The Brand Chrysler Created Just to Destroy It

In 1987, Chrysler Corporation spent $1.5 billion to buy a car company it didn't want — to secure one brand it desperately needed. The company was American Motors. The prize was Jeep. And the brand created to absorb the leftovers was called Eagle. Eagle launched with a Super Bowl commercial, a $40 million marketing budget, and a network of 1,400 dealers. Ten years later, it was killed in a single afternoon conference call. Two paragraphs. No press conference. No tribute reel. This documentary traces the full arc of the Eagle brand — from its creation as a legal mechanism to absorb AMC's dealer network, through the cars it sold that it never designed, to its quiet death in March of 1998. Eagle sold roughly 600,000 vehicles in ten years. Jeep sold more than that in a single quarter. The cars were never the point. The customers were never the point. The brand was just the packaging for a deal. A reminder that sometimes the car isn't the product. Sometimes the entire brand is just there to satisfy a contract. #Chrysler #Eagle #AMC #AutomotiveHistory #ForgottenCars #JeepHistory #CarDocumentary Music by Florida Rains: https://floridarains.bandcamp.com/alb...