Bow-Mel Chrysler Ltd.

This weekend I was up at Whistler with my family. On Saturday afternoon I went for a walk with my two year old daughter. While she was playing in one on the many puddles I saw a hydrogen powered Transit bus driving down the road. My first thought was “isn’t that cool, so quiet and clean”. Then I started to wonder, just what kind of fuel economy does one of those things get and how much is hydrogen per liter? Then I remembered my grade eight science teacher Mr Hawkens teaching us how to make hydrogen and oxygen by applying an electrical current to water. I quickly came to the following conclusion, there is no way the hydrogen in that bus was created by applying current to water! It would take forever to produce enough hydrogen to drive that thing.
A quick check on the Internet confirmed my suspicion, to produce large quantities of hydrogen you apply steam to fossil fuels. So much for clean energy. That got me thinking, electric vehicles, sure most of our electricity in British Columbia comes from hydro electric power, but the majority of the world uses coal or fossil fuels to produce electricity. There goes that clean energy thing again!
I think we’ve got it all wrong, instead of trying to use less fossil fuels we should be burning like there is on tomorrow. That’s right let’s have a great big fossil fuel party. Here’s my reasoning, remember I was out for a walk with my daughter, at Halloween she got a buch of candy, a dentist I mountain bike with said the best thing to do is let her eat it a fast as possible, it’s better than feeding it to her over a long period of time. Along the same thought, why are we trying to conserve fossil fuels? If there are a few trillion barrels of crude oil in the ground we’re going to continue to burn it until it’s all gone, my feeling is the sooner the better. As for all the fancy alternate fuels, let’s be honest with ourselves, where does this stuff really come from. While I’m at it what are the buy products battery production?

If you agree I’d love to hear from you, if you disagree tell me why. If you know someone who has a strong point of view on this topic tell them send me a comment.

Hot on the heels of a recent Chrysler recall, I thought this might be a good opportunity to try and explain what a recall is and what people should do about them.
You can think of a recall as being an upgrade for your vehicle, much like software companies regularly produce updates to computer programs or operating systems. In the car industry recalls really solve three basic situations; safety, reliability and performance. So how do they decide what recalls need to be performed and on what vehicles. There is no rocket science involved here, when Chrysler notices a problem and it starts to become a trend, the engineering department investigates to see what is causing the problem. If a recall is warranted then one is issued.

So now the fun begins, by law Chrysler has to notify the Federal Government first, next they notify the media then they send out letters to the customers who have effected vehicles and last but not least the send the dealers the instructions on how to perform the recall correctly. Here’s where we as a dealership run into a problem, the media is telling the world that there is a recall, our customers start calling us looking for information and help. The problem is the public knows more about the recalls than we do because our information hasn’t arrived yet. This can be frustrating for us but more so for our customers unfortunately that’s just the way it is. If it’s any consolation things are much better now that we get information much faster through the internet. Once we have this information we can start booking appointments for customers to get the recall performed.

Here’s a few things to know about recalls:

• Recalls are always free of charge
• There is no expiry date on a recall
• For Chrysler to contact customers affected by a recall they have to have your correct address, to do this simply stop by the dealership and we’ll take care care of this.
• Whenever you bring your vehicle in for service we check to see if there are any outstanding recalls
• In some cases all that is required in a recall is for our technician to inspect a part or condition, so don’t be surprised if we don’t really do anything to your vehicle, it just means everything is the way it should be.

In conclusion, don’t be surprised if your vehicle is recalled they are complicated pieces of equipment. If you have any questions give us a call we’ll do what we can to answer your questions.

The everything Chrysler website Allpar.com has just posted an audio clip of Sergio Marchionne’s meeting with the press earlier this month. Listening to this thirty minute clip you really get a sense of where Sergio is taking Chrysler and I couldn’t be happier. For those that don’t know Sergio Marchionne is the CEO of both Fiat and Chrysler and as an interesting side note he’s Canadian.

It’s refreshing to hear honest answers coming from the person who is running the show and while the beginning of 2010 is going to be a little short on new product, the second half of the year looks like we’ll start seeing some exciting new products.

It’s a great time to be involved in the car industry  and Chrysler in particular. Now if we could only convince Sergio to put those great Fiat diesels in our vehicles I’d be a happy campter.

Take care

Todd