From the fools who bet on EVs as being the Next Big Thing: Volkswagen and Mercedes.
Yeah… screw you and your little Duracell cars, screw you for buying into the Big Manufactured Panic stemming from the Global Warming Climate Cooling Change© hucksters, and screw you for trying to force us into buying your shitty fad products by cutting back production of regular internal combustion-engined cars and trucks.
And while we’re on high-level fools in Big Auto, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Stellantis. This is what you get, and deservedly so when you let finance people run an engineering business. Let me count the ways:
- Misreading your core customers
- Forcing inferior and low-demand products onto the market
- Reducing product offerings when your competition offers choice (and having those remaining products be simply me-too choices, which you’re always going to lose especially when your products are less reliable and more costly)
- Making long-term decisions based on doomsday (and fallacious) predictions
- Sacrificing long-term growth for short-term profits (see below)
- Ignoring basic marketing principles, e.g. when faced with growing reserve stock levels, increasing prices rather than cutting them.
Stellantis has broken each and every one of those oh-so basic rules, and the people who will pay the price are their employees, who are going to be laid off as their workplaces end up being shuttered. Now, of course, they’re scrambling… in the face of being sued by shareholders.
Sadly, the people who have made all these disastrous business decisions will be fine thanks to generous severance packages and bonuses. (Tavares’s compensation last year was worth $40 million, for example.)
instead of facing the proper consequences of public flogging followed by hanging.
“This is what you get, and deservedly so when you let finance people run an engineering business. ”
Was I the only person who thought “Boeing” after reading the above line? Fuck Jack Welch and his ideas.
So I was bored shitless yesterday and watched the Stellantis promo video for the new electric truck (I think it’s called Ramcharger, or whatever). It was obviously a high quality PR video to highlight their product while also being a little light on details. One interesting piece was a model that was full electric but included a V6 engine combined with a generator. Basically you fill the truck with gas, the gas engine runs and makes electricity, charges the battery, and the battery then drives the truck. This allows the truck to use the existing infrastructure (i.e. quick fill-up at a gas station) while also being a full electric that can re-charge at home. Ok, I can kinda see this as semi-practical, although overly complicated and possibly a maintenance nightmare. But then the presenter threw out a comment that, paraphrasing, said basically “our dumb hick customers are too scared to go full electric, so we made this model to help drag them kicking and screaming into the bold new all-electric future”. Obviously he used different wording, but still that’s the impact it had on me.
Ok, thanks for the clarification. Glad I know where I stand, over here with the stupid hicks. That’s us, insisting on being practical and able to still function in an EOTW scenario.
This dude does these sorts of videos every week – https://youtu.be/ITUwWjFmdPk?si=ahcViYvOVtWsveqK
Walks around these dealer lots that are bursting with trucks, each one $85k and up. One video he pointed out the 2023 models. 2023 trucks, with 2025s on the way!
You’d think there’d be a fire sale.
Meanwhile, that dude has a bottom of the food chain dealership – $5K and under, cash only. He can’t keep cars on the lot.
I’ve been looking for a beater toyota or honda as a project and to lessen the wear and tear on my truck. Can’t find much that don’t have a million miles on them.