Vice President Joe Biden tells Chrysler employees at the Jeep assembly plant in Toledo that the Democratic administration saved the auto industry.
Vice President Joe Biden says he’s a Corvette guy. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown tells a story about his daughters picking the color of the Ford Thunderbird he bought. Are we in a Chrysler plant?
Biden visited the Jeep plant in Toledo, giving the expected stump speech about how Democrats – particularly President Obama and himself – were the only ones who believed in Chrysler and GM 21 months ago when the companies went to Washington, hat in hand to ask for help in saving the companies.
Speaking before about a thousand Jeep employees, with the Jeep Wrangler assembly line as a backdrop, Biden said Democrats saved the American auto industry as naysayers suggested that the industry needed to die before it could be reborn.
The lack of focus on Chrysler illustrates how desperately Chrysler needs to get new product into its dealers. With a dearth of new product, politicians are left to tell anecdotes that are too far away from the focus of the event.
The story of saving these two automakers is a good one.
Letting GM and Chrysler die was not acceptable, Biden said, pointing to the Jeep complex,where three key suppliers make parts for Jeep vehicles assembled on site, as an example of what would be lost. It’s not just about the Chrysler employees who work along the assembly line.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs associated with the assembly lines,” Biden said.
But he also talked about how his first plan upon graduating from high school was to get a job working the third shift at the former GM plant in Delaware. He mentioned an Aug. 19 article in The Economist suggesting that critics owed Obama an apology because the effort to bail out GM has been a huge success.
Chrysler seems to be forgotten little brother in all of this. A lot of that has to do with a lack of new metal from Chrysler in recent years. And some of the ones the company’s recent ones, most notably the Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Avenger, are better off forgotten.
It’s the products, the car, that drive the automotive industry. Make unimpressive cars that don’t capture the public’s imagination and you quickly become irrelevant. Very quickly.
A long-time employee told me as we were waiting for Biden to make his appearance that for years, the company was unable to invest in new product, the lifeblood of any auto company. He said that during the short time Cerberus, an investment firm, owned Chrysler, there was little product development. “All they did was fire people.” Before that, Daimler was notoriously tightfisted with development dollars.
Things appears to be different these days. Jeep finally has a new vehicle, the Grand Cherokee, which is getting good reviews. The automaker is promising several new models during the next couple of years, many using Fiat platforms and technology.
Doug Nowak, a 25-year-veteran of the Jeep plant, introduced Biden and later admitted working for Chrysler has been difficult at times.
“We’ve been through a lot here,” said Nowak, who works as a liaison between UAW employees and management. “The people here want to build good vehicles.”