Dana wants to enter car module market

Dana Corp. believes its experience supplying complete chassis modules to Mack Trucks Inc. qualifies it for light-vehicle systems contracts. Although it has yet to reel in any, in one recent four-month period Dana was involved in 13 system bids worth $1.6 billion. Five of the opportunities were black-box programs. Dana currently supplies complete chassis, just-in-time and in-line sequence for 25,000 Mack vehicles a year. It pulls 1,900 parts from a database of 500,000 for each unit. "If we have to handle a competitors' product, we do," says Mike Laisure, vice president of Spicer modular products.