Originally posted by neon_duke
The comment about Mercedes Benz being violent rapists stems from the Daimler-Benz "merger" with Chrysler a few years ago. This was sold to the public as a merger of equals, when in reality it was nothing less than corporate rape. Daimler took voting control of Chrysler, then literally transferred all the available cash to Germany. This amounted to about $8 billion - not chump change. Chrysler, which was near the top of its form in the middle of the '90s, was in the best cash position of the American Big Three, and they had a lot of money earmarked for continual product development. A lot of exciting all-American stuff was in the pipeline, too. All that got stripped away and transferred to Dailmler-Benz accounts, leaving Chrysler nearly broke.
As if that wasn't brutal enough, Daimler has also started requiring Chrysler to use more expensive Mercedes-sourced parts, while forcing Chrysler to pay Mercedes a share of the engineering costs of the parts they are being required to use. And if that's not bad enough, Daimler is slashing Chrysler's development money and telling them that they need to make cars with a bigger profit margin.
Daimler also tried to cut thousands of American engineering staff, despite the fact that Chrysler was pretty lean and mean in the post-Iaccocca years, and MB's engineering is overstaffed. In fact, it's bloody amazing that Chrysler has managed to produce anything as worthwhile as the SRT series when they are as crippled as heavily as they are by German control.
It's mismanagement so brutally bad that it simply has to be purposely done. So, yeah, you won't catch me driving a Mercedes until the day I can put studded snowtires on it and drive through Hell repeatedly running over Bob Eaton and Juergen Schrempp.
