Fiat, Fiat Cars and Trucks, and the Chrysler-Fiat Alliance

golling fiat

The successor to the big Alfa 166 (large executive sized 4door), is the 2012 Alfa 169. It was suppossed to have been launched in 2009. For several years, Alfa has been poking around looking for a suitable platform' on which to base it. They want a return to rear wheel drive, and their Maserati Q platform has been deemed too expensive. Talks were held with Daimler several years ago, and a plan was under way to base it off of an E-class platform, but in 2007 agreements broke off with Daimler due to difference of opinions and plans. So, the search for a suitable platform was under way again.

If you are familiar with the relationship between the Mercedes E, the new Mercedes CLS [editor’s note: reportedly based on the LX platform], and the Chrysler LX, we can probably draw some dotted lines as to another reason the Fiat/Chrysler alliance keeps moving forward.

Automotive News reported in July 2010 that the next generation Maserati Quattroporte would be moving to the Chrysler platform as well, and would use a smaller V6 and V8 with what we believe to be Chrysler's all wheel drive system (which allows for two-wheel-drive gas mileage when not in use). The V8 will be Maserati’s own but the V6 may be the Pentastar. Like the SRT8 models around 2013-2014, they will use an eight-speed automatic — but likely the ZF model used by Audi and BMW rather than the one Chrysler was involved with.