What about Allpar?

Given that the fate of Chrysler is unknown, and that the judge may respond to offers (if any are made) by companies outside the U.S./Canada/Fiat alliance, and that Fiat itself, with majority control, could well renege on its various promises, or that challenges may prolong the Chapter 11 stay of the “good assets,” and that Chrysler might end up selling almost no cars and have its dealers almost universally disappear – in other words, that there are several “worst case scenarios” that could see the death of Chrysler – you may ask, when will this horrible sentence end?

More to the point, you may be asking, what about allpar?

The answer is — we intend to continue regardless of whether Chrysler does. If the parts are sold off, we will follow the parts. If everything is liquidated, we will have enough new material from the past to last a lifetime. (Just ask the Mopar Action guys how many issues one can get out of three moderately similar carlines built over the course of around 15 years, and still have new things to say.)

The past few days have been a good test of what will happen to us without Chrysler’s advertising dollars, but we know that, if Chrysler disappears completely, that things will be much worse for us. Not as bad as it will be soon for the plant workers in all those idled and “bad asset” plants (like our friends at Twinsburg, regardless of Chrysler’s future), but the dealer and competitive company ads will likely wane.

But we’ll still be here. Really. Whether the ad revenue pays the server bills, whether we have to go out and start working full time at another job again, Allpar will stay up. We started out losing money, and we may well end up that way too, but unlike many other sites, Allpar is a labor of love, not one of a dozen cookie-cutter profit-makers whose owner is never seen. We’ve been here for 16 years and 1600 pages. 

(In case you’re wondering, we did catch people asking this question.)