Fortune Mag:Backlash Begins

[SRT-6]

Almost 17000 orders before most of the models have even hit the streets, I'd say Chrysler is pretty happy.

[Charles236]

I am glad that the Challenger is available, if I didn't have college for my daughter (two more years before she is done) to pay for, I would have to buy an SRT8 to help offset a couple or three of those worthless Priuses. I HATE and DESPISE the entire enviromentalist movement, if mankind could have destroyed this planet, it would have happened by now. Now, you folks who are fortunate enough to have your Challengers, go burn a few extra gallons of gas for those of us who don't have one yet.

[ChuckG]

Originally Posted by Charles236

I HATE and DESPISE the entire enviromentalist movement

I'm with you!!

[seth]

Probably get flamed, but I think you are all missing the point of the article. The fact is very few people can afford the current fuel costs that present themselves everyday. If I was running Chrysler I would have killed any halo car and establish myself as the provider of quality, design, fun and high mileage.

The fact is as I was once told by a very, very senior marketing executive at P&G, my customer is an avg family of 4 that makes 48k. That is the target audience for Chrysler as well. They need to sell cars that people can drive for high mileage that look good.

Whether you think a car company should build fuel efficient cars has nothing to do with your political leanings and it gets a little tiring of every time someone makes a suggestion that gee, maybe we shouldn't be building 13mpg cars when we lose 2b a year.

Now with that said, I am one of those lefty, don't think we should drill offshore, card carrying aclu members. I also own a srt-10 and have two chally's on order. Don't confuse smart business with anything else.

[SF18C]

Originally Posted by seth

Probably get flamed, but I think you are all missing the point of the article. The fact is very few people can afford the current fuel costs that present themselves everyday. If I was running Chrysler I would have killed any halo car and establish myself as the provider of quality, design, fun and high mileage.

The fact is as I was once told by a very, very senior marketing executive at P&G, my customer is an avg family of 4 that makes 48k. That is the target audience for Chrysler as well. They need to sell cars that people can drive for high mileage that look good.

Whether you think a car company should build fuel efficient cars has nothing to do with your political leanings and it gets a little tiring of every time someone makes a suggestion that gee, maybe we shouldn't be building 13mpg cars when we lose 2b a year.

Now with that said, I am one of those lefty, don't think we should drill offshore, card carrying aclu members. I also own a srt-10 and have two chally's on order. Don't confuse smart business with anything else.

OMG...I am way to drunk to properly respond to this but I will...maybe tomorrow! Car companies should build what sales...17000 '09 Chally orders even before all the 08 have made it to the sold out 6400 owners...Dodge got this one right! Not left, not wrong but totally RIGHT!

[seth]

Hate to tell you, but 17k is absolutely, positively nothing. Do you realize how many units you need to produce to be profitable? Hundreds not ten's. Chrysler makes money on the r/t and mostly on the se. However you need to sell a hell of a lot more then 17k cars to make money. Just ask Jaguar, Land Rover, Saab, etc.

Originally Posted by SF18C

OMG...I am way to drunk to properly respond to this but I will...maybe tomorrow! Car companies should build what sales...17000 '09 Chally orders even before all the 08 have made it to the sold out 6400 owners...Dodge got this one right! Not left, not wrong but totally RIGHT!

[TBONE24]

Most of those 17,000 orders are for dealer stock , not customer orders.

[Stew]

keep in mind their goal is only around 50k per year, considering that 17k is pretty damned good, even if most is going to dealer stock, and hell, you can't even build one on the website yet!

[seth]

I am not discussing whether the challenger has had a great launch, it has. The thread is that the writer was wrong because he didn't pray on the altar of mopar but approached it as a businessman. Apparently that makes him an idiot if I read the thread correctly.

[StoneLC]

Seth makes a good point. Fortune is a business magazine and not a car mag. The whole article is spent approaching the issue in a business sense and why the author feels that the Challenger is not the right car for the time for a market that is looking for more fuel efficient cars and a company that is losing billions of dollars every year. It is only at the end of the article that he actually talks of the car itself, which he considers "extremely satisfying on its own terms: powerful on the straights and sticky in the turns." So it's not the car he finds fault with but rather the unfortunate timing/environment that the Challenger was brought into. He notes that it's difficult with a 4 year advance time to know what the market will be like when a car is finally introduced. He's not saying that no one will buy it or that people who do buy it are idiots... he mere concludes that Chrysler, from a business perspective, probably wishes they had something smaller and more fuel efficient to introduce right now instead. (Some fuel efficient smaller cars are selling at a rate of nearly 50k a month, nevermind the possible 50k a year planned for the Challenger).