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On this day in 1991, Peugeot officially announced its exit from the U.S. market.
In 1986, Peugeot sold roughly 14,000 cars in America. By 1990, that number had plummeted to just 4,200. PSA still maintains an office in Michigan, but as Peugeot’s exit date closes in on the 25 year mark, that last vestige of a French auto maker presence will likely disappear as well.
48 Comments on “On This Day In History: Peugeot Withdraws From U.S. Market...”
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I remember renting one of these sedans in San Francisco in 1986. The car was really nothing special compared to its Swedish competition (and certainly several notches below BMW and Mercedes). Like a lot of turbocharged engines of that era, the Peugeot 4 had a “light switch” power delivery: “on” and “off.” Somehow Peugeot had never cultivated the image of safety that Volvo cultivated so successfully.
RWD Peugeots are my first and one true automotive love. I have owned 3 504s, 2 wagons and a sedan, and 4 505s, 2 sedans, 2 wagons. One wagon was one of THE very last ’92 505s sold in the US, it came over in the very last shipment, and was THE only 5spd stick ’92 SW8 in the US, because I had it converted from the automatic. A very special order by a family that had owned nothing but Peugeots for 30+ years. In a fit of stupidity I sold that car to buy my first Saab 900T. Sigh.
Lovely cars let down by the fact that American mechanics (and really most Americans) had not the first clue about them, a seriously sparse dealer body (though little Maine had THREE), and they do rust like crazy if not well cared for. And they were quite expensive.
I have to disagree with DC Bruce. Having owned Peugeots, BMWs, Saabs, and Mercedes in multiples, the Peugeots were their equal. They combined comfort and performance in a uniquely French way. Not superior or inferior, just unique, back when cars were allowed to be far more different that they are in the dull gray world of today.
Totally jealous. Have owned many Saabs, never a Peugeot, always wanted one. When I was a kid running a small farm-stand, a customer had a black SW8 and it was my dream car, might as well have been a Ferrari :)
I have owned many Saabs after that first one, but the Peugeots were very special cars. I had to sell my ’79 504D when I lost my job for a bit in ’03. I sold it to a friend from the Pug Club who has kind of a private museum in IN. I hope to buy it back someday. It is an absolutely rust-free car with only ~120K on it. 2.3l diesel with 4spd stick.
Oh, my gawd, don’t get me started. We took delivery of the 1965 404 wagon at the beginning of our year in Paris. It was amazing. Whereas the ’57 Chevy wagon had rattled, had leaned way over in the curves, and had been totally clunky over Massachusetts potholes, the Peugeot took those same potholes with aplomb, cornered flat by American standards of the day, and had precise steering, and got about 30 mpgs on the road. Then there was the four on the tree. We drove that car all over France, and then all over Europe before bringing it home, and three years after we arrived home, it was the first car I drove legally. On top of everything else, that Pininfarina styling was beautiful. Of all the cars I knew in my childhood and teenaged years, this is the one I’d love to have.
“and they do rust like crazy if not well cared for. And they were quite expensive.”
Maybe those Americans had more of a clue than you give them credit for. These reasons alone are enough for presto, chango – no more Puegeot.
@rpol35
They did not rust much worse than most other 70’s cars – 504s were a bit worse, 505s were probably better than average. The 504 was a car from the 60’s actually. They were expensive because they were near luxury cars. Pricing was similar to Saab and Volvo, maybe a little more expensive. Sophistication level was MUCH closer to Mercedes-Benz than Volvo, so in that sense they were actually a bargain. A 505 was VERY comparable to a w123 Mercedes, I have owned those as well. The Mercedes was tougher, but it also was a cruder car to drive, and not anything like as comfortable. A good 505 is a magic carpet ride.
I freely admit, the biggest handicap was the TINY dealer network. It was not easy to find DIY info in the dawn of the Internet era. And taking one of these cars to a regular mechanic back then was a recipe for disaster. They might as well have been a starship compared to something like an ’82 Chevy sedan. I never had a problem getting parts, but I lived right by two dealerships.
Historical trivia note – for many, many, many years, Saab and Peugeot shared a parts distribution warehouse in Scranton, PA.
Sorry, I could never get the love.
You buy French cars because Saab’s are too mainstream and not quirky enough for you. You buy them because you like driving weird, easy riding, maintenance intensive, little-to-nonexistant-dealer-support automobiles because it’s very important that you don’t see yourself coming down the road from the opposite direction more than once a month. And possibly no more than once a year.
Peugeot’s were nothing more than French Volvo’s, without the safety reputation, but with the typical complete lack of dealer support. I’m usually amazed they lasted as long as they did.
Oh well, they pulled back to the motherland, and have spent the last three decades trying to turn Citroen’s into boring, normal cars.
@Syke
Whatever mate. I live in an area that had two very good Peugeot dealers relatively close by. They were not particularly unusual cars in my area. I saw them daily, often in multiple, until 5-6 years ago, and still seem them monthly even now. Not as common as a Saab or Volvo, but those are like Chevys here. having owned sundry Saabs, Volvos, Mercedes and Peugeots, a Peugeot (505, 504, and 604 anyway) is a French Mercedes, not a French Volvo. None of mine were remotely maintenance intensive. In fact, my ’92 505 SW8 was probably the most reliable used car I have ever owned. Not a thing broke in 4yrs 70K miles, and it had 90K on it when I bought it. Nothing but routine maintenance.
They are certainly not cars for everyone, but most exceptional things are not for everyone. Budweiser and McDonalds make the best selling beer and hamburgers in the land, but they are certainly not the best. Some of us prefer to drive cars that are exceptional, not exceptionally dull but worthy.
I’d rather have a Citroen.
Or a Tatra.
In the mid-’70s, my dad bought ’73 Citroen SM. It was a fantastic car – when it ran, which was about 40% of the time during the winter. The rest of the time it sat in our garage, and then sat for six months at the Citroen “dealer” (and I use that term loosely) while it waited for a new engine from Italy…Dad blew the old engine doing 35 in second gear. This little mishap cost $5,000…in mid-’70s dollars.
Worst. Car. Ever. It was so bad that when we watched “The Longest Yard” on TV, which features Burt Reynolds first beating the hell out of an SM, and then launching it into the water, I believe I saw this really evil smile cross Dad’s face.
I mean, even my friends who had British cars had better than 40% odds of completing a trip from November to February…and they didn’t shell out the equivalent of $40-50,000 for them.
He sold the SM to an attorney who lived up the road from us and worried he might end up in court over the sale.
Don’t take this wrong way…but if Peugeots were your first true automotive love, then you got off to a rough start…
They were absolutely terrific cars. Absolutely bulletproof, every one of them. They just take a certain understanding, and I think being able to swear in French is a big help. :-)
I do miss my 85 505 Sti. I miss the comfort, and the relaxed attitude. I do not miss the lack of power or crap fuel economy. I also miss the ride, the current daily driver 94 Legacy wagon is like a track day car compared to the Pug. I sent it to the crusher little over a year ago. Shame really, because body wise it was still a tank. Just needed modern drive train renovation. Torque tube IRS set up limited swap potential so, well that was it. I my self put over 300,000 miles on it. It was the lack of parts that was really starting to grind me.
The wheels do live on however, on my lifted Subaru.
Didn’t Alfa Romeo leave the US about a year later?
Guess the early 90s were not a good time to be a European (but not German) car-maker in the US.
1995 for Alfa Romeo.
The early 90’s were the last big recession in the US. Add that drop in sales for what had become very expensive luxury cars due to exchange rates with the new safety and emissions regs that came in, and we lost a LOT of car models from our market in those years.
That sounds about right. Kinda surprising SAAB and Volvo survived.
They didn’t. Got sold to GM and Ford respectively. That recession was a BIG part of why.
I thought the Ford thing was like…1998. But yeah, I forgot the sale to GM was in the early 90s.
It was, but the groundwork was laid in that recession. GM bought 1/2 of Saab in IIRC, 1990, the other half in 2000.
Don’t forget kids, Alfa-Romeo’s were sold at select Chrysler-Plymouth dealers for a short time. I recall seeing one on the showroom floor of a Chrysler-Plymouth dealer in Brandon, FL, just east of Tampa.
My local Alfa dealer was also a Chevy store. Interestingly, that same dealer picked up the Fiat franchise when they came back, NOT the local Chrysler store. Must still be some Italian car love in the family, as it is still the same owners.
They were actually Chevy-Alfa-Saab back in the day, they split the Saab business off into a standalone store in a MUCH nicer area a few years later, then sold it off eventually. They did pretty well here with Alfas, still lots of Spiders, a few Milanos and GTV6s, and a fair number of 164s in the area. We have a couple indy mechanics in the area that do Italian quite well.
Oh, boy, Mr.K, you bring back memories with this. The very first car I ever purchased, back in the summer of ’73, was a dark-green 504 sedan, with a 4-on-the-tree, sunroof, FM radio, and about 50K miles on it. I’m still not entirely sure why I bought it – maybe the sunroof, or the great seats, or the sheer weirdness of having a Peugeot. But for the first month or two, I was utterly enamored.
And them everything went right to hell. I can’t begin to remember all of the failures this car had. Overheating, brakes that rusted solid after every winter, clutch hydraulics, starter, alternator, an inability to run in cold, damp weather… I’m probably suppressing various memories. At about 70K miles – just two years later – I gave up and swore off imported cars for about a decade.
It goes down in history as the least reliable and god-awful-slowest car I’ve ever owned. And by the way, the sluggishness of this pig (0-60 times measured with a calendar) didn’t even translate into good gas mileage. I don’t think I ever much exceeded 25 mpg.
It’s been years and years since I’ve seen another 504. Rumor has it that they last forever doing taxi duty in the third world. But I let mine go in 1975, and never regretted doing so!
Well, how can I avoid commenting on this one. Learned to drive on a 74 504 diesel sedan. Went to the prom driving a 504 diesel wagon. First brand new car I ever bought was an ’89 405 Mi16. The magazine ad at the top of this story represented their final failed marketing strategy of appealing to contrarians. Even the ad copy was written in a quirky, off kilter manner. The French were, and may still be, the best suspension tuners in the world and the Peugeots I drove had amazingly long wheel travel but were tenacious in corners, even if the door handles were scraping on the pavement. Alas, when they decamped from the US market and it was time for a new car I searched for another quirky, low-volume vehicle and bought a ’96 Audi A4, one of the first available at the local dealer. We all know what happened to Audi after that! I owned two more Audis and now two Acuras, including an RL which maintains my theme of low volume weirdness but I suspect to my dying day I will never again own a car I loved as much as that 405 Mi16.
I came THIS close to buying a brand new leftover never titled ’92 MI16 in early ’94 for <1/2 price from the local dealer. Just couldn't quite swing it. Will always be one of the ones that got away for me. Stuck with my trusty '84 Jetta GLI for another few years. Bought my first Peugeot in '96, an '85 505TD sedan.
I think PSA would be well served by relaunching into North America. The cars are far better quality than they were in the 70s and could expect to win a strong niche following – and any sales are good for a company that’s struggling in Europe and largely dependent on making Beijing the new Paris. Clearly they’d have to team up with someone (GM?) to access a dealer network, but shouldn’t be so difficult.
Sadly, PSA is a basketcase, it doesn’t need the problems of trying to sell uncompetitive product into a very competitive market.
It hurts to say this as a Francophile, and former 205 GTI owner, but the problems of PSA were very evident only a year before withdrawal from the US market.
It reminded me of LJK Setright and his musings on the Sisyphean task of PSA producing a car that was truely haute de gamme. His comments in 1990 on the 605 are truely telling.
“What I have seen breeds no confidence in the chances of the 605 winning ennoblement for Peugeot.
Considered merely as a car, the 605 is undeniably a good car. It may not be as good, is surely less clever, and is certainly less brave than the XM; but it gets along well enough, gets around unexpectedly well, and gets the attention it seeks. If it does not reflect a birth in the purple, that is because a patrician’s paintwork is like mirror glass, not like orange peel. Should we ignore the surface and investigate deeper, we find the 605 quite meritorious: I was favourably impressed by much of what I saw at the newly equipped factory where its hull and major mechanicals are so well fabricated and assembled. What shocked me, prying deeper were the traces of the submerged tenth, the flimsy wiring and beggarly couplings of the electrical harness.”
I have tried to buy a Peugeot for my last 2 car purchases. My experience (I live in Australia), is that the cars just aren’t competitive, expensive for what they are, and the dealer experience is rubbish.
I work next door to a Peugeot service centre and dismantler, and the amount of low mileage relatively young cars ( 5 years old) which have no accident damage, that have some form of major failure and aren’t viable repair candidates is very scarey.
I appreciate your experience of seeing rather young cars going to their death, but I think that can happen with any OEM and is not indicative of am OEM ‘basket case’. I’ve been to two of the five plants in France producing Peugeot and Citroen models and the quality control is comparable to any German or Japanese OEM. In addition, the in-house technology development is pretty decent, both looking at vehicle make up (materials, joining, paint) and cabin features.
The 605 and XM are both old cars now and the company has moved on since then. That said, I think the 607 was a mistake, as PSA should’ve predicted the demise of the E-seg in Europe and adjusted the size of the car. Effectively, the 508 is the car that the 607 should always have been. I think it delivers a good alternative to the enduringly hard suspension of the Mondeo (Fusion) and the both the saloon and wagon are decent looking cars that would hold up well against North American competitors.
In another article thread it’s mentioned that 10% of the US new car market is forecast to be diesel by 2020. PSA is a diesel specialist and could cash in on this – if they had cars to be bought.
I would be very surprised if diesel was 10% of the passenger car and light truck market in 2020. Diesel fuel is already more expensive than the most expensive grade of gasoline. Wouldn’t be surprised if the excise tax on diesel was raised to pay for road repair.
George, back in the 80s I had a diesel Jetta which could get me from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and (almost) back on one tank of juice. I reckon that was close to 600 miles. Bring that forward and I’ve heard that if you’re careful with the go-faster pedal that the Honda Civic with the 1.6 i-DTEC can get close to 1,000 miles on a 50-litre tank (I guess that’s about 12-14 gallons), or about real world 80mpg.
Do you think that the potential range of a diesel weighs in their favour, despite the higher pump price?
Oh I when I said PSA was a basketcase, I was referring more to PSA Corporately, rather than their cars per se, although in Australia, it is fair to say their ownership experience is not particularly competitive.
Here is a Reuters article outlining the challenges :-
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/11/peugeot-strategy-idUSL6N0N33IX20140411
Sadly the early death of these cars, is a factor of poor resale, poor parts availability and high parts cost, and an owner who is at the end of his or her patience typically with electrical gremlins.
I spoke to the owner of the yard on Monday about a 407 that was being parted out. Basically the car was a one owner, but it was at the end of its registration, required some expensive maintenance in the form of tyres, brake rotors and pads, wheel bearings and cam belt, along with a faulty ECU and a stuffed air cond compressor, along with some electrical gremlins that were probably sensor related. It was worth more as parts than fixing these problems.
In the case of my 5 year old Volkswagen (not a paragon of reliability in my experience), if I had these issues, the parts availability combined with resale would see these not inconsiderable issues be addressed, and not go to the wreckers.
As far as I remember, there were no Peugeot dealers in my town and I only remember one tooling around, owned by a girl a couple grades lower than me who was super cute and by then it was already older and unusual in 1997.
Were they stand-alone shops or did they commonly align with other dealer networks?
Most Peugeot (and pre-AMC Renault) dealerships that I can remember were almost-shade-tree level exotic foreign car repair shops in buildings that were like old fashioned gas stations, with a ‘showroom’ side big enough to hold one or two cars. And a lot of them seemed to be in small towns outside some big city. Obviously, the main motivation here was passion for the brand, or odd foreign cars, or something; rather than the usual ‘move the metal’ profit motive.
Yeah, that’s how it was in South Jersey/suburban Phila. The dealer wasn’t in the high-end “auto mile” in well-off Cherry Hill, but in working-class Runnemede, another 15min out. The repair shop that’s since taken its place still has pug expertise…
Of the three dealers in Maine, one was a small stand alone dealership from beginning to end. One was a standalone that picked up Subaru in 1980, and is still a stand-alone Subaru dealer to this day, along with some high-end boats. The last was of all things, a gigantic Buick-Olds-Cadillac-Peugeot-Fiat-Rolls-Royce(!!) dealer that is long gone. The Oldsmobile 98 that my folks had was bought there, it was not far from where I grew up. Next town over.
Have very fond memories of a road trip all over Germany and Belgium with three friends in an aging 404.
The most comfortable seats I have ever encountered in a car – to this day. Other french cars I have sat in (CX, even the 2CV) always had pretty comfy seats, especially compared to the planks in Japanese cars of the time.
Almost bought a 504 in the mid 80’s as my collage car, it was different and that appealed to me , can not remember what happened but ended up getting a Fiat spider instead, just as well Both cars cemented my love for the different and swimming against the tide, as I have owned Audi’s before they were cool, Infinity’s Volvo and Saabs and now have a diesel wagon. I always liked the looks of the 505 but it seems the french can not get a vibe on what the US wants or they just do not care to.
An aunt who had lived in Europe in the early 60s for a couple of years brought a 403 with her.
I was still a youngster, but my curiosity for cars had already been piqued. I distinctly remember the four on the tree, and gauges with funny names like “Eau”.
Under the hood, the engine looked different. Can’t pinpoint exactly why, just different.
If my memory serves me well, the air filter was also of the oil-bathed variety.
Good god, I want to apply for a job at the PSA office in Michigan. Seriously, WHAT do they do there all day, year after year!
Secretly plotting their return? Spearheaded by brown, RWD, diesel, manual shift station wagons . . . . which they’ll force people to buy new?
So PSA has an office in Michigan, and they are the ones who provided the RCZ coupe which showed up in the Audi review by Karesh?
Michael never answered anybodys questions regarding the Peugeot, which is lousy.
-Why was it in the article?
-Who provided it?
-What does the PSA office DO?
From what I understand, the gentleman who owned the RCZ was Michael’s neighbor and operated PSA’s office in Michigan.
Thanks for the detail.
So presumably he has access to other exclusive non-US products. Somebody should contact this guy and get a car or an interview! I’d be interested on a story regarding the current state of PSA in the US.
It’s kind of like the “armistice station” in Battlestar Galactica…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLaTmro5MfE
cool I have never seen that, so just so I understand Honda is the Cylons that killed French cars in the US , Frack
Well, I think this video about sums it up…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yciX2meIkXI
I remember my buddies 403 having a crank starter!!!
How awesome is that!!!