I'm an old guy, almost 82, and a three year Xfire owner - 2005 yellow LTD Roadster - and a new member. Late last year I got the double whammy. Stage Three colon cancer and, I think from reading all the info on the Forum - my garaged car won't start because I need a new SKREEM unit. The VA operated and got all the bad stuff out of me along with a 79 cm piece of my plumbing, and put a bag on me. I had that for 5+ months and then in April I had it reversed and am now back to normal. Feel 30 years younger, no problems at all, and want to get my car back on the road. I contacted Needswings and ordered and paid for a SKREEM and ring antenna after trying three Chryslers stealers who could do nothing for me and were totally disinterested . I tried to get into the MB parts system - and learned that I'm not able to get one there because I have a Chrysler VIN.

I looked up the production figures for Crossfires and see Karmann assembled and delivered 2004-2008 - just over 76,000 cars. Karmann made lots of MB SLKs that used the same part, and MB can and does still service and repair them with the parts they are able to draw from their supplier - presumably Siemens, so it is only logical assume FCA/Chrysler could get them there too if they cared about their customers. I saw here on the Forum that some owners had failed SKREEM units as far back as 2006 so these failures are not new to Chrysler. FYI, MB dealer near Chicago sells the part for MB cars for less than $300 when you walk up to the parts counter, so the price differential - Chrysler dealers wanted about $550. for it but don't have any - is another issue.

Think about this: If just 50% of the Crossfires out there need or will need a SKREEM unit it's a good chunk of change. Or,taken another way, if 50% of the cars are rendered totally inoperative for lack of availability of this part, or any other part, that amounts to a large amount of dollars in parts sales and losses to the owners. Try 35,000 Crossfires x $10,000 average value or whatever numbers you think are better - Anyway you slice it, it's worth supplying the parts and too much for most owners to just throw away. Depriving owners, who purchased in good faith, of the part and the code which they need and only Chrysler controls, is irresponsible, at best. Of such irresponsibility are serious lawsuits made. If anyone has data on this situation or an informed guesstimate about frequency of failure, let me know.

I tried twice to contact Chrysler through their Customer Care link. No answer so far. So I just mailed a letter to Michael Manley, FCA CEO. Hopefully they will see the light and dig up some parts from their worldwide system or get Siemens or another supplier to run up a batch. Maybe they could do that and let Needswings or someone designated department code these and sell/ship them out to legitimate owners who need them. And maybe even lower the price back to the MB level.

I'll post next week my letter to Mr. Manley and any reply I get. I think that if this situation had been brought to Sergio's attention he would have turned to one of his aides and said, "Remedy this and get back to me by Friday and tell me how you did it." Probably Walter P. would have done that too. Hopefully we can locate the right person at FCA to get this done PDQ.

Are there other parts that are similarly unavailable?

If anyone knows, please post a reply.

Just because the Daimler connection was broken Chrysler (FCA) should not be allowed to forget about us and leave us with totally unusable cars and significant financial losses.