The news this month that General Motors and Honda will team up to produce mass quantities of affordable electric vehicles elicited in me a huge wave of nostalgia, because it brought to mind the veritable master class in automotive partnerships two editors and I received on Aug. 22, 2015.
That day, in an otherwise empty high-rise office in downtown Detroit, then-Fiat Chrysler Automobiles CEO Sergio Marchionne laid out to us in common language what turned out to be his ill-fated and immediately rebuffed intention to force a merger between FCA and GM.
Marchionne is now dead — his plans of automotive conquest equally so — but the logic that motivated his thinking seven years ago keeps repeating itself over and over.