Chrysler Corp. is hoping it can boost its current 10 percent share of the U.S. car market by 5 percentage points by 1995 with its new small and midsize cars.
Vice Chairman Robert Eaton said the company's new midsize cars arriving in showrooms now and a new line of small cars due in 1994 should help Chrysler contend for a bigger piece of the car market."It's going to take time," Eaton said. "It's not going to be significant within a year."
But Eaton, who will succeed Lee Iacocca as chairman of the No. 3 automaker in January, said a 15 percent car share by 1995 was "in the range" of internal forecasts.
The critically acclaimed LH midsize cars are Chrysler's first all-new passenger cars in several years.
The Chrysler Concorde, Eagle Vision and Dodge Intrepid are being built at a deliberately slow rate on one shift in Bramalea, Ontario. Neither Eaton nor Chrysler President Bob Lutz has pushed the plant to go faster because in-plant studies show vehicle quality is above what Chrysler expected when it launched the cars June 30.
For this year, Eaton said he foresees 13.4 million cars and trucks being sold in the United States.
That forecast, lowered slightly in the past month, stands despite what Eaton called the weakest economic recovery since World War II.
Total industry sales - domestically built and imported - during the first seven months of 1991 barely exceeded 7.6 million.
General Motors Corp. predicts 13.1 million total vehicle sales this year. Ford Motor Co. set its estimate at 13 million to 13.5 million.
Any of the three would be a significant gain on last year's anemic 12.3 million sales, the lowest since 1983.
Some analysts have said Chrysler is in the best position among the Big Three U.S. automakers to take advantage of an economic recovery because of new vehicles like the LH cars.
"Chrysler has gotten through this recent recession in relatively good shape," Eaton said. "We've been able to maintain our product programs, maintain our spending and we have more new products coming out in the next 31/2 years than we've had in the past 20 years."
Chrysler's $178 million second-quarter income was above Wall Street estimates. Future profits should remain respectable now that the automaker is selling some of the vehicles it spent big money to develop in recent years.