March 18, 2009

Chrysler LLC, surviving on federal loans, asked the U.S. Treasury for more aid for its finance arm to stimulate auto lending, the carmaker’s chief executive officer told CNBC.The company began seeing benefits in sales to individuals last month from a $1.5 billion Treasury loan to Chrysler Financial, CEO Robert Nardelli said in a CNBC interview today. He didn’t give a figure for how much more Chrysler requested.“We have gone back to Treasury and said ‘we need to re-up that amount,’” he said. “We saw the evidence of how that works.”

Providing more funds to Chrysler Financial may increase sales as much as 20 percent by expanding the range of customers who could qualify for loans, he said.Chrysler is trying to make it easier for potential buyers to get financing, after the Auburn Hills, Michigan-based automaker’s U.S. sales slid 49 percent in this year’s first two months. The Treasury in January provided the funding for Chrysler Financial, which financed 40,000 sales in February, double the number in the previous month.