Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer, director of the Center for Automotive Research in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, said capacity will need to shift to emerging markets such as India and China, not saturated markets like the United States and Europe, where most of the dealmaking is centered.
All the changes brings to mind past unhappy auto mergers: Ford with Land Rover and Jaguar, Chrysler with Germany's Daimler AG, and General Motors with Fiat.
A big exception, Dudenhoeffer said, is Volkswagen AG, which gathers multiple brands from Bentley to Lamborghini to Skoda under one roof. "But it took 20 years to bring them onto the same technical platforms," he said.
This should, but won’t, give pause to boisterous Saturn buyer Roger Penske, who is planning on using Saturn dealerships as a platform to sell multiple brands of foreign cars. Indy Roger says that will only happen when those unspecified brands meet GM quality before he’ll sell their cars through Saturn as a multi-brand dealer network. Besides the laughableness of that, with many foreign brands already ahead of GM, one that isn’t yet is working on that.
When India’s Tata is looking at coming to America, not the other way around, Roger Penske should shut up until he can prove something.
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