PSA, USA: Peugeot will bring French cars back to the US by 2026
There hasn't been a Peugeot for sale here in 28 years.
Ever since PSA, the French auto-manufacturing giant that includes Peugeot and Citroën, announced that it wanted to return to the US, we were left with very few details aside from, "Oh, this is a thing we want to do." Now, we have a bit more information about what to expect.
Peugeot will be the first PSA brand to land in the US as part of an effort to bring French cars back to our amber waves of grain, according to comments made this week by PSA CEO Carlos Tavares, as reported by Automotive News. After the initial announcement in 2016, PSA didn't specify which of its groups would be the first to land in the US.
I hope you like waiting, though. PSA is in no hurry to slap a bunch of dealerships and cars all over American roads, saying that it intends to return to the US by 2026. As for distribution, manufacturing and all that, PSA still hasn't made any official announcements to those ends.
If Peugeot brings the 208 to the US, it won't be the one that just debuted, but likely the generation that will follow it. Seven years is a long time when it comes to vehicle generations.
That doesn't mean PSA isn't working on it. In regard to distribution, an Automotive News report from May of last year said that the automaker wants to focus on smoothing distribution by relying on digital means like Hyundai's Shopper Assurance, while trying to increase margins to keep dealers happy as the US market again warms to French cars.
Part of that also involves not forcing dealers to spend a ton of money upfront on dealerships: "I don't want to go to people and say, you have to build me a Taj Mahal with this color tile and this fabric on your chairs," PSA CEO Larry Dominique told AN in an interview last May. There are a number of known unknowns involved with reviving an automaker in the US, and PSA doesn't want potential dealers turned off to the idea before it even has a chance to start.
Saying that Peugeot will come back to the US by 2026 leaves the door open for a potentially earlier arrival. Automotive News interviewed Tavares in September 2017, at which time the CEO said that PSA was already adapting its next-generation vehicles to comply with US regulations, allowing them to smash that re-entry button with greater ease. The vehicles you see coming from Peugeot now, like the new 208, are unlikely to be part of PSA's return to the US, but it's possible that the next generations of these vehicles will be rolling down the interstate in the future.
Actually, PSA already has a foothold in the US, albeit not a traditional one. In 2017, it released Free2Move, a mobility app that aggregates a number of mobility solutions under a single app, making it easier for folks to use multimodal transportation services. Free2Move eventually expanded to a car-sharing service in Washington, DC, as well.
