And yet Automotive News reports this morning that Chrysler wants to slash its spending on components by 25%. On the bright side, it seems that Chrysler wants to make some internal changes to help meet that target-including increased component sharing-but one thing is for sure: the last thing that Chrysler needs to do is use cheaper parts.
Spend one minute in the interior of a Chrysler Sebring, and you'll agree. Take a Jeep Wrangler for a drive around the block, and you'll curl your upper lip at the way it feels. Go ahead, touch a Compass. You might just get a rash. If anything, Chrysler needs to spend more money on their cars, not less. The "make it beautiful and people will buy it" sham worked well through the 1990s: the Cloud Cars (Cirrus, Stratus, and Breeze) were gorgeous. The Neon was adorable. The LH cars (300M, LHS, Intrepid and Concorde) were great looking and had enormous interiors. But they certainly weren't quality pieces - ever see one of their transmissions outlast three oil change intervals? Or even better, ever look at the IIHS crash test results for them? Ouch.
But now that modern Chryslers aren't pretty, the company needs some other way of making people want to buy them. Loading them with techno-gizmos works only until the competitors catch up - and they already have. Pushing their suppliers for cheaper parts means even crappier cars. And in a world when "premium" cars are becoming the norm, that just seems like the wrong direction.