According to Greek mythology, Hermaphroditus was the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. Due to some ‘divine’ manipulation, he became both woman (with the characteristics of his mother) and man (in some specific details a spitting image of his father….). As you may imagine: he wasn’t too happy about this, as this turned out to be the worst of both worlds for him.

Thanks for sharing this useless piece of information, I hear you say, but no: I am referring to unifications in the motor industry, where sometimes it’s hard to tell whether the outcome is positive or not. Everybody is talking about company values, about the company ‘DNA’.

So let’s check out some of the ‘Hermaphrodites’ and how they are doing in terms of residual values. When Jaguar was part of the Ford family and Werner Reitzle left the PAG, Jaguar was only a shadow of its glorious past. Especially when the Mondeo-based X-Type and the X-Type estate were launched, the whole community of Jaguar aficionados fell into a deep depression, which lasted until 2008 when Tata acquired the company.

Since then, Jaguar has been back on track. The Indians obviously understood the DNA of Jaguar far better than the Ford managers. Today, Jaguar residual values of are on the increase, there is no longer such a thing as a pimped Mondeo, and the XK is like an aged red wine – improving from year to year.

The next example is of how somebody has lost their way over a re-badging. When Chrysler launched the 300C, it polarized opinion, a case of like it or hate it. The 300C has clearly got American DNA and played quite successfully with design features from muscle cars of the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Now, since Fiat bought Chrysler, the 300C has become a Lancia. It would have helped to contain the ‘cultural’ problems of this merger if Lancia had kept the 300C badge.

Alas, the former 300C is now a Lancia Thema, which is probably not the smartest thing to do. Lancia is linked with a certain DNA, which is out of step with the 300C design. It is like promising to sell an ‘Alessi’ teapot but actually offering George Foreman’s ‘lean, mean, fat reducing grilling machine’!

Fiat also re-badged the Dodge Journey as the Fiat Freemont. Although the problems there are slightly different, it would have been ultimately necessary to give some of the Fiat DNA to the car.

Neither the Thema nor the Freemont residual values will suffer from these circumstances but Fiat/Lancia missed a good chance to improve the former Chrysler residuals.

There are a lot of other mostly positive examples. There is MINI and BMW, Smart and Mercedes, Renault and Dacia – a very recent and pretty exotic example is the selling of Volvo to the Chinese company Geely with an open ending.

A good example of a merger between different cultures – which worked out very well – is Daewoo and Chevrolet. Although initially, Chevrolet made the same mistakes as Fiat regarding re-badging, pretty soon the mixture of cars made in the US and those from South Korea started to pay off. Chevrolet has shown a way to merge car segments that are very hard to combine: pure sports cars like Corvette and Camaro, with pretty decent cars like Captiva, Orlando, Cruze and so on. So, although American managers may not be particularly renowned for subtlety and forward planning, this example proves that inheriting the DNA from two very different entities doesn’t necessarily have to end in a Greek tragedy.