"Let me help you understand," replied Tom Stephens, the global product chief, who described GM's tradition of making a variety of engines, including one the 62-year-old Mr. Stephens himself designed in his 42 years at the company.

quote:

Mr. Akerson wants GM to ... "bet the company," as he puts it. That's what he once did at Nextel, when he made a big bet on a cellphone feature called "push to talk."

He is emphasizing not just the Volt but also an older technology, the OnStar service for drivers in distress. He envisions making it an interactive network by which drivers could update their Facebook status or take requests from family members to run an errand.... Mr. Akerson's heavy stress on marketing has caused differences with his division heads.

Cream_Filling posted:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203525404576050070062206368.html?mod=WSJ_article_related

Best quote, from a 2009 marketing meeting showing just how out of touch this guy is:


Missed 90s GM? Look forward to more marketing, less engineering, and lots of corner cutting!


So, new Corvette is semi-confirmed for 2014. Hopefully they don't decide to start cutting, say, the three different engines offered in the current C6 (LS7, LS3, LS9) - all of which I argue can be justified. Now, my reckoning of exactly what is meant by "engine types" may be inaccurate, but typically the fastest way for the beancounters to meet meaningless metrics such as "number of engine types" will be to cut "niche" performance products and engineering in favor of retarded high-concept marketing stunts like Ackerson's current proposal: to add social media capabilities to OnStar. What the hell?