This should have been obvious all along

By Gary S. Vasilash

While Sergio Marchionne’s “Confessions of a Capital Junkie,” a 2015 screed that included the recommendation that there be more sharing between OEMs (e.g., given that most people—unless those with a HEMI—don’t know what’s under their hoods, why should there be so many different I4’s and V6s when there could be an Acme Engine Company that could provide OEMs with common engines) helped make him seem like a visionary,  an early presentation he made about the brands on offer from Fiat-Chrysler was less perspicacious.

That is, he made it would like Fiat products would fly out of the dealerships—or “studios,” as they were called—because Americans can’t get enough of Italian design.

That didn’t work out so well.

No one can be right all the time.

Stellantis recently announced its efforts to “simplify its organization.”

This essentially means various executive assignments/reassignments that “allow for the right balance between regional and global responsibilities to enable speed of decision and execution.”

On the one hand, Stellantis wants to have economies of scale, which means using whatever it can wherever it can.

But on the other hand there is the non-trivial issue of providing customers in various markets what it is they actually want.

So, for example, people in the U.S. (broadly speaking) want Ram pickup trucks and they don’t want Fiat 500s.

You can’t share what people don’t want. If you do you end up with a whole lot of vehicles sitting on dealer lots.

Scale comes only when people are buying the products in number.

That’s really not hard to figure.

And someone(s) got really big bucks to make that determination.

Imagine.