Tagged: Stellantis

Chrysler’s Sad Love Life

Marriage can be an iffy thing. Especially if you’re an auto company that can’t seem to exist without being coupled, sometimes with a parasite. That’s what the entity commonly just called Chrysler seems to be.

Full disclosure—I worked at the company for 11 years through three of its marriages. One ended in divorce, another as a result of bankruptcy and a third where Chrysler just became the second of its combined name.

I retired in 2016, five years before the company was sucked into another relationship and lost its identity altogether, as part of a blob of corporate Play-doh called Stellantis.

Keep in mind the last three letters in Stellantis are also the final three letters in the suffix “it is” which is a medical term for some sort of inflammation. Appropriate, since the CEO just flamed out and flew the coop with a nice multi-million dollar nest egg.

So this seems like a good time to examine Chrysler’s marriages from both my inside perspective and a more macro view to better understand how this corporate Sadie Hawkins should go about chasing its next partner—or should it?

In 1998 the all-American Chrysler Corp. was joined in a shotgun marriage to the German automaker Daimler AG. It was billed as a “merger of equals.” There should have been a pre-nup. There was nothing equal about the marriage. The Germans were clearly in charge.

I joined the DaimlerChrysler in 2005 as a contractor—hired to ghost write and manage the company’s first corporate communications blog. A year later, having been a broadcast and print journalist since 1973 and covering autos since 1989, a new digital communications team was created around me. I was hired on staff to run it.

My boss at the time sent me to attend the annual “communicators conference” at DCX headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. To get there I was granted a seat on the company’s plush jet.

Somewhere over the Atlantic I received some valuable insight as to how the Chrysler side of the marriage was regarded. I overheard a couple of engineers complaining that “they want us to build Chrysler vehicles with Mercedes quality on a Chrysler budget—impossible!”  Yes, it was.

During the actual meeting, a German executive declared any quality issues should be blamed on Chrysler—and welcome to Stuttgart. Ach!

Some marriage. Even the late Dr. Ruth Westheimer couldn’t fix that relationship.

On Valentines Day 2007 the Germans decided to ditch their American spouse with little warning. At the “annual news conference,” held for the first time at Chrysler headquarters in Auburn Hills, Michigan, CEO Dieter Zetsche spilled that all options were open with regard to the future of the tenuous tie-up. By summer the divorce was final and Chrysler found itself in a new abusive relationship—this time with capital management company Cerberus—yes, the three-headed dog guarding the gates of hell.

The upside was the company went back to being just Chrysler. The downside was everything else. Cerberus was known as a corporate slum lord and the new CEO, Robert Nardelli, known for being passed up as successor to General Electric boss, Jack Welch and for being fired from Home Depot after its stock tanked as a result of his bad decisions.

Cerberus had no experience running an auto company and it showed. Its main strategy was simply firing people. I watched as dozens of my immediate co-workers and hundreds more were suddenly told to grab a box, fill it with their stuff and take a hike.

There was a guy installed in one of the little glass offices on our floor who spent his days hovering over a computer and transferring figures to a white board with the mission of plotting where, and whom, to cut.

At one point, to make the world think the company was actually doing something constructive, the company decided to invite the automotive media, along with CNBC’s auto reporter, to anchor live coverage from our headquarters of the unveiling of a line of “production intent” electric and extended-range vehicles under the acronym, ENVI..the first letters of the word, “environment.”

There were three ENVI vehicles–a coupe based on a Lotus that went by the name Dodge Circuit, and two others based on a Jeep Wrangler and Chrysler Town and Country minivan. Coverage was massive.

In fact, the CNBC reporter called me a few weeks later to say if I could get the Dodge Circuit to New York City by that Thursday, he could get it on the Today show along with the Chevrolet Volt.

No problem. I flew out to NYC for the show and was both heartened and horrified when Today host Matt Lauer said to the CNBC reporter he liked the Volt but if given the choice, he’d go for the Dodge. See the segment here. Sorry in advance for the rough quality.

Cerberus said the ENVI vehicles would go into production by 2010 but they never did.

Greatly summarizing here, the combination of the recession and the company going into bankruptcy, along with General Motors Co., buoyed by federal government bailouts, led to Cerberus exiting and Fiat S.p.A. at first taking a partial stake in Chrysler with Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne leading both automakers.

Requiem For An Idea

This is an obituary for an idea that sprang from momentary consternation, lasted 17 years, won awards and respect and recently died a quiet, undignified death.

It was September, 2007, a month after corporate slum lord Cerberus took over Chrysler from merger of unequals Daimler. My job was head of the company’s digital communications team, which included its media website, social media, broadcast media relations and video production.

Since all news releases issued by the company came through my team to be posted on the special website for media, I knew everything we were putting out there in hopes of winning coverage.

The truth is, earned media, as it’s known today, is a crapshoot. You post and pray, and most times whomever you’re praying to treats you like an atheist.

So one day I was looking over some recent releases that were posted to the media site and realized there were several that earned little to no media at all. As a journalist-turned PR guy, I knew these items would languish for lack of major news, but as a company employee I also knew the item was important to someone, probably an executive, who was banking on seeing some daylight for his or her little bit of news.

If you’re familiar with the process of creating a news release and related assets, you know a lot of work goes into it—writing, editing, approvals, re-editing, re-approvals…..miles of red tape.

This bothered me.

So in the course of literally a moment, I thought, what if we created a weekly video recap of Chrysler news that included some of those ignored items? It would give those stories another chance to reach an audience instead of just languishing and going nowhere.

Chrysler’s main logo at the time was the Pentastar, and there was a big pentastar-shaped window on the top floor of our Auburn Hills, Michigan headquarters.

So I titled the recap “Under the Pentastar.”

My bosses instantly approved going forward, but with zero budget.

No problem. I posed the idea to my team but told them we’d all just have to pitch in on a volunteer basis to produce the feature every week. OK, they said!

A signup sheet was posted and it didn’t take long for it to be filled with volunteers, including myself.

We posted what we called “UTP” on the media website, YouTube and our social media channels.

It took awhile but it slowly gained an audience. Those of us who narrated UTP became known and even had followers.

One member of my team, the wonderful Betty Carrier Newman, was a former anchor at WDIV in Detroit. Has a great voice. In fact, our boss nicknamed her “The Voice” long before the cheesy singing show.

Betty had her fans who looked forward to listening to her golden pipes.

As a former radio announcer and network news correspondent, I’d record some of the narrations as well.

One year, at the Los Angeles Auto Show I introduced myself to a worker setting up our stand. Now remember, I was on the air at CNN for almost 20 years. But when I told him my name, he said, “Ed Garsten…From Under the Pentastar! I  listen every week..love it!”

That’s when it hit me we’d really done something worthwhile.

UTP won an award from the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) and maybe another. Can’t remember. It was more important that we’d won an appreciative audience.

When Fiat took over the company in 2009 and later changed the name to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, (FCA) the Pentastar logo was discontinued. “Under the Pentastar” became “FCA Replay.”

Our new Italian bosses absolutely loved it and referred to it often in reverent terms.

All this time, the weekly video news recap was produced by team members who continued to sign up to write, produce, narrate it above and beyond their actual duties.

It was never slick the way an actual agency or production house might handle it, but we did our best with limited resources and it always looked at least professional.

After I retired from FCA in 2016 and the company was later taken over by the French, a new company was created called Stellantis. The team members I left behind changed the feature’s name again, accordingly, to “Stellantis Spotlight.” 

All this time, our two video editors/producers, Paul Cirenese and Peter Spezia kept it going. Never missing a week. I don’t know if I ever properly expressed how much their devotion meant to me. They’re two of the most solid souls I’ve ever been privileged to work with, along with Betty Newman and our incomparable media site manager Courtney Protz-Sanders.

In recent years I would only occasionally view Stellantis Spotlight as my life in retirement took on its own life. But I would check in periodically.

It had been a couple of months since I did when this week I noted there were no episodes after September 27th. The episode is below.

As a freelance auto reporter for Forbes.com I was well aware of the cutbacks and job losses at Stellantis and suspected “Stellantis Spotlight” fell to the budget ax, which is troubling, since it operated with no budget.

A few days ago I spoke to one of my former teammates about it.

Knowing it was something I still held dear she gravely informed me my suspicions were correct.

After more than 800 episodes over 17 years, under three different titles, our award-winning little weekly video recap created in a moment’s thought and kept alive by the power of devotion, just ended without ceremony.

Look, as trite as it sounds, nothing lasts forever, especially in the corporate world. But for the rest of my life, I will always be thankful for my dedicated team for embracing, then giving life to an idea borne in a moment’s thought, simply to give overlooked stories a second chance of being noticed.

An Open Letter to the UAW and Detroit 3 Automakers

Dear Contract Combatants:

I’m writing to you to request you move the expiration date of your labor contracts because it conflicts with a date related to my domestic bliss and continued marital comity.

You see, my wife and I were married on September 15th, 1973 about 370 miles east of Detroit in our native state of New York.

We were but 21 at the time and not yet even experienced enough in our careers to call us “green” meaning we had no congizance whatsoever of your quadrennial exercise in contractual Hunger Games.

We led fine and happy lives through our early married life, always approaching celebration our anniversary with happy anticipation and thoughts of expensive gifts and meals.

But in 1989 that all changed. CNN transferred me up to the Motor City from Atlanta to take over as the bureau chief and correspondent at the network’s Detroit Bureau. We covered a wide region and variety of stories from suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian to hurricanes, crime, medicine, government…everything, including, of course, the auto industry. Indeed CNN founder Ted Turner created the Detroit Bureau to cover, as he accurately called it, “the biggest industry in the world.”

That meant covering the contract talks between you guys and of course the contracts always expired on either September 14th or 15th. Since you almost never reached a tentative agreement by the expiration date we beat reporters would get stuck awaiting the white smoke to appear languishing, sleeping, filing, doing thumbsucker live shots, killing time until something happened.

Yes, you automakers fed us well. Any reporter of a certain vintage will not forget GM providing an almost endless supply of Dove Bars.

Good eatin’ but it kept me away from home on our anniversary which caused a combination of disappointment, anger, tears and fat chance reliving honeymoon night.

On our 20th anniversary in 1993, CNN took pity on me and sent former Detroit Bureau chief, the late, great Bob Vito to spell me at Ford headquarters. Nice touch, but Vito didn’t show up until 11:30pm on the 15th from Los Angeles because, as he put it, “I hadn’t had a Lafayette Coney in years and I had a craving.”

Not only was he very late, but had terrible chile dog breath. I got home with about 3 minutes left on our “special” day.

Every contract since, whether I was working in TV, the Detroit News or flipped over to PR at Chrysler, we’d have to time-shift celebration of our anniversary to avoid being screwed by you guys not shaking hands on a deal on time.

This year is our 50th anniversary. I’m now semi-retired but working freelance. I have informed my clients that I’m out of the mix this time around on the 15th. No matter what happens…deal, no deal, strike, no strike, I’m a ghost.

Even though technology..and common sense, has elminated the need for reporters to sleep at the various automakers’ headquarters awaiting word that you’ve either reached a deal or are playing the game into overtime, I’ll be spending the 15th blissfully someplace else, celebrating the fact my wife and I haven’t drawn pistols at dawn after half a century together.

But then, dammit, the clock will tick, the calendar will turn and the 15th will turn into the 16th and if you guys don’t figure it out by then I’m out of excuses.

So help a reporter out. Move the date your contracts expire to, say, the spring. How ’bout April 15th, tax day? No one celebrates that. How hard would that be? Maybe I’ll even buy you all Dove Bars.

Thanks very much,

Ed Garsten