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Are we being told, like John Cleese in the Norwegian Blue sketch, that Chrysler's not dead, but has lovely plummage? To plug gaping holes in its truck-heavy lineup, the U.S. automaker already plans to stick a Chrysler badge on a restyled Nissan Versa subcompact...

Can't leave Chrysler out.  Today, the Pentastar announced they will close St. Louis South (minivan plant) and cut St. Louis North (Dodge Ram plant) to just one shift.  Chrysler has ridden the minivans and Rams for nearly 15 years - for a period time, both plants were open daily with multiple shifts...

Are hard times the right time to announce a price increase? Chrysler's U.S. vehicle sales fell an adjusted 20 percent in the first five months of the year from a year earlier, hit by tumbling demand for trucks and large SUVs...

A little over a month ago I had a blog entry (No Smoke, No Fire) about Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault-Nissan, saying that the deal to allow Chrysler to market the Versa in South America was as far as it goes. That's all there was to it and nothing further was in the works. Um, yea...

No news here. Nope. Nothing going on...

Until around 1950, there was a Wild West-like attitude in the American automotive industry. It was a frontier to be conquered. Throughout automotive history, there have been something like 5,000 individual makers of cars and trucks in the world with about 3,500 of them being situated in the United States...

In a previous life, people relied on me to keep them abreast of the goings-on in the automotive world. My current life makes knowing the restoration market a little more important than the global production of cars and trucks, but that doesn't mean I've stopped paying attention. All the buzz in the American automotive industry today, aside from "when is the market coming back," is about CAFE...

Sometimes you have to scratch your head at the ideas that get tossed around. Nissan and Chrysler are in talks to provide each other with vehicles in a deal that would enable the carmakers to expand product offerings and keep factories busy in the face of slowing markets. I'm trying to figure out how Nissan comes anywhere close to benefitting as much as Chrysler from this potential collaberation...

As I write that title, my thoughts go back to the Diana Ross/Lionel Richie classic "Endless Love." And that connects well with the idea of the first car I ever fell in love with. I must have been about 14 or 15. My father and I would drive up to Altoona on Saturday mornings to play raquetball...

I'm not sure why this is surprising anyone, but it is. Chrysler LLC said Thursday it plans to cut up to 12,000 jobs and remove four models from its lineup. Scaling back their capacity to match their production would seem to be a necessity for survival...