I am going to disagree and say the Chute must play a major role as that Cessna TTX thingy went tits up and appeared to look and feel like a Cirrus on the inside.
The chute is just one thing that differentiates Cirrus. To say the chute "must play a major role" overlooks all the other things that Cirrus has done to appeal to their high-net-worth and (as a result) often very demanding target cohort.
Everything from continually improving the product with each "Gen", brilliant marketing (Cirrus Life), creating a unique customer delivery experience, as well as tackling head on and fixing the abysmal fatal accident safety record circa 2010 (something that could have easily sunk a lesser company). I am not the greatest fan of the Cirrus piston airplanes (however, I do lust after that jet!), but as someone who has built a number of businesses from scratch I really admire the management and leadership of that company.
The TTx was an "orphan" in the Cessna line up right from the beginning. Completely incongruent with the entire Cessna piston aircraft line up. For any Cessna owner wanting to upgrade, the environment in a TTx must have seemed completely alien and unfamiliar, as would many of the POH procedures and such. Don't underestimate how important that is - look at the efforts Cirrus has gone through to make their jet cockpit, systems and other characteristics as familiar and easy a transition as possible for its SR22 customers.
I sometimes wonder if Textron shouldn't have tried to sell the TTx as a Beech Bonanza replacement product instead.
Cessna loves killing single engine planes unless it's a 172 trainer.. they only care about the sky courier, Denali, and the turbine market as a whole. I mean just look at the Bonanza, a very capable plane and they're barely selling any. I think Cessna is largely to blame for that
The Bonanza is an ancient plane that went through the "continuous improvement" part of its life cycle in the 1960s and 1970s. Its time has passed, and there is no amount of "heavy promotion" by Textron that is going to materially change Bonanza sales numbers in a global piston aircraft market that moves less than 1000 units total, annually.
Textron is running a business, and the single most important measure of business success is margin in excess of your cost of capital. Like Warren Buffett's Berkshire, Textron has many more options to re-invest its capital in higher margin businesses and products than Cirrus, Mooney, Piper and every other remaining piston aircraft maker out there.
It doesn't have to produce piston airplanes.
Per my post #10 on this thread, the whole private GA market,
including Cirrus, has been moving inexorably upscale for many years now. Daher-Socata was early to read the future correctly, and completely dumped the piston market years ago to focus on producing the turboprop TBM for private owners. Don't expect Textron to run a charity.
