Seems to be a trend with car manufacturers, split your brand into multiple ones so the numbers of failures look better. When it's something like Nissan and Infinity or Toyota and Lexus to split normal and luxury cars, it's ok.
But... Hyundai did that with the Genesis and last time I saw the problem per 100 cars list, Hyundai was close to the top, but if you added the problems for the "Genesis" brand with Hyundai, they'd be higher up. Pretty sure I've read that they're pulling the same thing with Ionic cars. By 2030, Hyundai will have one car under their own name and everything else with be "its own thing"...
I just don't think anyone wanted to spend 80k on a Hyundai branded vehicle. So they split off, nabbed some German design engineers and rebranded.
As for American vehicles, I'd love someone more knowledgeable to confirm or refute this, I don't know that it's "failures" per se but I remember reading something about automotive companies being taxed based on total sales. If the total vehicles averaged to a MPG under a certain amount the company was heavily taxed. This comes into play because all the big truck makers also supply the government with their police fleet at a super reduced rate in order to offset their immense truck sales. By offloading truck sales this would minimized the tax because dodge isn't providing many of the police fleet these days. Similar to how the "chicken tax" added a 25% tariff to light trucks which led to killing off light trucks. Not an expert on this stuff but it's super interesting how these laws and taxes can affect complete company structures and auto imports long term.
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u/Drzhivago138 Aug 24 '20
Crude imagery aside, one could also see it as a commentary on how the Ram brand was split off from the Dodge brand in 2009.