Let me clarify that I personally could not care less that the engine block is sourced from Chrysler. Someone posted a question regarding the source of the engine, and I thought I'd share what I know.
There is a right way and a wrong way to share parts or platforms. Americans are very weary of the type of platform sharing that was abused by Ford, Chrysler, and GM, and to a lesser extent by Japanese brands in the past couple of decades. Certain brands of cars such as Pontiac, Mercury, and Oldsmobile essentially had no unique products of their own and everything they sold was based massively on existing vehicles on the base Chevrolet or Ford brand vehicles. They often claimed that many of the parts were unique, but they were unique for the sake of being unique, rather than offer something different or better. For example, a differently shaped body panel is of little value if it is still ugly and pedestrian in design. Subsequent to the general public being completely turned off by this type of automotive shell game, many of these brands were killed off as the car manufacturers focused on making their core brands stronger. However the damage was very severe as it became instantly a negative connotation for platform sharing or parts sharing between different brand/model vehicles.
Getting back to the history of Maserati and Chrysler, the history goes back much further than the current Fiat-Chrysler relationship. If you all remember, the automotive world went through a lot of consolidation and in the process there were often team-ups between an exotic brand and a more pedestrian brand. Remember the Lotus tuned Isuzu Impulse? Similarly, Chrysler had gotten together with Maserati to make the TC in 1989:
Chrysler TC by Maserati - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It optionally used a Mitsubishi engine to make it a true 3-continent effort.
Fast forward to today, the relationship between Chrysler and Maserati is more of a sibling relationship, than partner. The parts and platform sharing is also done with far more sophistication than the old days when odd pieces were bolted together without much regard to the refinement of the finished product. These days, the sharing is done only if it actually makes sense to do so. I will use a cooking analogy.
In the old days of platform sharing, three cooks looking to cook three different dishes would have done so by having one cook cook something first, and the other two cooks then took the same ingredients used by the first cook, and forced two more dishes out of it. The results are always sub optimal because the goal of saving money by reusing existing ingredients meant poor results.
Currently, three cooks would each cook their own dishes, but if one cook needed an ingredient that another cook happened to have already, then he didn't have to get that on his own. He still had the freedom to find and get other ingredients to make is own unique dish. This is ingredient sharing done right and the end result has no loss of quality.
