The merger of equals.

Schrempp did not warm up. He had assessed both companies, he told Eaton, and they fitted perfectly — by product, by geography, by everything. Then he invited Eaton to tell him it was nonsense. Eaton smiled and said he would call within two weeks.

It was not a cold call. Eaton had been arguing for months that of the thirty-odd carmakers then in business only a handful would survive the coming decade, and that Chrysler could not outspend Ford and General Motors forever. Its health was not in doubt: in 1998 the Chrysler, Plymouth, Jeep and Dodge division booked record revenues of €56.3 billion, comfortably more than Mercedes-Benz took in the same year.

In February the two sides met in Geneva, where Eaton set out three conditions: the best possible price for his shareholders, no tax bill for them, and a merger of equals. The first two were easiest to satisfy by incorporating the combined company in Germany as an Aktiengesellschaft — which quietly settled the question of where power would live. Eaton then fought over the name. He wanted Chrysler first and lost; what he won instead was the deletion of Benz, so that the company carrying the name of the man who built the first automobile became simply DaimlerChrysler.

They signed on 6 May and announced it in London the next day. Schrempp called it the perfect fit of two market leaders; Eaton said the products and brands complemented each other. The release promised $1.4 billion of benefits in 1999 and $3 billion a year within several years, a 28% premium for Chrysler shareholders — and, in the same document, no plant closures and no lay-offs.

Shareholders approved in September. On 17 November 1998 the new shares began trading in New York at $84.31 under the ticker DCX, and on 6 January 1999 they touched $108.62. On paper DaimlerChrysler was the fifth largest carmaker in the world by volume and the third by revenue. Assembling it had taken fewer than 200 working days.

Zetsche arrived with Wolfgang Bernhard and, on 29 January 2001, with the bill. Chrysler would shed 26,000 jobs, about a fifth of its workforce, and idle six plants. "No one wants this to happen," Zetsche said. "I personally wish it didn't have to happen." The press release of May 1998 had promised the opposite in writing.

It worked, for a while: Chrysler was making money again by 2004. And the merger finally began to produce things you could drive rather than synergies you could only read about.

The Chrysler Crossfire of 2003 was the most literal expression of it — an American sports coupé on the platform of the Mercedes-Benz R170 SLK, sharing roughly 39% of its parts with it, assembled by Karmann in Osnabrück.

The Chrysler 300C that followed a year later was the better car and the better argument: an unmistakably American rear-drive sedan riding on the W211 E-Class's rear suspension geometry and shifting through a Mercedes five-speed automatic. It sold, and it made the case for the merger more convincingly than nine years of press releases.

Traffic ran the other way too. The Mercedes-Benz W903 Sprinter was sold in the United States wearing Dodge badges — shipped from Düsseldorf partly dismantled and screwed back together in South Carolina, because a van finished in America escaped the 25% tariff on imported light trucks.

Zetsche's first year as chairman opened with 6,000 white-collar jobs cut worldwide and, improbably, with a starring role in Chrysler's American advertising. As Dr. Z he appeared on television vouching for German engineering in cars built in Detroit — a German chief executive selling the merger to the country that had come off worst from it. The campaign lasted about a year. Chrysler lost $1.5 billion in 2006 and slipped behind Toyota in its home market.

On 14 February 2007 Zetsche told investors he would not rule out any option for Chrysler, including a sale. Chrysler announced 13,000 more job cuts the same day. The shares rose 5%. That was the verdict: the market paid more for the prospect of undoing the merger than it had ever paid for the merger itself.

On 14 May the buyer was named. Cerberus Capital Management, a New York private-equity firm, would contribute €5.5 billion — $7.4 billion — for 80.1% of a new company called Chrysler Holding LLC. Only $1.35 billion of it went to DaimlerChrysler; $5 billion went into Chrysler itself and $1.05 billion into its finance arm. Once the pension and healthcare liabilities and the $1.5 billion of debt Daimler agreed to subscribe were counted, selling Chrysler cost Daimler money.

The deal closed on 3 August 2007 and Daimler kept 19.9%. At an extraordinary shareholders' meeting in Berlin on 4 October, DaimlerChrysler AG became Daimler AG. The name had taken ten months and thirty-six billion dollars to assemble; it was dismantled by a show of hands.