Fiat, Chrysler Look to Overcome Powertrain Hurdles

ANN ARBOR, MI – The Chrysler-Fiat partnership looks to overcome hurdles in worldwide fuel-economy standards and diverse driving habits to develop a common global powertrain strategy that will work equally well for both companies in all markets.

“The challenge is to have brand differentiation at the powertrain level, without excessive part proliferation,” Chris Cowland, director-advanced and SRT powertrain at Chrysler, says at a recent conference here at the University of Michigan.

More than 4,000 employees work in research and development at both Chrysler and Fiat. The primary goals are to reduce the number of engines in Chrysler’s lineup and to work toward meeting fuel-economy averages required in Europe in 2017 and the U.S. in 2025.

“That’s a pretty difficult situation, trying to create solutions that can be used around the globe,” Cowland says, adding he would like to see better alignment on fuel-economy targets between Europe and the U.S.

“If we could sit down and have a harmonized test procedure, that would make the powertrain world much, much easier to handle,” he says. “When we bring over a European powertrain, we have to go through a huge amount of powertrain work, and vice versa.”

R&D staff on both sides must account for the differences in ownership, maintenance costs and transmission preferences, Cowland says. He figures about 12% of Chrysler drivers shift manually, compared with 90% of Fiat buyers.

The first step toward balancing that scale was the big investment made in manual transmissions for the Dodge Dart compact.

“We need to see how the Dart sells with the manual. But we’re not going to change the U.S. dynamics of driving overnight,” Cowland tells WardsAuto.

The Chrysler executive speaks highly of the Tigershark engine, which was developed specifically for the Dart. The turnaround for the project was 26 months, an unusually speedy process for engineering, but necessary if the auto maker is going to streamline its engine portfolio over the next five years, Cowland says.

Development time was shortened by mining some Fiat technology and research in Turin. “It has been a marriage of equals, not a merger of equals,” Cowland says, hearkening back to Chrysler’s less fruitful collaboration with Mercedes under Daimler ownership.

While Chrysler’s focus is on expanding its portfolio of mainstream models in Europe, the absence of high-performance cars in its stable there has not gone unnoticed, especially in the wake of Ford announcing the planned return of the Mustang to that market.

“We used to sell the Viper in Europe. I’m sure (SRT President and CEO Ralph Gilles is) thinking about selling a few over there.”

Cowland also recognizes the increasingly stiff high-performance competition in the U.S., with recent horsepower-enhancing tweaks to Ford’s GT500 and Chevrolet’s Camaro ZL1.

“Clearly we are thinking about a response to that. But we have to offset the negative (fleet fuel-economy) effect of these vehicles as well,” he says. “Developing brand-new powertrains for a couple thousand (units) a year is quite tough.

“But keep watching. There will be a response.”

 [email protected]