(Editors Note: This post was started to be in the series of the American Story of the Car alongside Dodge and Ford, but although all these companies have become multinational, that seems to be the Chrysler model of business. As you’ll soon see, the make some good cars and have had success, but they’re harder to classify as an American car Company.)
Fiat Chrysler might be reminiscent of the Chrysler building in New York – huge, imposing and with a certain amount of style. The cynic might also suggest that the Chrysler building has less wholesome things in common with the cars, such as being overpriced (in common with the rest of New York?) and a product of another era. But, as said above, this is a cynic’s view.
There a number of quite individualistic vehicles which come under the Fiat Chrysler brand, so how did it get to where it is?
The Fiat part of the company could be described as the oldest. The Fiat 4 HP sounds like it might be a twentieth century vehicle, maybe a SUV? But no, it was created in 1899 and looked more like a baby buggy than a modern Fiat car. A more noticeable thing is that it had no reverse gear, so parking would have been troublesome.
Standing for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Italian Factory of Cars, Turin) Fiat soon became the biggest automobile manufacturer in Europe. In 1970 they were employing 100,000 people. As well as cars they have also built such items as railway carriages, farm tractors and planes. Outside Italy, the biggest base for Fiat is Brazil where it is described as the market leader in manufacture.
The Chrysler part took over from the Maxwell Company in 1925 when it was founded by Walter Chrysler. He spent his defining years working as a railway mechanic before going into the motor trade (his father was also a locomotive engineer). The company in turn took over such brand vehicles as Dodge, Jeep and Ram as well as Fargo Trucks. In the 1960s the brand was taking over the Spanish, French and British car companies.
The takeover of Mitsubishi occurred in 1970s and in the late 1998 the company merged with Daimler-Benz . Both Daimler and Benz have a long history, Benz goes back to 1886 (before teaming up with the “more famous” Mercedes) while Daimler was spending that period of history converting stagecoaches with Wilhelm Maybach.
Although it was now a member of the Big Three companies, it didn’t stop Chrysler suffering losses in the crisis between 2008 and 2010 and had to be bailed out. This could be described as controversial; not all governments would top up their factories, especially for a non-nationalized company. A marketing slogan at the time was “Let’s Refuel America” but it seemed they were in need of a vital top up themselves…
The companies of Fiat and Chrysler were merged in May 2014. There is still a huge variety in vehicles under the label – foreign cars such as the Maserati and Lancia, as well as more American cars such as the Jeep or the Ram van. What they lose in a complete brand image, they make up for being all-encompassing.
What seems certain is that Fiat-Chrysler will continue to merge with and take over new car brands. It’s all about survival. And, in essence, finding what sort of car the American public wishes to own.
Gran Trak 10 in 1974 was confusingly the first arcade game to simulate car racing (there seems to be no Gran Trak 9, 8 and so on). It boasted very low-resolution, black and white graphics. In a mere two years violence became linked to race cars with the game, Death Race in 1976. Evidently the people at Exidy who made the game felt they were giving the public what they wanted and there was a notable jump in sales for the arcade machines.
Racing games seemed to be slow lane for about a decade until Super Mario Kart in 1992. Games had now acquired 3D imagery but had probably lost a sense of reality. The big thing about Super Mario Kart that it created a genre of fun character-based race games or “Kart games.”
It goes back even before video games to 1946 where the Monte Carlo method which relies on random sampling to create likelihood from which an algorithm can be built up. The Goal is to aid logistics and road planning to avoid bottlenecks. Municipalities wanted to know how fast emergency services could get to certain points, and so on. It was natural for video game developers to digitalize these algorithms so that the cars on a road or track, to have cars around the POV vehicle behave in a realistic manner in response to obstacles and road conditions.
Saxons built their roads along the path of least resistance, which generally means a bridge ends up at the best historical place to ford across the river long before the bridge existed. It also means that a lot of the roads in England were built where a cow pushed aside the brush making it easier for humans to pass as well.
A moving map display was first introduced in the 1950s using paper chart. The only problem is that they could only navigate one specific road, so if you had to travel somewhere obscure you were out of luck. Using a cell phone as a guide to where you are has some similarities to using a moving map display, except of course you are not confined to one road. With larger devices, such as the iPad, there’s room to change the display and allow for something resembling a Sat-Nav when using Google Maps.
Some pieces of copy might need you to become more interested in cars than you really are. “The best thing to happen to the 6 cylinder engine” – Chrysler Dodge. Why does it need to be a 6 cylinder engine? Would it be not so good if it was 7 cylinders? The 6 cylinder is apparently set at 30 degrees to produce a “bigger manifold system”. We’re not sure on the science, or really what they are going on about. To save a trip to the dictionary, the word manifold means “many and various” so it has the same meaning as system really.
You’ve got to love it when advertisers decide to highlight the most mundane items –for instance a Foam-Rubber Seat in a Mercury with the name “Lounge-Rest.” (Leather had yet to become the most obvious material for car seats). Strangely the carburettor has been nicknamed “Econ-O-Miser” because it doesn’t use that much gas, which seemed a common theme in writing copy for these types of advertisement.
The first big car washing franchise was Dan Hanna’s Rub-a-Dub. Starting in Oregon, Hanna Enterprises (as it became known) in 1955 it soon had 31 car washes all other America. In the 1960s the idea of soft friction washing, roller on demand conveyor belt (also known as a tunnel) and wrap around brush was introduced. It was not until the 1970s that you they introduced the automatic wheel cleaner and polish ‘n’ wax. By 1988, Hanna Enterprises grew to 80,000 car washes in 56 countries, the second biggest franchiser of the time, after McDonald’s of course. It now trades as Colman Hanna Carwash Systems and still owns a number of patents and trademarks linked to the car wash. So if you’ve used a car wash, you’ve probably used a system created by Hanna Enterprises.
The lasting memory in the minds of “Big Auto” was how only really excelling at selling gas guzzlers had left them vulnerable. After all, this was the second time that a large scale economic crash had knocked out the auto industry. The first time was in the 1980s. When the economy got going again this time it found the American automaker throwing everything it had behind convincing its fans to buy hybrids and electric cars.
We are so used to opening our windows electronically that we rarely think of it as technology at all. The power window seems to go back all the way to 1947 to the Cadillac Fleetwood. However the system was not (still is not) fool-proof. Power windows have produced injuries and even fatalities when obstacles got caught up in the window.