Posted by MoparNorm on Wednesday, November 09, 2005 at 12:09PM :
In Reply to: Re: YES!, use OEM recommendation... posted by Ken Dunnington on Wednesday, November 09, 2005 at 11:31AM :
...just like the 'Air Temp' the former Chrysler hvac unit, New Process was an in-house gear unit of Chrysler. In the 80's gm no longer wanted to put Chrysler transfer cases in their trucks, it was kind of embarassing, so they reached a deal with Chrysler to add Muncie to the deal and created New Venture, a joint venture between Chrysler and gm combining New Process and Muncie into one company with two separate manufacturing facilities. This agreement worked well for both parties until Chrysler sued gm over the 7 slot patented Jeep grill that gm was placing on the H2*. Gm was so irritated at the lawsuit that they terminated the New Venture agreement and took Muncie out of the deal. They also cancelled a contract with Dodge to supply Allison transmissions for the Ram, which was a long term Dodge goal to build a bullet proof automatic transmission that can deal with the torque of the Cummins 610 diesel.
MN
*Originally an AMC (AM General) vehicle under the design of Jeep engineers at AMC, the Hummer carried the Jeep grill because, well it was a Jeep design. When AMC fell on hard times, just before Chrysler bought AMC, AMC sold off AM General along with the rights to produce the grill on the H1 and Humvee. When gm entered into a marketing agreement with AM General the grill patent issue went un-noticed until gm began putting Hummer type bodies on the chevy Tahoe (H2) and Colorado (H3). Chrysler sued to protect the integrity and of course market position of the Jeep brands most famous trademark. (Jeep had no logo until a few years ago, it's grill is it's brand identity, may people now confuse the H2 and H3 as "Jeeps" or think that Jeep is copying Hummer)
Side note, to this day, Wranglers and H1's still use the same tailights.
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