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DETROIT — Chrysler was reborn Wednesday under a new Italian parent, but it can’t shake the shadows of its past: It’s not selling enough cars, its fleet is tilted to trucks and SUVs, and help is more than a year away.

A 42-day stay in bankruptcy court cleansed the company of much of its debt and labor costs, but many analysts say Chrysler’s immediate future is bleak. It lost $8 billion in 2008, and sales are down by almost half through five months of this year.

Cars designed by its new owner, Italy’s Fiat Group SpA, won’t make it to the U.S. until late 2010. And even then there are no guarantees American drivers will want the small cars Fiat specializes in.

"Fiat is really not a known commodity in the U.S. market," said David Koehler, a clinical marketing professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. "It doesn’t resonate with the target market."

The new Chrysler began operations Wednesday morning after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of lower court decisions that allowed the transfer of most of the old Chrysler’s assets to Fiat.

Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne was named chief executive of the new company and quickly shook up the management, replacing Chrysler’s chiefs of marketing, finance and product development and cutting layers to make the company more focused on individual brands, such as Jeep, Chrysler and Dodge.

Jim Press, who was Toyota Motor Corp.’s top U.S. executive until he joined Chrysler in 2007, was named deputy CEO and probably will run the company when Marchionne is in Italy.

In an e-mail to Chrysler’s 54,000 workers, Marchionne acknowledged the company’s problems and said he was determined to repair them free online credit report. Five years ago, he wrote, he stepped into a similar situation at Fiat, perceived at the time as a failing bureaucracy that made poor cars.

"Through hard work and tough choices, we have remade Fiat into a profitable company that produces some of the most popular, reliable and environmentally friendly cars in the world," he wrote. "We can and will accomplish the same results here."

Work is already under way to convert some Chrysler factories to produce small Italian-designed cars. Neither Chrysler nor Fiat, however, would say which models would come first or how many would be imported to the U.S.

Chrysler also plans to roll out new versions of its popular Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV and Chrysler 300 large sedan by the end of next year, along with a rechargeable electric vehicle. But analysts said those probably were delayed in the bankruptcy process, making the next 18 months look iffy.

The good news for Chrysler is that it has cut its expenses enough that it can break even with lower sales, said Gary Dilts, senior vice president of global automotive operations for J.D. Power and Associates.

Some of those cuts, however, costs thousands of jobs in the St. Louis area. Chrysler’s Dodge Ram assembly plant in Fenton is scheduled to be permanently idled by the end of September, and last year the company closed its minivan assembly plant, also in Fenton.

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