https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiat-ch...al-11558935759




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Losers joining forces with losers will not end well.

 

The French aren't known for making reliable vehicles... sure Fiat isn't known for reliability, either, but they're slightly better than the French.

 

Fiat and Renault, two of the worst car companys there is today. I thought Renault and Nissan were together, did they get out of that?

 

Nope. Renault still owns Nissan.

Surprisingly, they've left Nissan alone.

It will be called FARTIN

Fiat And Renault Together Including Nissan

 

Remember it was Renault's money and technical lead that gave birth to the Cherokee XJ! That's about the only good thing that came out of the unholy marriage between Renault and AMC.

 

Care to elaborate a bit more? I am not extremely familiar with this history.

 

By the late 1970s, AMC was just about completely broke. They had blown their limited development capital in the 1970s on the Matador Coupe and Pacer, both of which flopped and failed to recoup their tooling costs. So there was no money left to engineer and tool up for new models. (The last AMC-designed passenger car, the Eagle, sold through 1987, was based on the 1970 Hornet and the basic Hornet platform was heavily based on the 1964 Rambler American.)

Renault bought into AMC starting in 1979, primarily to sell, and then build, Renault cars in the United States. Renault wound up pumping more money into AMC year after year, ultimately taking control of the company. (This wound up costing Renault CEO Georges Besse his life, as he was assassinated in 1986 by militants largely because he was laying off French workers while spending money in the U.S. on AMC.)

Without Renault providing the funding there is no way that AMC could have afforded to engineer and tool up the XJ, and Renault engineers were directly involved in its development. In fact the reason that the 258 six was not used in the early XJ is that the lead engineer from Renault, François Castaing, hated the Rambler/AMC six for some reason and deliberately designed the XJ engine bay so it would not fit. (Later the firewall was modified for the 4.0.)

Anyhow, that's the Cliff Notes version of the environment in which the XJ was developed. There's also a pretty good XJ Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeep_Cherokee_(XJ)

Also at allpar:

https://www.allpar.com/trucks/jeep/cherokee.html

 

You are 100% correct!!!! I lived through it.