ok we all know the world is going mad and going down..espesh the car industry is hit the worst.

we know jag, aston, honda are going down the pot, walker renault where my bro bought his car has also shut.

so what state is fiat in does anybody know?i iant heard anything.

all i know is there pulling the stop production for 3 months in 2009 with quite a few other car companies,

( and churchil suzuki will be dead within a month or two )

Who is Churcil Suzuki? Has he got something to do with Fiat?

a lot of people that are cutting back on buying big expensive cars are still needing a car to get to work in, so with cars like the 500 fiat should do better than some

Its been pretty well covered on here, but there are many rumours of Fiat merging with PSA (Peugeot/Citreon) to stave off the depression we are in and is so doing creat eth worlds 4th largest car company, and only this week Fiat had to pay a $18M fine for bribes to Iraq during Saddam Hussain regime to secure contracts.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/b...s-out-18m-to-settle-iraq-charges-1208617.html

Fiat have also laid of 47,000workers for prolonged Christmas break and in Italy alone Fiat sales are down 30%, and Italy as we all know if Fiats strongest market.

Alfa Romeo sales have dropped off the edge of a cliff and have actually sold less Alfa models this year than Lancia. Lancia launch in RHD markets has been put on hold, which considering this also includes most of Asia/Australia and not just UK, it is a massive potential market for them, but this quicker than expected down turn has caused them to rethink about launching what is perceived as a luxury brand.

And from top man himself Sergio Marchionne on the 8th Dec.

he global slump in car sales could sound the death knell for major automotive brands including BMW, with one automotive group CEO predicting only six high volume survivors.

Fiat group boss Sergio Marchionne has told Automotive News that 24 months from now the global car making scene is likely to look very different, with survival only guaranteed for groups that can build and sell more than 5.5 million vehicles a year. Currently that means Toyota, GM, Volkswagen, Ford and Renault-Nissan, and Marchionne’s view of the new global reality is stark.

‘We’re going to end up with one American house, one German of size, one French-Japanese, one in Japan, one in China and one potential European player,’ he told AM. ‘Independence in this business is no longer sustainable’.

While bigger companies can achieve cost savings and enjoy economies of scale, smaller outfits are likely to bear the brunt of the recession.

According to AM’s analysis, brands with a large ‘family-owned’ stake are at most risk – including BMW and Peugeot-Citroen, which could be put up for sale by the Quandt and Peugeot families. Fiat is also considered vulnerable.

While some predict mergers and acquisitions as the way for European brands to survive, others are more cynical citing EC competition rules and the failure of previous ventures like Daimler’s takeover of Chrysler and the BMW Rover debacle.

Although not Fiat, when the industries biggest and most successful company Toyota declares its going to make its first ever loss as a car maker, you have to take notice.

December 23, 2008 The Times

Fears for 40,000 jobs in British car trade as Toyota goes into red.

A further 800 jobs in Britain’s car industry were put at risk yesterday after Toyota Motor, the greatest example of Japan’s postwar economic miracle, warned that it will go into the red for the first time since 1941.

The possible job losses – 15 per cent of Toyota’s UK workforce – would add to the 40,000 positions expected to be eliminated from the UK car industry’s 200,000 over the next three years, as sharply declining demand for its cars is likely to trigger redundancies across Toyota’s business.

Toyota, which analysts universally believe to be the most innovative and efficient of the leading car companies, makes the Auris, the Avensis and Corolla models at its plant in Burnaston, Derbyshire, and manufactures engines at its Deeside factory in North Wales, which employ 5,250 people.

Toyota, which decided recently to halve the number of shifts on its Auris production line and will close its Burnaston plant for four weeks over the next four months, follows a string of carmakers in announcing moves to cut costs.

Vauxhall’s owners are in talks with trade unions over pay cuts and a four-day week and has offered nine-month sabbaticals to thousands of workers at its Ellesmere Port factory in the North West of England.

Tata Group, owner of Jaguar Land Rover, is negotiating a government bailout worth tens of millions of pounds to enable it to pay suppliers, while Honda’s plant in Swindon will be mothballed for February and March. BMW’s Mini plant in Cowley, Oxford closed ten days ago for an extended break of a month and has shed 300 agency staff, while Ford’s Transit van factory in Southampton has closed for four weeks instead of the usual one.

Analysts in Tokyo predict that the cost savings at Toyota, which recently dethroned General Motors as the world’s largest carmaker, would send a shockwave throughout the extensive “food chain” of industries that keep Toyota’s industrial engines running across the world.

Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota’s president, described the situation as “an emergency of a sort we’ve never experienced before”, adding that there was no way to see an immediate end to the crisis.

Professor Garel Rhys, of the Cardiff Business School and president of Cardiff University’s Centre for Automotive Research, said: “Every single car market in the world is down, signalling it’s a depression not a recession. This year is terrible, next year will be even worse. The last time the North American, Japanese and European car markets were all in recession at the same time was in 1945, which was hardly a normal year.”

Professor Rhys also predicts that the sale of vehicles in the UK, which stood at 2.4 million units last year, will fall to 2.1 million this year and to 1.6 million in 2009.

Kota Yuzawa, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, is now predicting global auto demand to fall between 15 and 20 per cent over the next few years, with potentially dramatic reviews of production systems by leading manufactuers.

Toyota has not made any of its permanent staff redundant yet but it has cut an unspecified number of temporary workers. The group promised to do all that it could to retain permanent British workers but could not rule out the possibility of redundancies.

A Toyota spokeswoman said: “The times are changing so fast that it’s difficult to predict what will happen even in the next two months.”

Toyota’s bleak admission is a double-punch to markets as they approach the last few trading sessions of the year, and the company’s full-year loss – unprecedented since the company stopped making looms and turned its hand to carmaking – is expected to reverberate throughout Japan.

“We have lived our whole lives knowing only a situation where Toyota makes money,” the senior executive of one Nagoya-based car dashboard maker told The Times. “This changes our whole world.”

Ray Kishor, a former consultant to the car industry and now an analyst, says the lesson from Toyota’s rapidly declining fortunes is that it leaves little hope for the rest of the industry. “Clearly nobody is immune to the collapse in consumer confidence and the weakening economy.”

They are in trouble......same as everybody else.

http://uk.reuters.com/business/quotes/quote?symbol=FIA.MI

Whilst I persoanlly would hate a tie up with PSA, because I dont think PSA can actaully build cars properly, it would be better than Fiat going bust. Id sooner see them tie up with Ford really, at least their stuff drives well.
Another Italian company, the giant Piaggio of scooter and small commercial vehicles seems to be doing well, they have just borrowed 150 million euros from the bank of Rome for R&D work, so they at least must be confident.
What Fiat need is this Topolino and the 2 cylinder engine mighty quick, they should purely concentrate on cars of GP size and less and forget the Bravo and above IMO.

nuovapanda said:

the 2 cylinder engine mighty quick, they should purely concentrate on cars of GP size and less and forget the Bravo and above IMO.

Click to expand...

i agree, for the next two years or there-abouts, its gonna be the small efficient cars that people will be buying... larger and less efficient cars are gonna slump anyway so money would be better spent marketing the smaller cars.