May I?
May I ask why it is taking some 15 years to take a winning product to the market?
Now the market launch of the promised Maserati SUV is three years away.*
There is a pervasive scepticism in Italy about the recent and widely reported announcement of a 1 to 1.5 billions Euros investment for the new Maseratis and at Fiat's Mirafiori industrial complex for the production of the anticipated Maserati Levante luxury SUV, and possibly a all-new Alfa Romeo model, a SUV or a premium sport sedan.
Information from different sources seems to confirm the official information lacks credibility, as their pieces do not match convincingly. It is not the first time that Sergio Marchionne statements and comments are contradicted by the reality of facts.
Insiders say there is no need for another factory to reach the highly optimistic production (and sale) volume of 50,000 Maserati per year expected by the company by 2016.
WHY THE U.S.A. SHOULD PROMISE HIGH TAX ON FUEL IN THREE TO FIVE YEARS, RIGHT NOW.
In my humble opinion, Lee Iacocca was absolutely right when he proposed again and again to double the price of fuel. The U.S.A. car industry would have not been so much in trouble back in 2009, if they had listened to Lee.
Perhaps looking ahead and taking a medium or long-term view on strategic choice is not fashionable in the auto-industry and related government policies. A report in the annual publication of the British «Guild of Motoring Writers» anticipated the first dramatic Fiat crises around 1998 four to five years earlier. The same was true for the easy-to-anticipate failure of the Fiat-GM alliance when it was announced in a number of printed magazines published around the world. It simply could not work and it didn’t.
Wolfgang Egger, 50, has moved to Torino to meet the ultimate designer’s challenge at Italdesign.
In its 45 years, the Italian think-tank has only had two directors of styling (they call it this way to stress they also do engineering work and a lot more) whose name is on the top of the building: nothing less than Giorgetto and Fabrizio Giugiaro.
Egger is the first non family-member to take that responsibility and if he succeeds he will be ready to replace Walter De Silva when he will eventually resign.
Audi’s design team has done extremely in the past seven years under Egger’s management and the current and coming range of cars are there to witness his success.
Probably there was not much more that Egger could deliver to Audi for second next model generation.
Now can he do as much and as well for many more brands of the VW Group?
