Just weeks before Chrysler filed for bankruptcy last year, it announced a battery partnership with A123 Systems, which would have provided Lithium-ion batteries for Chrysler’s ENVI lineup of EV vapor. Needless to say, the ENVI program disappeared after bankruptcy, but A123 stuck around and was rewarded with the supply contract for Chrysler’s only prospective EV project, th Fiat 500 EV. Now, the Freep reports that A123 has withdrawn from the Fiat 500 EV project, and its CEO tells Bloomberg that

a competing vendor had been willing to take the business at a lower price and that the program had been “significantly diminished.”

It’s not clear if A123 was upset with a reduction in  planned Fiat 500 EV volume, or if the partnership’s downgrade from a “full line” of ENVI EVs to the 500 EV project represented the unwanted volume reduction. In any case, Chrysler CEO still planns on selling 56k EVs per year by 2014, and it’s strange that A123 would give up that long-term volume opportunity. But, according to A123, another automaker has more serious plans to grow EV volume, and A123 will be concentrating on that partnership. What program is that? Where does this leave the Fiat 500 EV? Is A123 in even more trouble than Chrysler? As usual with EV programs, there are more questions here than answers…

Collectively, the the Detroit Three have enjoyed precisely one market share turnaround in the last several years: Ford in 2009. This year, Detroit’s market share looks downright stagnant. Chrysler’s got a tiny bump going on, but Ford’s lost its fizz and GM is skidding bottom… at best. On the other hand, if this graph is just too gloomy for you, hit the jump for one of the first glimmers of (market share) hope for Detroit in years.

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Chrysler recorded another small quarterly loss this quarter, as increased expenditures wiped out modest gains in revenues and earnings. Press release in PDF here, webcast presentation slides in PDF here. More analysis after the jump.

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Set the way-back machine to our July 2009 Chrysler Group sales post, and a certain amount of deja-vu might just set in. Last Summer, Chrysler’s version of success was a mere single-digit percentage volume decline. This July, Chrysler’s big accomplishment was a five percent improvement over last July’s number. Last July we thought the Chrysler brand in particular was “toast,” and based on this July’s numbers, we can’t say we’ve found much to change that opinion, as ChryCo’s eponymous brand dropped 11 percent year-over-year, and shed over 3k units of volume compared to June. Chrysler Town & Country outsold the rest of the brand alone at 8,083 units, an 18 percent gain.

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“The only reason we are not making money on the net is that I pay interest on the borrowings I took from the government and I have money in the bank to cover that debt. Actually, against the Treasury we owe them nothing. We have enough cash to pay it all off. But you can’t run a business without cash, so it’s just a function of our capital structure. If we had taken those funds as equity as GM did, we would have been making money, net, right now.”

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The Obama administration went here before, when it tried to quantify how much worse things would have been without its stimulus bill. And considering the task force has enjoyed access to GM and Chrysler’s business plans, it’s surprising that this graph (from the Auto Task Force’s just-released Bailout “report” [PDF]) is based on notoriously iffy BLS data. Instead of projecting how many jobs were saved by Detroit’s $86b life raft, couldn’t the White House have cited GM and Chrysler’s pre-bailout Chapter 11 plans? Or were there pre-bailout bankruptcy plans? Either way, the Task Force’s claim that 56k jobs have been created in Automotive since mid-2009 is a bit hard to swallow given the SIGTARP’s recent finding that

Treasury made a series of decisions [regarding the bailout-era dealer cull] that may have substantially contributed to the accelerated shuttering of thousands of small businesses and thereby potentially adding tens of thousands of workers to the already lengthy unemployment rolls.

By narrowing a broad bailout to just the manufacturing side (the report leaves out dealer cuts and the GMAC rescue), the Task Force is simply defining its way to victory. Besides, the problem is that there’s really no way of knowing what might have happened without last year’s landslide of government sugar. For all we know, Fiat might have bought a bankrupt Chrysler with its own money. GM might have shuttered dying brands and cut its bloated capacity of its own volition. Both might even be in mediocre-to-OK shape right now. The only thing we know for sure is that the auto bailout has been a qualified success at best so far. Luckily for the bailout boosters, it will be years before Treasury fully divests from GM and Chrysler, so there will be plenty of other opportunities to declare victory.

When Chrysler’s CEO Sergio Marchionne took the stage over the weekend to honor Lee Iacocca with an induction into the Walter P. Chrysler Legacy circle, he admitted to feeling unworthy of honoring Chrysler’s most famous executive in recent memory, and called Ford’s Alan Mulally and the UAW’s Bob King to help share the honor. And being the business-obsessed type he is, Marchionne wasn’t about to let Mulally get on stage without at least a mention of Ford’s just-announced $2.6b profit. And though the recognition and ensuing awkward “moment” helped add to the usual Detroit gala hometown booster vibe, it also highlighted the fact that Chrysler still has yet to announce its Q2 results.
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Chrysler is taking a page out of Ford’s playbook and will surprise and delight Japan with their  “latest version of the Jeep Grand Cherokee sport utility vehicle, which features Chrysler’s new Pentastar 3.6-liter V-6 engine,” if The Nikkei [sub] is not mistaken. (Read More…)

More to the point, is it better to acknowledge that regrets might be common among Chrysler buyers and address the problem with an ad like this one… or does this campaign feed the perception that it’s trying to address?

After a year of bitter battles with its dealers in the wake of a bankruptcy-era dealer cull, Chrysler is about to do the unthinkable: start a whole new dealer network to sell Fiats built in Italy by its new owner. The Detroit News reports that

existing Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram dealers will get a chance to apply to sell the Italian Fiats, but they must be able to operate separate facilities with different sales and service teams in order to win a franchise.

Fiat will return to the US by the end of this year, starting with the Mexican-built Fiat 500.

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A year ago, Chrysler used one word to qualify nearly every sales figure it gave in its June 2009 sales report: Retail. Today, Chrysler blithely reports that overall sales were up 35 percent, but fails to use the “R” word even once in its June 2010 release, suggesting that it benefited from heavy fleet sales in the face of an otherwise soggy market. How else do you sell 3,978 Sebrings and 6,400 Avengers in a month? The fact that Dodge saw a 67 percent increase, although that was largely in comparison to the utterly wretched June the brand endured last year. In fact, compared to its relatively strong May performance of 104,819 units, Chrysler shed about 10k sales, falling to 92,482 total sales. That’s under the 95k monthly “survival” rate cited by CEO Sergio Marchionne. All this while Chrysler spends an estimated $1.4b on advertising this year. This, to paraphrase another automotive blogger, is beyond the valley of the not so good.

Alfa’s been talking about selling an SUV for years now, as the brand has thrashed around looking for a rescue line. Now, a long-rumored ute named Kamal (after an Alfa SUV concept) has finally materialized at Alfa’s 100-year anniversary, looking an awful lot like a BMW X1. In fact, it is a BMW X1 with tacked-on Alfa cues. If this is a sign that Alfa fans are desperate for an SUV, their dreams will come true. Automotive News [sub] reports that SUVs are a crucial component of Alfa’s plan to sell half a million cars per year by 2014, up from just over 100k last year. A small SUV, to be built by Chrysler and imported to Europe, will start sales in 2012, with another, larger ute (based on the next Jeep Libery) planned for 2014. In other words, look for rebadged Chryslers to rescue Alfa’s SUV dreams rather than a taped-off BMW. No wonder analysts are so skeptical of Alfa’s turnaround plans, telling AN [sub]

The potential of the (Alfa) brand is huge, but to multiply sales fivefold in five years they probably also will need to sell cars on the Moon and on Mars

Today, natural gas is a rational alternative to gasoline that can provide a near-term environmental solution on the road to vehicle electrification. It is the most effective solution, in terms of costs and timing, to lessen this country’s reliance on oil

Chrysler/Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne tells the Detroit News that despite not having an electric vehicles in the works until 2012 (can you believe ENVI was just vapor), Chrysler can sell environmentally-friendly vehicles sooner than that. After all, Fiat sells a grip of natural gas-powered vehicles in Europe (130,000 last year), offering the alt-energy drivetrain on nearly every model. Of course, there’s a hitch. Or three.

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Chrysler’s Ed Garsten breaks the last bit of bad news TheFirehouse will ever have to spin:

I wanted to let you know that on Wednesday we’ll be closing the doors at TheFirehouse.biz, our media-only blog…

We had a great time posting things you wouldn’t dare put in a news release. Things like “Friday Night, Gotta Go,” an explanation of the company’s potty break policy in response to a minor flap at one of our competitors. When coverage of recalls at domestic automakers seemed out of whack, compared with coverage for recalls by foreign companies, we listed every recall by a major Japanese competitor that had previously won a free pass in the press, and pointed out that indeed, they had recalled many, many more vehicles than the Detroit bunch.

Our biggest blowout was calling out “Big Oil” for artificially propping up fuel prices.
Over time we were playful, pointed, and took great glee in “guiding” journalists towards positive results hidden in those monthly sales reports.

The brick and mortar firehouse during the auto show has been gone for a couple of years, a victim of financial realities, and now we’ve made the tough, but logical decision, to shutter the virtual version.

O Noes! Where, oh where will the internet get its coveted Chrysler spin on the automotive industry?

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The Wall Street Journal [sub] asked several Chrysler dealers about the newest hotness being developed in Auburn Hills, and came away with the tales of a “man van” that Chrysler hopes will lend the Dodge Caravan some masculine swagger. According to the WSJ, this re-man-ification of the minivan includes:

a slightly sportier look on the outside, possibly finished off with a black-and-gray interior trimmed with hot-colored stitching on the seats and steering wheel

Oh yes, and some “edgy” ads laden with tired cliches of sexual politics. In short, they’re sending the 2008 “Caravan R/T” concept into production. But why?

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