More irrelevant auto trivia
Chrysler had a long-standing habit of designing and tooling brand-distinct parts that didn't look different. You had to be a serious car fan to notice. Sometimes you had to compare cars side-by-side to see the difference. Why bother?

GM never made this mistake. Sloan and Earl understood how status works. When GM went to the trouble of tooling up a different part, it LOOKED different. You could tell without a microscope, and you could also tell which version had higher status. This makes perfect sense. If you're going to spend money on a change, it should cause the customer to spend more money to gain more status.

But Chrysler was smarter than GM or Ford just once.

Their Canadian rebadge of Dodge trucks was Fargo.

Same number of letters, so the two could use the same dies for badges, and use the same hole-drilling jigs for separate chrome letters. The separate letters could reuse the G and O.

GM already had Chevrolet and GMC trucks before it expanded into Canada, so it used them as the lower and upper brands in Canada.

Ford rebadged its slightly fancier trucks from Ford to Mercury for Canada. This did have the advantage of visibility; you can see the long name vs short name from a distance; but it wasn't a necessary difference. In the first few years the Mercury trucks were dramatically fancier, so the label didn't need to be noticed.

Ford made the same mistake with Ford / Meteor and Falcon / Frontenac, but it saved money with Mercury / Monarch.

Ford is responsible for the most famous word-length amortization. The Comet was originally planned as the compact for Edsel. When Edsel was killed, a hasty change was needed, and Comet saved money in tooling as well as dealer signs.

Labels: Constants and Variables

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