It’s happened: Ford and VW are teaming up buddy-cop style to face the headwinds of electrification and autonomous vehicle technology. Their collaboration will no doubt save each company billions of dollars in development costs and possibly serve as a blueprint for other companies looking to do the same. These automakers may have just secured a viable path to prosperity going forward, a feat that will be considerably more difficult as we drift farther away from peak automobile with each passing day.
The details of the plan are actually pretty simple: Ford and VW are collaborating in three different areas: autonomous driving tech, electrification, and commercial vehicles. The first part involves VW becoming an equal stakeholder in Argo AI, which until now was Ford’s exclusive autonomous tech developer. The second aspect of the deal has Ford using VW’s modular electric vehicle platform for a European-only small car. Finally, each company will build commercial vehicles for one another. Ford’s next gen Ranger and Transit will spawn VW variants, while VW’s next gen city van will serve as the basis for a new Transit Connect.
It’s a pretty solid plan that is ambitious yet rational. And it got me thinking about other successful alliances. For this QOTD the definition of alliance will be porous. Basically any collaboration between two or more automakers that ostensibly compete against each other is fair game.
My personal pick is the Ford/Mazda/Volvo “partnership” that produced the second generation Ford Focus (for Europe), 2003 Mazda 3, and 2004 Volvo S40. In that example, three automakers got together and created a platform with very good driving dynamics. The platform saved each company a substantial amount of money and none of the cars were ever accused of being badge engineered. I’ll have more on this later, but Ford’s relationship with Mazda and Volvo may have been more important to the Blue Oval avoiding bankruptcy than anything else the company did around the time of the recession.
Anyway, that’s my contribution. What’s your favorite automotive alliance?
This one worked out spectacularly:
Far more unsuccessful alliances come to mind versus successful ones.
I’d say Chrysler/Mitsubishi from 1970 to 1990 represents the best example here in the US. On the Chrysler side, they gained access to critical product (both cars and engines) that helped keep the doors open in a dark time, while Mitsubishi could use a pipeline for their product until they could build their own dealership structure.
While the alliance didn’t survive, both companies still live on in some form, which makes it much more successful than many other examples.
Great example, Dave. For Mitsubishi, it gave them the distribution and inroads into the US that they needed; sort of like access to a major highway to travel on. Chrysler needed better vehicles for that highway. The Dodge Stealth was a great example of that…..they saved money on R&D, while for Mitsubishi, it was a great opportunity to get what was essentially their car into the hands of the general public that may have otherwise not driven a foreign car.
One of my favorite examples is Ford/ Yamaha, with the 1989 Taurus SHO–American car, but with a high revving DOHC exotic engine….a truly exciting package and as a sedan.
I would give an honorable mention to the collaboration that produced the Saab 9000, Alf Romeo 164, Fiat Croma and Lancia Thema….The 9000 certainly extended Saab’s life and gave them a competitive large car.
Another possible honorable mention is the creation of the V6 PRV then Peugeot, Renault and Volvo created together and was used in their cars during the 1970s and 1980s.
No too sure about the honorability of that one, in that it was never much of an engine. Reliability not great, power out put per litre very ordinary, all with very ordinary fuel economy.
Same factory did produce the alloy ohc four for Renault and PSA, which, while nothing special either, was at least very tough.
Sure, the strategic alliances do save costs, but mostly they keep the new alliance partner off their turf yet still on their side. This is more similar to how royal families pawned off children to other royal houses of other countries more than a buddy cop movie. By having a spare royal child wed the future ruler of another kingdom, it lessened the possibility of that kingdom sacking the one providing the spouse as well as allying the two houses.
In this case, I notice that VW stays mostly off the North American truck market, and Ford stays mostly clear in Europe. Where they do overlap, one ceded that to the other where strongest. That, in my opinion, is a win-win.
The closest to this from history seems to be Mercedes and Studebaker. Neither was the big dog, and both got something good out of it. It did not last long, but it did help while it lasted.
” It did not last long, but it did help while it lasted.”
Especially for those Studebaker dealers who picked up a Mercedes franchise. No Studebaker dealers remain, but those with a Mercedes sign continued on and typically flourished.
Ford is a full line truck seller in Europe. The company sells the Transit in four different sizes, and covers the medium duty & vocational segments with the Ford Cargo and the semi tractor market with the F-Max, which came out in 2018. The latter two are products of Ford Otosan in Turkey.
VW’s new relationship with Ford may also be strained a bit by VW’s purchase of part of Navistar. Navistar is in bed with GM, as the Silverado 4500-6500 are built by Navistar and are also badge engineered as Internationals. Additionally, Navistar’s IC Bus subsidiary uses a Chevrolet big block V8 (built by Husker Power Products rather than GM and upsized to 537 cid/8.8 liters) in its gas-powered school buses, rather than Ford’s competing Triton V10.
The heavy Turkish Ford trucks and tractors (Cargo and F-Max) are not offered on the major northwestern European market. The intention seems to be there, a successful execution will be an entirely different story.
Ford left the “ruck” market in Europe, selling a majority stake to Iveco (=Fiat) back in the late 1980s. Well present in the light truck and van market though. The Turkish built trucks ae not sold west of Turkey. The Ford Cargo is now an Iveco product, sold as the Iveco Eurocargo
I always thought Chrysler and Mercedes would be good. Of course, I was wrong.
When I saw those Dr. Z. commercials on TV, I said to myself, this is not going to last too long.
While it might be apocryphal, my favorite story I heard from the merger was that there was a large fight over whether the paper they used would be standardized on Letter or A4.
So today is the day I stop being a Ford guy. R.I.P FoMoCo. And real Volkswagens do not have radiators. The Mahindra ROXOR is the only rig left thats worth a damn. So sick of todays motherboards with wheels. It’s no wonder collector cars command top dollar and no big surprise why todays auto repair shops have a permanent “Help Wanted” sign out front.
Just out of curiosity, what’s your current daily driver?
Volkswagen hasn’t sold an air cooled vehicle in the US since 1983 and the ROXOR is literally not street legal in the US. Not quite sure what the point is here.
The NUMMI Toyota/Chevies partnership let the consumer have Toyota-ish quality at Chevy prices. So that’s good. Even though the Nova’s and Prisms were so boring.
Ford/Volvo and the Diamond-Star collaboration helped both companies I think. That generation Focus was a blast to drive.
Daimler/Chrysler was parasitic and degrading to both in the long run. Sucked Chrysler dry and Mercedes quality went to poo. And stayed there.
AMC was a very good try destined to fail. But the Matador coupe is still googly-badass® to me. Most of their cars were boring and sad. But Jeeps have always been cool.
Renault just destroyed Nissan. Prior to that they were some of my favorite cars. I always wanted a late-80s Maxima or 240SX. Because Japanese and awesome.
FCA couldn’t have turned out any other way. Very fun and exciting. Briefly.
Yes I paraphrased Jeremy Clarkson there. Because he is as googly-badass® as the Matador coupe. And just as funny-looking.
British-Leyland! The most efficient way to carpet-bomb Europe with crappy cars. The UN is still trying to find the remaining ones before they injure anyone else who has eyes or self-respect. Wretched, wretched things.
Except the Rover SD1 because it one of my favorite Matchbox cars.
Mazda and Ford. Ford benefited from Mazda small car know how and Mazda benefited from Ford’s management style of vehicle development. Somewhere on these pages I read that Mazda used to put a product on the market and then figured out how to make money on it. Ford insisted on planning for profitability from day one. The Mazda 323 was standing by for the Ford Escort and the Mazda 6 was doing that for the Ford Fusion, and there was also the Ford Escape and the related Mazda Tribute.
NUMMI should be mentioned too. After all I am enjoying a NUMMI product right now (Pontiac Vibe) and we had an ’89 Geo Prizm as well.
This combination keeps on giving. I have an old Mazda badged Ford Ranger, which means I got a $500 discount on my new MX5.
This arrangement worked out very nicely for Ford in AU, NZ and other markets during the 80s and 90s with the Laser and Telstar
seems like a good idea to me. two carmakers with serious engineering chops who both have taken it on the chin recently decide to team up.
Well…nobody can say it hasn’t (partly) been tried before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoLatina
Brazilian Escorts had for quite awhile VW 1.8 engines and VWs had 1.6 Ford engines.
The VW Santana was transgmogrified (well, badge-engineered) into a Ford Versailles.
The Ford Verona (a 2-door notchback Escort sedan) was copied into the VW Apollo.
And Escort gave birth to the Apollo, a 5-door VW.
Oh, and the time they did the Seat Alhambra/ Ford Galaxy/VW Sharan minivan triplets together (from 1995 to 2006). I belive VW was responsible for desinging the car and for constructing the plant. They broke up in 2006 when VW bought the factory and soldiered on with the old desing untill 2010, while Ford made a very successful S-Max/Galaxy duo on the Mondeo platform. But untill 2006 you were able to buy a Ford with a TDI badge for all its worth. Vw is still making Sharan/Alhambra in Portugal at the original site.
Ford is in bed with several manufacturers PSA for diesels VW Mazda, never mind the divorce from Mazda the Global Ranger is shared with Mazda their version is the BT50, I’m wondering which vehicle will become the new Ranger the Thai developed BT50/Ranger or the actual Amarok which is really good but vastly overpriced here.
Another interesting Chrysler mash-up was none other than VW when VW rebranded the 2008 Grand Caravan as the Routan. AFAIK, the Routan was okay, infused with just enough VW DNA to make it an interesting minivan alternative. I have no doubt that might not have happened if not for Daimler running the company at the time.
And speaking of Chrysler, although the ‘good’ Chrysler/Mitsubishi and ‘bad’ Chrysler/Daimler ventures have already been mentioned, the one that I think was more critical than either of those was Chrysler/Simca. Without Simca’s FWD knowledge, the Omnirizon might never have come to pass, at least in a way that may have actually saved Chrysler. It’s been written that the Omnirizon was the vehicle that convinced Iacocca that Chrysler had a future and to take the helm. And there’s yet another VW connection in how VW supplied Chrysler with short engine assemblies for the first iterations of the Omnirizon. Lots of Simca/VW in those first Omnirizons…
OTOH, Simca was acquired during Lynn Townsend’s mad dash in the sixties to scarf up all the remaining European bit-players like Rootes and Sunbeam, as well as diversifying into dead-ends like Airtemp and Chrysler Marine. Maybe if he’d skipped all of those money-losing projects and, instead, poured that same money into product development (you know, in things other than the ill-fated E-body ponycar), the resulting version of the Omnirizon would have been the same, regardless. Who knows, maybe the F-body Aspen/Volare might have enjoyed a reputation as solid as the A-body Valiant/Dart they replaced.
Chrysler Marine was a good business in the 60s and 70s. The boat business was sold as a condition of the loan guarantees. Chrysler got out of the power business in the late 80s.
Lynn Townshend had nofhing to do with ‘acquiring’ Airtemp. Chrysler Corporation was a pioneer in commercial and domestic air conditioning in the 30s. The Chrysler Building was the first air conditioned skyscraper.
Chrysler Marine was actually two different businesses. The original went back to the 1920s when Chrysler became the original supplier of off-the-shelf purpose-engineered marine engines for boat builders. The traditional marine engine trade had been a low-volume, highly customized engine business.
It was in the 60s that Chrysler got into the light boat and outboard motor field and this is the Chrysler Marine that most people think of.
Historically? Anybody + whoever was making Jeeps at the time.
Also Chrysler + Packard would have been a great combination. Both were companies with great engineering operations. Chrysler never got all that far with the Imperial and Packard was never successful combining their senior cars with the medium priced stuff. A Packard Division would have been the capstone to Chrysler in the 50s and beyond.
Now? FCA and Hyundai/Kia.
Yes indeed, Chrysler and Packard would have been a perfect match.
As noted before in these pages, Packard depended on the Briggs company for all their body production. In December, 1953, Chrysler bought Briggs’ entire US body building operation. There were twelve plants, ten in Detroit, and two in Youngstown, Ohio and Evansville, Indiana. The Packard body plant was leased to Packard. So the seeds of partnership were there.
But Packard president James Nance was more interested in running a bigger independent company than a division of Chrysler. As of October 1, 1954, Packard bought failing Studebaker without enough due diligence into Stude’s financial condition. Then just seven days later, AMC’s George Mason died and a possible merger died with him. 1956 was a terrible sales year for S-P, and Nance quit. The last “Packard” was built in 1958. (Details from Wikipedia.) If only…
Nance had impressive marketing smarts, honed in the appliance world where it can be difficult to make your brand stand out. He had a good sense for what needed to be done to make Packard relevant again (a modern V8 that was more powerful than Cadillac’s, engineering selling points like the front/rear connected Torsion Ride suspension and limited slip differential, and modernized styling that was much flashier without being gaudy). And he found the right people to make it happen, like Bill Allison who designed the brilliant suspension and Dick Teague who did the equally brilliant 1955 facelift. Things may have turned out very differently had Nance settled for being the marketing SVP and left the accounting and financial stuff to someone who actually understood how it worked.
Aside from company-swallowing mergers, Willys made several productive alliances. Willys + IH gave IH access to small trucks. Willys + Bantam = Jeep, which Willys still makes. In Brazil, Willys + Renault = Interlagos, and Willys + Ford = Maverick with a Willys OHC 6.
Austin pollinated BMW, Nissan, and Bantam.
With Ford and VW teaming up partly to build EVs together, I expected to find commonality between EVs by longtime partners Nissan and Renault. Combined 2018 sales volume of Nissan Leaf and Renault Zoe (pictured below) would be #2 worldwide after Tesla.
But surprisingly, the two EV programs appear to be separate, without any sharing of major components. For example, Nissan partnered with NEC in a joint venture to build batteries, while Renault works with LG Chem.
PS: News is that they do have plans to build new EVs on a common platform in the next few years. https://www.alliance-2022.com/electrification/
Henry Ford and Harry Ferguson was one of the most combustible. Fun to watch.
Greatest historical automotive alliance would have to be General Motors which went global brands like Vauxhall in the UK Opel in Germany and Holden in Australia as well as American car and parts manufacturers, mostly gone now,
Volkswagen’s acquisition of Auto Union (Audi) in 1965 and Chrysler’s acquisition of AMC in 1987 were both considered relatively minor at the time, yet both likely wound up saving the companies doing the buying. After holding on to their increasingly obsolete Beetle-based air-cooled rear engine cars well past their sell-by date, Audi’s engineers provided VW a path to quickly transition to a state of the art front-drive lineup, as well as the Audi brand itself that would eventually become a major player in the luxury market on par with Mercedes and BMW. Likewise, designs evolved from the Eagle Premier helped Chrysler move on from the K-car era, along with the Jeep lineup and brand, perfectly timed at the cusp of the SUV boom. How much do you think Jeep contributes to FCA’s bottom line today?
When one considers the history of how poorly auto mergers succeed, Chrysler has had some stunningly good luck. Yeah, there were failures but, somehow, Chrysler has managed to survive. Even today, the Fiat alliance has actually done surprisingly well.
To la673’s point: as I have learnt on this site, the purchase of AMC and the inheritance of the Eagle platform and, especially, the Jeep XJ means that the great Chryco was also in part saved by way of Renault engineering!
Not just the XJ but the first Wrangler too.
It wasn’t really an alliance, really an acquisition, but GM buying Saab and the brief partnership (?) with Subaru and Suzuki just seemed weird to me. On the Suzuki side, GM had native small cars from Opel etc, Isuzu, Suzuki, NUMMI and probably others all at the same time. Subaru? Well, I think there was a bowtie-branded Forester sold in India, and of course the Saabaru’s sold in the US. But Saab really didn’t make sense, for either side. It seemed like GM looked at Ford/Volvo and said, “hey, we can do that too”.
nash and hudson.
Honestly it’s kind of disappointing to see a Metropolitan with the big old H on it these days but it seemed promising at the time, I guess.
GM Canada and Suzuki had an excellent partnership in Canada starting in 1986. For a good fifteen years, Canada was awash with Sprints and Trackers. They were simple, reliable units that were legendary in Canada. Then GM let these cars wither on the vine and yet another market segment was abandoned.
Daimler and Benz in 1926. That little merger worked out pretty well.
My favorite “what if” is of course the Packard/Studebaker merger already mentioned above. That one had interesting possibilities at every step that could have played out differently.
The most intriguing of those involve what would have happened if AMC’s George Mason would have lived to consummate the 4-way merger with Studebaker-Packard to create a full-line company that would have been larger than Chrysler. It may have meant Packards and Studebakers (and maybe Hudsons and Nashes) would still be found in new-car showrooms today. But it seems even more likely that losses at Studebaker could have brought the whole shebang down with it, or that the difficult job of merging four companies from different states and with few shared parts would have never been accomplished. The loss of AMC wouldn’t at first seem to change the course of automotive history all that much beyond not having funky Gremlins and Pacers to
laugh atadmire, but it also means Kaiser would have still been in the Jeep business unless they found another buyer, and probably wouldn’t have ultimately landed in the hands of Chrysler/FCA. Would Kaiser-Jeep have been bought by GM or Ford instead? Might they have merged with International Harvester to create a truck and SUV powerhouse? Been bought out by some Chinese manufacturer?Austin Motor Car Co. ……..
& John Healey
Rolls and Bentley led to the glorious Derby Bentleys, some of which are amongst the sweetest cars of the 1930’s. Ultimately, it also led to the survival of the brands to the present.
PSA seems to keep acquiring brands, Citroen a Peugeot to begin with then the miss managed remnants of Chtysler Europe Rootes, Simca et al more recently Opel/Vauxhall ironic when you consider two competing brands in England Ford and GM one is owned by PSA and the other uses PSA diesel powertrains, my local dealer hasnt hung hOLDEN flags yet but I guess they will eventually.
PSA and Toyota. Toyota is an expert in A-segment hatchbacks (citycars), PSA knows everything about building compact and mid-size FWD (panel) vans.
The successful results so far:
Toyota Aygo, Peugeot 108 (previously 107) and Citroën C1.
Peugeot Partner, Citroën Berlingo, Opel Combo, Toyota ProAce City.
Peugeot Expert, Citroën Jumpy, Opel Vivaro, Toyota ProAce.
Feels as though we are talking about two different things here: alliances, when the parties get together for a couple of dances then part (eg Ford/VW Sharalaxy), and mergers/acquisitions, which have to be unpicked at vast expense after everything’s gone badly wrong (Daimler/Chrysler).
Ford has a long history of alliances, which it’s used well to achieve specific market goals. This one’s my favourite:
BMW and Rolls-Royce seems to be working well, and somewhat better than Citroen and Maserati did.