1997 Chrysler Town & Country Lxi 3.8l Minivan Good Insp Til 9/2014 Needs Repairs on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Bailout dealership cuts did their job as profits surge

Almost five years after US taxpayers bailed out General Motors and Chrysler, a large majority of their slimmed-down dealership networks are posting soaring profits, Bloomberg reports, and contributing to the US auto industry on track this year to deliver 15.4 million vehicles, the most since 16.15 million were delivered in 2007.
Consider another important figure: Bloomberg says that more than 90 percent of GM dealerships are profitable, compared to about half of them in 2008 and 2009. At the start of 2013, GM had 4,355 US dealerships and Chrysler had about 2,600. Compare that with just a few years ago, when GM had 6,246 dealers in 2008, while Chrysler had 3,200 in 2009.
As part of their bankruptcy restructuring, both GM and Chrysler decided that their retail networks contained far too many dealerships and insisted that they be slimmed down. The resultant dealership terminations followed by a rebounding auto market - in part due to better new GM and Chrysler vehicles - have increased the number of sales per dealership to record levels. Many dealers are taking advantage of increasing profits and investing in facility renovations and updates, such as Chrysler dealership owner David Kelleher. He's spending $2 million to expand his store.

Wish you had a world-famous auto exec give your commencement speech? Watch this

We've seen some pretty great commencement speeches over the years. There was Steve Jobs' incredibly inspiring Stanford address in 2005, John Stewart's insightful speech to the graduating class of William and Mary in 2004 and Steven Colbert's hilarious 2011 address at Northwestern, but automotive executives aren't strangers to honorary degrees. Former General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner spoke at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011, and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne recently gave the keynote at Walsh College's 100th Commencement Ceremony. The executive knows a thing or two about success and following one's beliefs to fulfillment.
"I constantly encourage my co-workers at Fiat and Chrysler to go beyond the cliche and the conventional to try new approaches and change perspective each and every day," Marchionne said. "I exhort them not to repeat the same things, the same approaches, and I remind them they are indeed free. The freedom I am talking about is something inside you. It is determined by how open minded you remain, how receptive you are to the new and to the different, to the infinite possibilities that present themselves even if you don't go looking for them or could never have imagined. Being free means that you have the strength not to be conditioned by what others want you to do or by what may seem to be the easiest choice."
Amen to that. You can check out the brief press release on the address below as well as a video of a few highlights from the speech.

Four-horse race opens up for next Chrysler-Fiat CEO

There are some companies that could change leadership overnight and still remain more or less the operations that they are. But some have built themselves up around one central figure. Just ask Carlos Tavares, who found he couldn't escape the long shadow of Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. Tavares recently left to find his own limelight. But Ghosn isn't the only executive who presides over two disparate automakers on opposite ends of the globe.
Having built up Fiat and Chrysler around himself, we can hardly imagine either automaker getting along without Sergio Marchionne. But the day will come when the famously sweater-clad bigwig will step down. The pressing questions remain when when that day will come, and who will take his place. The only solid clues we have are in the statements made mostly by Marchionne himself, but those statements have been all over the place. When speaking to Automotive News in 2012, he said he would step down "no earlier than 2013, no later than 2015." But a year later, he had already seemingly changed his tune, indicating he could still be at the helm in 2016. Fiat chairman John Elkann seems to think Marchionne, 61, could and should stay on longer.