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A new Fiat Chrysler Automobiles sign is unveiled at Chrysler Group World Headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich., May 6, 2014.REBECCA COOK/Reuters

In what is shaping up to be the automotive equivalent of the 2011 Melbourne Cup photo finish – Dunaden won not by a nose, but a nose hair over Red Cadeaux – Chrysler Canada is just 2,576 units behind Ford of Canada in sales through the first 11 months of 2014 (Ford, 269,198 and Chrysler, 266,622).

If Ford wins, the victory will go to a Dearborn/Detroit-based car company. If Chrysler wins, it will go to an auto maker whose Dutch parent is based in The Netherlands with headquarters in London, and whose North American affiliate no longer has the name of Chrysler founder Walter P. Chrysler as its corporate moniker – for the first and only time since Walter P. founded the company in 1925.

You see, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has announced that the Chrysler Group is henceforth to be known as FCA US LLC. With the arrival of that alphabet soup of a name, the time seems ripe to strike the name Detroit Three from the automotive company roster. The world now has only two Detroit-based car companies, Ford and General Motors.

This surely is a milestone moment in the car business. Something big has happened and it should be noted. We all knew this was coming, however. Fiat tells us so.

Ed Garsten, FCA US's head of digital media, notes in a web posting that the all-letters name is "all part of the changes under way since our parent company, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles [NV] came into being in October" when FCA was listed on the New York Stock Exchange – along with its listing on the Italian Borsa, also under the symbol FCA. Indeed, Fiat Group Automobiles SpA has also changed its name to FCA Italy SpA.

For the record, Fiat is the older of the two car companies. Fiat was founded in Italy in 1899 by a group of entrepreneurs that included Giovanni Agnelli, whose family controls FCA with a 30 per cent stake through the holding firm Exor. Automotive News has reported that the Agnelli family might see its voting power rise to as much as 46 per cent as part of the Fiat-Chrysler merger.

Despite the change, Garsten says that, in fact, nothing much has changed.

"When you think about it," he notes on the web, "when someone changes their name from Smith to Jones for personal or professional reasons, they're still the same person. The change just makes sense for them. In that vein, our commitment to quality, style, performance and service hasn't changed, we just have a new name to reflect our role in our new company, and that makes sense."

So long, Detroit Three, hello Detroit Two. If Chrysler Canada wins the sales race with Ford of Canada, it will be the first time that a subsidiary of a European-based car company has taken the sales crown in Canada.

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