It is interesting to note that Renault was once the largest import car make in the USA-at one point they outsold VW. Their cars were interesting, and did offer excellent fuel economy.
But their reliability was sub-par…which is why they stopped selling in the USA (around 1980 or so).
As a rule you’d be well off to disregard anything you read or hear after “Karl Lagerfelds says…” because he’s generally a batshit old bitch who just runs off at the mouth.
Also, their tourism and their medical community is aces.
People started complaining about the quality after Renault cars started to be manufactured in the US. They also no longer cared much about fuel economy after the oil crisis ended.
Volkswagen has never made “any inroads at all into the North American market”? Er, so all those cars I see with the “VW” logo, what manufacturer is that?
Renault owns a pretty good chunk of Nissan.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. They have a corporate partnership in which both companies own a piece of the other. Renault owns more of Nissan than vice versa, but it is a partnership.
Uh, cite? The only possible way that could be true is if you’re counting all the AMC’s sold during the short time when Renault had a controlling interest. For a brief period in the early 80’s, Renault was the second biggest European brand in the US, but it was a very distant second to VW.
Renault’s quality wasn’t great in the late 70’s and early 80’s, but they were pretty much on par with the VW’s of the day and certainly better than any of the small cars coming out of Detroit at the time. Renault’s failure in the US market had more to do with poor buisness decisions (particularly the partnership with the already-circling-the-drain AMC) than particularly bad quality.
From wikipedia:
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This is the most ridiculous, nay, hilarious, comment I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
Which is better - Bentleys or Cadillacs? Porsches or Corvettes? Lamborghinis or Mustangs? Bugatti Veyrons or SSC Ultimates?
American cars are awful. All they can do is wallow in a straight line. It suits your roads with their enormous size, useless drivers, and tiny speed limits to an extent, but driven hard by people who know what they are doing, they are disgusting.
Now I will agree with you that perhaps VW should start making awful cars to appeal to ignorant American buyers. That would make commercial sense. The US mass market desires crap.
But don’t pretend the cars will be better. Just better suited. It’s MS Paint versus Adobe Photoshop.
Slight sidetrack, but a lot of people think VW is doing just that. The latest generation of Passat and Jetta are significantly cheaper than the previous ones (and it shows!), which VW have explicitly said is aimed at increasing their market share in the American market.
I think it is more than a bit unfair calling him just a celebrity, he is effectively a businessman.
Cite:
My AMC (Renault) Alliance blew its head gasket at 9,000 miles. The head was so warped that it could not be reused. Also, the plastic control knobs on the dash all fell off..and the alternator blew up.
You might say the quality was “sub-par”:mad:
Oh, another thing.
I wonder if American dopers know what the hell “chevrolets” are in the UK.
Take a look at www.chevrolet.co.uk
The majority of them are rebadged daewoos. When I see a chevrolet, normally because I have been driving along to find it obstructing my good progress, I am immediately thinking: where will I overtake this old (wo)man?
(there is at least one cool chevvy corvette on the IOM [I also drive in the UK proper quite a lot but ignroe that {the differences are especially magnified here because a) most roads have no speed limit at all and b) most drivers either drive appaulingly slowly OR do not know how to overtake which leads to queues you need to despatch, and my daily driver isn’t THAT powerful}] which is driven properly, but I am talking balance of probabilities)
Well, the “cite?” was directed at the claim that Renault was ever the biggest import in America.
Like I said, “par” was extremely low in the early 80’s. The early watercooled VW’s were likewise pretty awful, to say nothing of Detroit’s first wave of subcompact offerings. Plus the Alliance was assembled in Wisconsin, so at least in that case, France’s suitability to manufacturing (or lack therof) was irrelevant.
Here is a fascinating documentary film on the subject. Really gets to what is wrong with French wine and wine around the world.
This.
I’ve been to France five times, and my partner has been there even more. Contrary to the stereotype, neither of us has ever had a problem being an American tourist. We have found them to be, in fact, more helpful than Americans are with tourists.
And French medical research is often years ahead of the U.S.
I believe Arianespace launches more commercial satellites than any other company in the world.
France is big in my field (specialized optics, mostly for space flight). Jobin-Yvon is the world leader in manufacturing of custom optical gratings. (They are now owned by a Japanese parent company, but the engineering and manufacturing is still done in France.)
They’re also quite well represented in niche high-tech fields like safety-critical software engineering. Esterel Technologies and Thales (really a defence contractor, but did a lot of safety-critical work for Airbus) are all big players in this sector, and academia in France which is quite strong in this area also plays a big role with their industrial partnerships.
The French economy is a lot like the British one. A lot of people here are looking at what the effects of the new taxation regime will be in France, as the two economies are so similar.
I wonder if Karl has heard of Total and Schlumberger. They seem to do pretty well in the oil patch.
And while It is a bit of a niche, there is some world class research being done in the field of Earth Sciences at the University of Nancy. Our technology unit hires and sponsors several of the researchers from there.