McLaren shows the P1 concept at the Paris Motor Show. Due to budgetary constraints, we had to outsource the video to India, and leave the reporting to Ireland’s Student News, which reports: Read More >

Renault chief Carlos Ghosn said in a radio interview with RTL that his company could leave France if it is unable to compete at home. Asked if Renault could disappear, Ghosn said: “In its current form, yes.” Read More >

TTAC readers who followed our past reporting on the developing relationship between Daimler and the Renault/Nissan Alliance will not be surprised in hearing what Carlos Ghosn and Dieter Zetsche told the press today. If you think you’ve heard it all before, you are right. You did here. Read More >

GM’s Susan Docherty, who is in charge of Chevrolet Europe, is shocked by  GM alliance partner PSA Peugeot Citroen. PSA, along with Fiat, are producing “very scary numbers” with discounts of as much as 30 percent off gross sale prices, Docherty told Bloomberg. Opel’s numbers can be even scarier. Read More >

European auto sales likely will fall 8 percent this year, Renault/Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn told Reuters today in Paris. Should some industry leaders be hoping for government help, then Ghosn has bad news for them. There is “zero chance” for a government-led restructuring of Europe’s auto industry. ” Every company is going to have to deal with its own problems,” Ghosn said. Read More >

I drive an American car forum member’s fantasy: a stick-shift diesel wagon. Except that I don’t. I love that car, but it stays in its garage most of the time, unlike its predecessor in New Jersey, which I drove 60 miles a day plus 200 on weekends. Read More >

It’s official. France’s PSA Peugeot Citroen is “in a difficult situation,” says a government-commissioned report into PSA’s financial situation. The report comes to the conclusion, says Reuters, that the company cannot be saved by cost cutting alone, and that ”job cuts must not hurt its research and development capabilities.” While the report does not make recommendations on how else the company is to be saved, it pretty much smells like bailout  à la française. Read More >

Bad day for PSA and by association partner GM:  PSA Peugeot Citroen will be dropped from France’s CAC 40 blue chip stock index, market operator NYSE Euronext told Reuters. To add insult to injury, the former blue chip will be replaced by a Belgian company, chemicals group Solvay. Read More >

People in Europe had a lot of time to think about their troubled future during their long vacation. Coming back to work, they are “ready to shut plants and lay off staff,” as Reuters observes. Executives and union leaders are said to be in rare agreement over who to emulate: Obama, the UAW, and Detroit. Europeans want their bailout too. Some do, at least. Read More >

The united Europe is more and more turning into a divided Europe, at least when it comes to making cars. On one side are the hugely profitable German carmakers Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler and Porsche. On the other side are its loss-making or barely-profitable rivals including Fiat, Peugeot-Citroen, Renault and GM’s Opel. Now, the split drives the two countries apart that started Europe’s unification, France and Germany.

France’s new socialist government wants to punish buyers of bigger cars with huge taxes while lifting the tax burden on smaller cars. The bigger cars are mostly German. Read More >

Bailing out a European carmaker in need is sure to attract the attention and ire of a few EU Commissars. Once people are in the street, money can legally flow. Read More >

While in Detroit the leaking remains limited to gossip and innuendo, Opel in Germany sprung a Deepwater Horizon–sized  leak that could pollute the political landscape for years. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung says it is in possession of something that is regarded as part of the crown jewels of a car company: The long-term production plan through the next decade.  It’s bad enough that a paper publishes closely guarded secrets – their publication could blow-up the plan. Read More >

In 2010, when everybody was going ecstatic about EVs, PSA Peugeot Citroen said to Mitsubishi: “send us some of your i-Mievs, with our badges. Say, 100,000 for starters.”

PSA sold them (as much as they could) as the Peugeot iOn and Citroen C-Zero, the first car that sounds like sugar-free soda-pop. Now, PSA picked up the phone, called Japan, and said: “Hold the i-Mievs! We have enough!” Read More >

When GM bought seven percent of the moribund PSA Peugeot Citroen five months ago, the happy couple praised monstrous synergies and annual cost savings of $2 billion a year coming from the – ahem – tie-up. Hope springs eternal, but currently, the value of this dubious investment  is deflating faster than a popped balloon. Even GM is realizing it and tells the Treasury that it may have to write down that investment if things don’t get better soon.

The ever so vigilant Reuters actually went to the trouble of reading the complete 10-Q GM filed with the SEC in connection with GM’s recent quarterly report. In that filing, GM says: Read More >

And now, back to the usual blood and tears from Europe: July new cars sales dropped 7 percent in France and thudded 17 percent in Spain “as consumers cut back on costly goods in the face of economic uncertainty,” says Reuters. Read More >