By George Kennedy
Last week, Fiat-Chrysler announced some major changes in its product lineups, including the shuttering of SRT as a standalone brand, and a few newly redesigned vehicles. Now comes the rub– the newly merged boards of Fiat and Chrysler will move global headquarters to the UK.
In a move that is sure to anger American taxpayers, Fiat-Chrysler is moving its global HQ to London, England, which it considers to be neutral ground between Chrysler’s home of Michigan and Fiat’s home of Turin, Italy.
Next year, UK’s corporate tax is set to drop from 21% to 20%, and for such a large company, that could mean quite a bit in savings– especially considering that Italy charges a corporate tax of 31.4%.
Meanwhile, Fiat-Chrysler is setting about an ambitious plan to rethink its model lineups. We’ve already seen some of the changes announced, but more are surely on the way– especially if it wants to meet its goal of increasing output by 61% by 2018.
These aspirations are likely to fall on deaf ears back here in the U.S. The American people bailed out Chrysler to the tune of $7.6 billion back in 2008.
Still, Sergio Marchionne and the rest of Fiat’s leadership followed the rules laid out by the U.S. government when the sale went through.
That included slowly ramping up ownership. Now that Fiat has the controlling stake, it is setting about plans that it likely wanted to execute from the start.
We’ll be very curious to see how this effects the brand’s longterm plans, and how it resonates with Americans.
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