A few final thoughts, in no particular order...
My dad always drove Dodges -- Dodge cars, Dodge pickups -- mainly, I think, because the guy who owned the agency was a friend. (Agency, not really a dealership) But eventually he bought an Oldsmobile, and then another Oldsmobile. Big, hulking landcruisers that I hated. But I didn't care for the Dodges either.
I knew a friend of a friend who owned a series of late-60s Dodge Chargers and Plymouth Roadrunners. He was a drug dealer (weed only) who didn't like to keep the same car for very long. But they were all in top condition when he bought them and when he sold them. Decent cars. I can't think of too many Chrysler Corp cars built since then that were very interesting.
I suppose I expected the merger of Daimler and Chrysler to produce great cars and great synergies. I don't know why it all went wrong. Probably the Germans were afraid of putting too much Mercedes technology into cheaper cars, diminishing the Mercedes allure.
But Chrysler really needed new ideas, new engines, new transmissions, new standards of quality. It was okay to build PT Cruisers on the Neon platform -- but it was not okay to keep building them year after year because they didn't have any other ideas of what else to build.
Jeep actually has a decent lineup, all it needs are diesel engines in every model. But I'm not sure about the current lineup of Dodges and Chryslers. In an era of increased emphasis on fuel economy, there is something odd about designing cars with practically no aerodynamic qualities. I'm sure it is easier to engineer a car that way -- you can fit tall engines in there that wouldn't fit in a smaller compartment. But the cars they built in the 1990s, the Stratuses and Cirrruses, at least looked as as though they could be fuel-efficient. The Avengers and Magnums are great designs for another era -- maybe if they drop the "It's got a Hemi" tagline and substitute "It's got a V6 turbodiesel with 400 pounds of torque, and gets 45 mpg on the highway, and has a range of 900 miles per tank"?
And if the Calibre and Compass has engines very much like the 2.0 TDI, who wouldn't want one? Instead they have dinky 1.8 gas engines with not much power below 4000-5000 rpm.
Chrysler, and Ford and GM, suffer from a problem with timing. They are always about five years late when they introduce new models. That makes it hard to catch up with the competition.
