Marchionne relishes No. 1 Chrysler minivan ranking

Almost 30 years after the minivan was introduced, Chrysler Group LLC remains on top. Now, CEO Sergio Marchionne will have to decide how best to sustain the success.

So far, the moves made by Marchionne, who is preparing to merge Chrysler with majority owner Fiat SpA, have paid off. The choice he faces now: whether to merge Chrysler's two remaining minivans into one and whether to dramatically redesign one or both. Either way, Marchionne and his dealers are committed to Chrysler's signature product.

"I don't care if the minivan market shrinks as long as I'm King Kong in it," Chuck Eddy, a Chrysler dealer in Austintown, Ohio, said. "That is Chrysler's attitude, too. The minivan is here and the minivan won't ever go away."

Just four years after a 1979 government bailout, Chrysler Chief Executive Officer Lee Iacocca introduced the Dodge Caravan, and minivans soon joined Ram pickups and Jeep sport-utility vehicles as the company's most important product lines. To some extent, Chrysler created the minivan and the minivan saved the company.

Three decades later, Chrysler maintains its sales lead in minivans.

"When people think Chrysler, is minivan a product that comes to mind? The answer is 'absolutely,' " said Alexander Edwards, president of the automotive practice at San Diego-based Strategic Vision, a marketing and branding company. "Most everybody that is in the minivan segment recognizes Chrysler as the creator."

Chrysler has kept the title despite an onslaught of entries from Ford, Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and General Motors Co. Ford and GM eventually quit the segment, and Chrysler has claimed at least 40 percent of the U.S. minivan market every year since 2007.

Marchionne is closing in on deciding whether Chrysler still needs two entries for the U.S. minivan market. He led a complete overhaul of Chrysler's lineup in the 19 months after its U.S.-backed bankruptcy in 2009, introducing 16 new or refreshed models. The revamp has led to 11 months of U.S. sales gains exceeding 20 percent and made Chrysler the biggest gainer of market share through April. Deliveries climbed 33 percent in the first four months, boosting market share by 2 percentage points to 11.6 percent.

With its minivans, the company is "studying all options," including eliminating one of its models and then broadening the target market for the other one, Saad Chehab, president of the Chrysler brand, said. Right now, the company aims to sell the Dodge Grand Caravan for less than $30,000 and its Chrysler Town & Country, which has more equipment standard, for more than $30,000.

Marchionne would have to decide which will survive.

Chrysler offers more-generous incentives on minivans than its competitors. The average incentive per Town & Country sold was $3,106 in March and $2,236 for Grand Caravan, compared to Sienna's $1,650 and Odyssey's $974, according to researcher Edmunds.com.

The Town & Country and Grand Caravan accounted for 15 percent of Chrysler's 1.37 million deliveries in the U.S. last year, according to Autodata Corp. Odyssey was 9.3 percent of Honda's sales; Toyota's Sienna was 6.8 percent of its total.