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FCA Canada’s $3.7-billion overhaul of its Windsor, Ont., minivan plant has created 1,200 new jobs, a sign that Canada will have a huge role in Fiat Chrysler NV’s future as it restructures its operations.
The company revealed its new Pacifica minivan, built in Windsor, to a Canadian audience for the first time Thursday at the Canadian International Auto Show in Toronto.
The Pacifica fits well into the parent company’s new strategy of building more pickups, SUVs and crossovers in the cost of passenger cars, said Reid Bigland, leader of FCA Canada.
The corporate overhaul includes a intend to get rid of the smaller Dodge Dart and Chrysler 200 in reaction to what CEO Sergio Marchionne believes is really a “permanent shift” away from passenger cars.
This may have been troubling news to Fiat Chrysler’s workers in Brampton, Ont., who build the Dodge Charger, Dodge Challenger and Chrysler 300 sedans.
But Bigland pledged Thursday that “Brampton is steady as she goes.”
“With respect towards the full-sized vehicles and especially the greater muscle-car oriented (vehicles), certainly the benefit of low fuel prices plays right into those vehicles’ wheelhouses,” Bigland said, adding that interest in them is stronger of computer has ever been.
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When asked if the company’s big-car-and-truck strategy could backfire if gasoline prices rise again, Bigland said he isn’t worried.
“I think the fallacy out there happens when fuel prices are up, people want small cars, and that’s incorrect,” said Bigland, who’s also Fiat Chrysler’s head of U.S. sales and head of the Alfa Romeo brand in North America.
“What people want is fuel-efficient vehicles – so the real key is to make large vehicles more relevant for a $4-a-gallon gasoline environment.”
Bigland pointed to the hybrid version of the Pacifica, which gets 2.9 litres per 100 kilometres, saying “it doesn’t get anymore fuel-efficient .”
Chrysler, before it was bought by Fiat during the economic crisis, struggled to adjust to changing consumer tastes when big SUVs and pickup trucks fell from favour within the mid-2000s as oil prices rose.
It appears the company might be making exactly the same mistake again, said Micheline Maynard, a long-time transportation reporter and author of The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market.
“They don’t genuinely have a car gene, this is the problem,” Maynard said in a recent interview.
“The more you focus on SUVs and pickup trucks, and also the more the brand Chrysler is identified with big vehicles, greater it will likely be, if the market turns, for Fiat Chrysler to convince people who they care about fuel efficiency.”
Financial Post
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