DaimlerChrysler’s struggling Chrysler division should soon see an increase in sales from its line of all-new or redesigned cars and trucks, a senior company official said.
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“I think in the second quarter we should start to see some lift there. Things are taking off at this point in time,” outgoing chief operating officer Wolfgang Bernhard told Reuters, when asked how soon new products would translate into higher US sales.
The news agency said he referred to, among other vehicles, the Chrysler 300, an all-new, flagship sedan.
That model, together with the Chrysler PT Cruiser convertible recently launched in the US, makes its European press debut in France at the end of April.
Reuters said nine new models are coming from Chrysler and its Dodge and Jeep divisions this year, part of 25 due over the next three years, and, in an industry where product is king, company officials are clearly hoping that glittering new sheet metal will give their long-running turnaround efforts traction.
“This will finally mean that Chrysler has taken off,” Bernhard reportedly said of the product offensive. After a long drought, the automaker is finally getting “some air under the wings,” he said, according to Reuters.
Bernhard was appointed to head DaimlerChrysler’s Mercedes-Benz unit in February and spoke to Reuters at a luncheon marking the handover of his No. 2 spot at Chrysler to Tom LaSorda, a manufacturing chief hired from General Motors in 2000.
Bernhard reportedly has overseen aggressive cost-cutting efforts at Chrysler as part of a plan aimed at returning it to long-term profitability but he has also been deeply involved in product planning and design at the carmaker, and promised that that aspect of his work would give Chrysler’s sales momentum in future.
Bernhard, who takes up his new post in Germany on May 1, told Reuters there were things he would miss about Chrysler and what he called its “closely knit” management team but he added that the US unit was “a mess” when he joined it in November 2000 and said he and other executives had saved an icon of American manufacturing from a close brush with disaster.
“It gives me great satisfaction to say the company survived,” he said, according to Reuters, adding: “We made this company survive and brought it through a time that was pretty difficult.”
