Fiat now has its very own diesel engine division, in the form of freshly acquired company VM Motori. Up until this point of complete acquisition, the Italian engine builder was already half-owned by Fiat, while the other half belonged to General Motors.
The latter gave up all of its shares for a reported €34.1 ($47.1) million – they had been purchased back in 2007, when things were still apparently going well…
Now, the Italian automaker will have complete access to the entire yearly production run of 90,000, though, not all of them are for automotive use. Models such as the newly released Ram 1500 EcoDiesel and the slightly older Jeep Grand Cherokee EcoDiesel do use the three-liter V6 unit. It is competent, but not necessarily a benchmark compared to the array of similar units in use around Europe.
For both Fiat and Chrysler, I don’t think there’s any downside to the deal whatsoever, especially if the diesel market in the US picks up like it has been speculated that it might, and demand grows. In fact, we heard rumors that it may be introducing a diesel version of the 300 sedan to counter the increasingly large number of Euro-derived oil burners ending up on sale in the US, and we can speculate as to the connectedness of it all, but we’ll leave that up to you.
By Andrei Nedelea
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