List out two major reasons for the failure, and two possible...

Question

List out two major reasons for the failure, and two possible synergies that were expected to have from the M&A between Daimler and Chrysler.

That Daimler can sell Chrysler as a more-or-less intact unit to a private equity firm tells you all you need to know about why the combination failed. The two organizations never were integrated into anything that approached a cohesive whole. The potential synergies that were used to justify the deal went unrealized.
Why did this happen? Because the two organizations really didn't like each other, and couldn't cooperate to the extent necessary to make the combination work. Serious efforts to integrate the operations of Daimler and Chrysler foundered on lack of trust clashes between the mid-market cowboys of Detroit and the high-end knights of Stuttgart.
The seeds of post-merger disintegration were sown early when it became obvious that a "merger of equals" was actually a takeover of Chrysler by Daimler. And there were unbridgeable differences in the cultures of the two organizations. As is too often the case in acquisitions, the synergies were all on the surface.
In theory, the Daimler-Chrysler combination should have yielded two very potent sources of competitive advantage. The first was a cohesive global brand architecture. Consider Toyota. Its brand structure is extremely clear and logical: Lexus for the high-end buyer, Toyota for the middle-income family, and Scion for the hip young. The segmentation makes sense and the progressions between segments are natural ones. Young people find partners, have children, and buy minivans; people with money move up to luxury vehicles.
The second potential source of competitive advantage lay in creating a coherent platform strategy built on the economic logic of parts sharing. Because the cost of developing new vehicles is so great, car companies design "platforms" from which they create families of vehicles. They also try to share parts between platforms to drive economies of scale in manufacturing. See two papers on the history of the US and European automobile industries and platform strategy — 1, 2 — that I wrote with Nathan Simon.
Realizing synergy in brand architecture and platform strategy would have required deep integration of Daimler and Chrysler. German engineers would have had to design cars using parts created by American engineers and vice versa. The management team would have had to develop a global brand strategy and associated logic of competitive positioning. None of this happened. They ran the two organizations as separate operations. When major shifts in the environment (rising gas prices and the move away from SUVs and trucks) kicked out the blocks from under Chrysler's recovery, it was both necessary and possible for them to part.
Much of the fault for this debacle belongs to Daimler's former chairman, Jergen Schrempp. Like many senior executives anxious to cement their legacies, he got caught up in the late 90's acquisition mania. Economists have estimated that between 1998 and 2001, large acquisitions cost the shareholders of acquiring firms $397 billion.