CIEMR: Have you heard the buzz?
We have all noticed the high prices for everything from Chrysler, Dodge, Ram, and Jeep this year and last. Stellantis Jacked up prices in 2023 and had a record sales year. They took most of that profit and paid their executives. The CEO earned a record $700 million dollars!!!!!!!!!!
But folks were straining to keep up. I mean, who can afford trucks around $100K? I saw that many new car loans have payments of $1500-$1800 a month! Additionally, inventory has built up so much that many dealerships have new 2023, 2024, and 2025 units of the same car sitting side by side. Ever heard the term, "Lot-Rot?" Inventory of some models is sitting around 405 days, and there are many reports of dealerships allowing some of their cars to actually be repossessed by the bank holding their floor plans! This is unprecedented!
They are in the process of closing down some plants, going down to just two shifts in others and just this week someone exposed plans by Stellantis to move all of their plants to Mexico except for the one in Windsor! Thousands of workers are being laid off and a good percentage of the senior leadership has retired, quit, or been fired.
It looks like they are considering selling off the whole kit and kaboodle, and it looks like BYD is looking to purchase it. Who is BYD, you ask? Well they are the largest manufacturer of automobiles in the world and they are a Chinese company. That's way bad news.
Looking forward, Stellantis has not tossed any life preservers to their dealership network. Incentives are seen to be too small, no price reduction is being talked about and they continue to push out unsellable vehicles to their dealerships. We used to have affordable cars from Chrysler. You could buy a basic tradesman 1500, with a hemi for around $42K. Now that vehicle starts around $59, and I saw one example listing at a hypoxic $71K. Now which middle-class worker paying high taxes, double for their food, and lofty health insurance premiums can afford that? The answer, of course, is no one and the Finance industry is my proof.
I read that now fully 25% of new car loans are denied. The numbers simply do not add up. Further, the number of cars being repossessed is also at an all-time high. Do you see a pattern here? Another point to take note of is the Biden Administration and the UAW all had prior knowledge of this. Is this one of their hammer strokes to kill the US working middle class? Sure looks like it to me!
Looking forward as a certain political party likes to say, there is only bad news on the horizon. Gone are the Hemi Challengers and V8 pickup trucks. Instead, they electrified an iconic American muscle car! And they put two speakers in the rear to simulate engine sounds! Have you ever heard of anything so stupid? They won't sell a single one of those things. And the V8-powered trucks now get a twin-turbocharged six-cylinder engine that sounds like a swarm of drunken beetles. Dealers are complaining that some of them won't even start! The engine problems have not been sorted out either, with this new tree-hugger-friendly power plant, but none of that is making headline news.
Our precious Jeeps are mostly all becoming electrified for 2025. Let me see if I got this right. You placed a battery pack that explodes when it comes into contact with water into a Jeep???!!! Is anyone left over there at Jeep with a brain? Does anyone at Stallantis actually know what we do with those Jeeps? I have had water over the fenders in mine twice so far. Oh, and you are now paying north of $70,000 to buy one. Did I mention that the batteries actually lose charge over time and will arrive at a point sometime when they don't work anymore? When a gas engine does that, you go to the junkyard and buy a used engine for $1,000, spend two weekends swapping it out, and send your teenager with his fresh driver's permit off for another five years of driving.
Americans, except for a few do not want electric cars. We don't want to wait at a charger station for thirty minutes just to get a spot to then charge for an hour, at 1 AM just so we can drive it to work the next day. Almost no one can do that. So, in full confession mode, I bought a new Tesla some years ago. About two months later when I realized that other than the fact it was as fast as an F-22 Raptor, well the love affair was over. I sold it and bought my Jeep which I still have years later. I couldn't drive that Tesla to a park in Ohio and make it back without diverting 50 miles to the north to recharge, so I realized it was just a cool novelty, not a serious car.
Should Stellantis implode and it sure looks like it will, a lot of people are going to be washing your windshield at the intersection for tips. Tens of thousands of factory workers, and workers from parts suppliers from a hundred different industries will be out of a good paying job. What then? What happens when they can't afford to make their health insurance payments? Well, the folks in Springfield, Ohio at least can borrow money from the Haitian immigrants, they seem to be flushed with cash. But most of them will get caught standing with no chair when the music stops.
The CEO, by the way, is European. Has a small European brain with, apparently, zero understanding of what the US market looks like. And his plans for the company? Instead of being true to the blue-collar roots folks who have kept Chrysler corporation going for 100 years by building affordable cars, he wants to transition the company to a Land Rover. See any Land Rovers parked in the street near your home? I didn't think so.
This is just another example of poor elitist leadership sailing the USS America into another rocky shoal. How many leaks can we take and still remain afloat?
