All Cars, All the Time

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With today’s news of Daimler Chrysler selling off its stake in Mitsubishi and General Motors recent sale of its piece of Fuji Heavy Industries (Subaru) one has to wonder what’s next? There is still Isuzu and Suzuki in GM’s stable and Ford has Mazda. Could any of these companies be up for grabs? Isuzu provides a lot of diesel engine expertise to GM so I doubt that Isuzu is being shopped around; however I wouldn’t be surprised to see the sales of Isuzu vehicles pulled in the US market at some point. Suzuki has a nice lineup of cars here in the US and provides an outlet for Daewoo vehicles--let’s face it, Chevy can’t sell them all.

Ford has a tremendous number of vehicles based off the Mazda 6 CD3 platform, so it would be unlikely that anything would happen to that alliance. Given the dire straits that GM and Ford are in, however, all bets are off the table. How long will GM support the forever money losing Saab? The same goes for Ford and Jaguar. GM feels that they need Saab as a luxury presence in Europe, but they are starting to introduce the Cadillac brand including a “9-3 with a nose job” Cadillac BLS. The Ford and Jaguar question is more dubious. The new XK and forthcoming S-Type refresh are going to go a long way in either lifting or sinking the brand. Without Jaguar, Ford would be missing a piece of the premium car puzzle, but with Aston Martin dropping into Porsche territory it would be reasonably possible that Volvo could be expanded upwards. Also playing into the mix is whether or not Lincoln can once again catch fire under designer Peter Horbury. Can you believe that just a few short years ago Cadillac had to fess up that they doctored up sales records to falsely claim a sales lead over Lincoln? A new Aviator and Zephyr will attempt to turn things around in 2006.

Of course, there is talk that if things become much worse a company like General Motors could be an acquisition target itself. However at this point, its pension and health liabilities seem to be a sufficient poison pill. We’ll just have to keep watching and waiting to see what happens next. Personally I wish them all good luck.