The establishment of a new manufacturing base in North Africa has fascinated me for the past couple months – though few others seem to really care. The leader in this movement has been Renault, which is setting up plants in Morocco and Algeria to build their popular, low-cost Dacia vehicles in factories where employees earn a fraction of what a French assembly line worker would make.
PSA doesn’t have a low-cost brand of it’s own, so jobs haven’t gone across the Strait of Gibraltar – yet. But the closing of the Aulnay plant, where a massive contingent of North African immigrants (now French citizens) work, is a compelling snapshot of the socioeconomic and racial dynamics of France that happens to intersect with the auto industry.
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RS - Safety and Utility. It’s a win-win. Every vehicle should have a trailer hitch.
doctor olds - You can blame the UAW for a good share of those facts, and the lousy culture they inspired in many of the operations in those cities. I say this...
philipbarrett - It’s the new built in obsolescence. And one not easily fixed by a wrecking yard or creative machine shop.
DownEaster - All this technology in cars makes it so much easier to be a distracted drive. Finding the right button to touch on the correct screen can be a PITA. Also in...
ceipower - Will the GM stigma ever go away? Not for me it won’t. Pontiac took some hits for the plastic cladding , but what else could they do. GM , then...
philipbarrett - which is one of the reasons I’m still driving my ’03
highdesertcat - kericf, maybe they just had a bad batch of 2012s. Something similar happened to the Cruze belonging to a friend of my grand daughter. That...
DenverMike - I guess the issue here is the “low-speed” (bump?) that leads to fiery death. It should take major impact to cause any other (including the...
carguy - +1: The E46 and the E90/92 without iDrive are some of the most intuitive and clean designs in the business.
jmo - “I don’t like the idea of too much of a car’s functionality depending on high-level software which is certain to contain a number of bugs; it’s only a matter...