Peugeot-Citroen ready to marry?

[Stéphane Dumas]

French article spotted at http://www.leblogauto.com/2007/12/ps...se-marier.html
with the approximate Google translation at
http://translate.google.com/translat...hl=fr&ie=UTF-8

Peugeot-Citroen begins to looks for an "alliance" a la Renault-Nissan style and some think the partner might be Mitsubishi

[FoMoCo Fan]

Interesting. Mitsubishi is on the upswing, but lacks a full product protfolio in the US. This might help them a lot and bring some more interesting vehicles here.

[Bravada]

More interesting is the link to this story, detailing the plans of PSA's new CEO:

http://64.233.179.104/translate_c?hl...-cap-2010.html

He seems more conservative than the GOP! What he says is "expect nuffink and nuffink to change until 2010" - good thing Folz (the previous CEO) left him with some really good stuff in the pipeline, but by 2010 it will dry up. Bad, Streiff, bad!

As concerns the alliance talk, I find it remains gossip column feeder. PSA seems to have found the sweet spot with its multi-alliance strategy and searching for the best without taking up the unnecessary burden. They've got the commercial vehicles with Fiat (with the addition of the recent small triplets they might be ahead of the competition again), build cheap city cars with Toyo, share diesel costs with Ford, get great new turbos from their cooperation with BMW, and all-important SUVs from Mitsu.

That said, I believe there are still areas where they could expand the alliance strategy - for example small, compact and midsize car platforms. I also believe the Mitsu alliance could go deeper, at present it's rather skin-deep, with Mitsu supplying almost unchanged Outlanders and PSA shipping HDis to Japan. OTOH, PSA has just refreshed their core offerings (new C4, 308, C5, C6, 207), so I believe if anything's cooking, we will have to wait a longer time to see the complete dish.