The New York Times reports that Doug Betts, Fiat-Chrysler quality chief, abruptly abandoned his post this morning. The company, where Betts worked for the past seven years, occupied the very bottom of Consumer Reports magazine’s annual rankings released yesterday, with Fiat, Jeep, Ram, and Dodge taking the bottom four slots and Chrysler nabbing number 22 on the list of 28.
Betts, whose official title was senior vice president of quality, had also served in quality-control positions at Nissan, Toyota, and General Motors. But since joining Chrysler in 2007, Betts faced an uphill challenge turning around the company’s poor reliability scores.
Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram all dropped in CR’s quality rankings compared with last year, with nagging problems like the rough-shifting nine-speed automatic transmission in the Jeep Cherokee providing constant headaches. We’ve also experienced some issues, including a Fiat 500L with one of the more bizarre transmission shift faults we’ve come across.
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In a statement, Fiat-Chrysler named COO of Product Development Mark Chernoby and Matthew Liddane, quality head for Chrysler of North America, as Betts’s replacements. Betts, the company says, is off to pursue “other interests.”
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1sAQcHd
via Agya
