The past few days have seen all sorts of rumours and supposed leaks from plant managers, union officials and senior executives at Opel and PSA. What should we believe?
There are countless potential opportunities for GM and PSA to share R&D and manufacturing activities, yet it’s going to take many years for the synergies to kick in. Europe seems to be the main initial focus – barely a day goes by lately when there isn’t a media report of a new development in either firm’s shifting plans for future products and where such models will be built.
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Take PSA’s Rennes plant in the west of France. The manager there, Jean-Luc Perrard, has reportedly told a local newspaper that the replacement for the Citroën C5 will shift to an Opel plant. If true, the likely location would be Rüsselsheim. By happy coincidence, both the Citroen and its Opel/Vauxhall Insignia rival are due for replacement in 2015. But would that mean that GM and PSA would delay the successor models by a year? Both companies have stated that any future shared architecture models wouldn’t be seen until around 2016.
There are further rumours which state that the replacement for the Opel/Vauxhall Zafira Tourer will be built by PSA. Yet the current model is almost new, so it’s surely way too early to be taking those reports with anything more than a petit pinch of salt. The same applies to supposed shared platforms for small cars – the new Corsa and its Adam derivative are only months from launch, while the recently launched Peugeot 208 is the lead model for a new PSA lightweight platform. PSA is also committed to launching locally-built variants of the 208 in China and Brazil within the next 18 months.
It’s been fewer than three months since GM and PSA revealed that they had agreed to pool resources and were investigating many possibilities for shared R&D projects. Logically, manufacturing in one another’s plants, using common architectures should (eventually) follow. But how will things like the SAIC GM Wuling models that will soon be made in India affect the deal? PSA has reportedly now put its own build of a new plant in that market on hold – there’s yet another question mark for this alliance.
I have a strong feeling that we’re going to be reporting much news and analysis of multiple developments stemming from new alliance in the months ahead – we’ll be checking and cross-checking facts, speaking to our sources often, plus I’ll be updating the PSA and GM sections of our future models database even more often than I have been.
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