“Being small, cute is going to do nothing.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“If you put a Ferrari sticker on a toaster, it doesn’t go any faster.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“There are very few things that are certain in this market – apart from one, and that is that small displacement diesels are dead.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“If you look at Jeep, Ram, and the premium brands, those are brands that will survive.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“If you’re looking for power and handling, then I think Ferrari is the answer.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I won’t talk of bad luck. I don’t believe in it.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I think hybrids are inevitable. The question is not the technology: it’s a question of the cost and whether the consumer will pay.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“When I was young and foolish, and I had no money, I bought myself the carcass of a Jaguar E-Type. It was a rust bucket. I spent all my university savings trying to fix the car. I never did, and I finally sold it to recover at least part of my investment.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“There’s nothing worse in life than to sit there and be the victim of a process that’s outside your control.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Leadership is not a quantitative thing. People either smell it in you, or they don’t.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I think the likelihood that combustion will continue to represent the large portion of the power unit world is very small.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“The HMI (human-machine interface) function inside a Ferrari is probably the weakest link in the chain of technical know-how that’s embodied in the car.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“The hardest job is getting personalities to mesh.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I think that if you don’t do the full analysis of what the origin of the electrical power is, where it comes from, how you get batteries into these cars, what the cost is in terms of CO2 and the environment, I think the analysis that we are going to save the planet with electric cars is nonsense.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“By 2025, more than half of the power units you see on the road will have some relevance of electrification. There may be a base combustion engine, but it is combustion and electrification that will make the machine run.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Chrysler’s best assets were its Jeeps, minivans, and light trucks. Fiat’s expertise was in small-car technology and fuel-efficient engines, the very thing that Chrysler lacked.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Who my successor is will be up to the board, not me.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I like fast cars. I used to be a car buff before I went to Fiat.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I like simplicity almost to the point of being monastic.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“One of the things that unfortunately happens in organizations that become dysfunctional is that the very first thing to go is the amount of care and attention that you place on the workplace and the environment within which people work.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I’ve always had this incredible sense of urgency. I’ve always had this desire not to let things fester and to really seize the moment, because it’s serendipity.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“One of the most horrible wastes of capital you see is the duplication of the effort by the car manufacturers to do things that appear to be different from the other guy.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“All my bloody pants look the same; all my sweaters look the same. The shirts change; they’re all blue.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Auto companies need to quickly separate the stuff that will be swallowed by commodity from the brand stuff.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I’m a fixer by nature.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I think we have been unnecessarily maligned with a desire or a wish or intent on our part to try to defraud anybody. We haven’t.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“When you got mechanisms in a car that prevent damage from happening to the engine and that operate under very specific circumstances, those things are exceptions under normal operating conditions of the car; under the rules, they need to be disclosed.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“We’ve done all the work that needs to be done on the inside to make sure there’s no malfeasance inside Chrysler.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“When we agreed to the changes in the emissions standards and the objectives for 2025 with President Obama, there was a very clear road map that was put in place that required a midterm review, which should have been completed by 2017 and ’18.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“The biggest fear that I see is that we will be left behind. We are a very slow industry; for us to make a decision takes forever. Take Tesla: Elon moves at the speed of a rocket.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“We have been very reluctant to make statements about where the industry is going to go. The Wrangler is going hybrid in 2020. We don’t make much noise about that, but it will happen.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“There is nothing that would prevent Fiat Chrysler from providing ride-sharing service to a wider community and using our dealer network for this.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I think the mind should deliver new and fresh designs all the time.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“There’s no doubt that we are, by traditional automotive manufacturing standards, an automotive conglomerate. And so that causes confusion by definition.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“People don’t like the car business. They like going to car sales, but they don’t like the stock of the car companies.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“People are very focused on value and preservation of capital. They’re a lot less risk-prone than they used to be.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I have been public on this, and I firmly, firmly believe that this notion of accountability for what you promise as a leader is as important as your integrity.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I’m not really a late night guy. I used to be when I was younger.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“As much as I reiterate my affection for Elon, there is nothing Elon does that we cannot do.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“In the car business, sometimes you crash.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Don’t believe your own press, and don’t give speeches.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“If I want to leave one thing here after I’m gone, it would be an incredible sense of humility.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Most car advertising assumes that people have IQs that are missing a digit.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I don’t want to conquer North America. I only want a share.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Repatriating the Ram HD is the right thing to do… it should never have been moved to Mexico. This was owed to the U.S. government – and the taxpayers.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Jeep represents a way of life. It’s not just a car.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“You only produce one car less than the demand for the vehicle. You just don’t exceed that equation.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I am totally in line with the fact that I think wealth distribution for carmakers needs to be redimensioned to allow labor to take a piece of that wealth distribution.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I’m a phenomenal fan of Elon Musk. I think he’s the greatest. He’s a disrupter, and I think he is a great marketer. And I love him.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“It takes me exactly a minute and a half to get dressed in the morning.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I have the same clothing everywhere I live.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Having had to live through a period of integration into another country a number of years ago, I am keenly aware of the negative implications of stereotyping and the significant efforts required to undo its effects.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I am proud of my Italian heritage, and nothing I have said should be interpreted as an attempt at minimizing its value.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“There’s a not a single doubt in my mind that the car that changed the conversation about Chrysler was the Grand Cherokee of 2010.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“We have made the decision that we’re going to take some key products, such as the Wrangler and the Grand Cherokee, and protect those as being true American icons: produce them in the U.S. and make them available nowhere else.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Back in 2005, I introduced a thing which, I don’t mind saying this – I mean, we stole it, at least in its basic form, from Toyota – it’s called World Class Manufacturing. I mean, it’s this pretentious title for something which really involves the revisiting of the manufacturing processes of dedication to the removal of waste.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“There’s not a single doubt in my mind that the whole of Chrysler organization views itself as an American car producer.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“It would be idiotic to position ourselves against Silicon Valley.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“The suggestion that we were pursuing consolidation as a replacement for reaching our financial targets by 2018 is fundamentally a bunch of hogwash.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“BlackBerrys are divine instruments.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I give people a huge amount of rope, and then I hold them accountable for the rope.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I act like a native in North America. I eat sliders in Detroit.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I love Obama to talk about Chrysler. It’s the cheapest bloody advertising I can get.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“You’ve got to allow people to make mistakes, even though your gut tells you that the guy is going to get torched.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I just want to make things that people want to buy. I have no confusion about this.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“The last thing you want is a group of senators who just lent you seven and a half billion dollars to sit back and go, ‘Look at these jerks and how they’re using taxpayer money.’”
― Sergio Marchionne
“What is the point of one guy developing a 1.3 engine, and another guy a 1.4? What are you getting for this? And the answer is nothing: a total waste of capital.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I just want to make a difference. I want to make Chrysler the most profitable car company in the United States.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“People need to trust you: that you’re going to pull them out and that they will follow you when you pull them out. If they don’t get that comfort, they’re going to drop you. This is true of organizations. It’s true of countries.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“Following the automotive pack down unwise and unprofitable roads is not just naive but also very dangerous.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“The heart of Ferrari is winning in F1. I don’t want to see our drivers in 7th and 12th place.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“It is only proper that our employees share in the savings generated by tax reform and that we openly acknowledge the resulting improvement in the U.S. business environment by investing in our industrial footprint accordingly.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“My job is not to make decisions but to set stretch objectives and help our managers work out how to reach them.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“FCA is a culture of leaders and employees that were born out of adversity and who operate without sheet music.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I am never on holiday.”
― Sergio Marchionne
“I want to study theoretical physics because it is one of the hardest things there is.”
― Sergio Marchionne
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