A week after US President George W. Bush toured Europe to try to patch up the tattered trans-Atlantic relationship, the US car industry is embarking on its own charm offensive. Whether Detroit will make more headway than Washington is anybody's guess.
Cadillac, a unit of General Motors (GM), and the Dodge unit of DaimlerChrysler unveiled new cars at the Geneva Motor Show on Tuesday that they hope will lead a fresh push into the European market.
With Dodge, DaimlerChrysler is reintroducing a brand name that has been absent from Europe for two decades. With Cadillac, General Motors is trying to elbow its way into a luxury market that has been the playground of European aristocrats like Mercedes, BMW and Jaguar.
PHOTO: AP
For a variety of reasons -- ranging from quality problems in Europe to the brash new cars coming out of Detroit -- the US executives are feeling surprisingly confident.
"These guys have been virtually bulletproof for years," said James Taylor, the general manager of the Cadillac division, referring to Mercedes and BMW. "Now there's a chink in their armor."
The reliability problems dogging Mercedes have alienated so many customers in its home market that the fabled brand is even in danger of losing its status as the car of choice for German taxi drivers.
But given the recent political differences between the US and Europe, is the image of American cars any better? While neither Cadillac nor Chrysler plan to wrap their cars in red-white-and-blue bunting, they do not view anti-US sentiment as an issue.
However deep the ideological splits, the carmakers are convinced that those differences have had little effect on ordinary Europeans, who they note continue to be avid consumers of American pop culture and consumer gadgets, like the Apple iPod.
"I haven't heard of a single guy here who stopped drinking Coke or Pepsi because of Iraq," said Dieter Zetsche, the German-born head of Chrysler, who is leading Dodge's charge back to Europe.
Detroit, of course, has had a presence in Europe for decades, through brands like Opel, which is GM's German unit, and Ford of Europe. Traditionally, though, the companies have run their European outposts as separate, stand-alone operations, rather than regarding Europe as an export market.
For a company like Chrysler, though, Europe is now an alluring alternative to the US, where it is enmeshed in a fierce, costly battle for market share with GM and Ford Motor.
Chrysler sold 100,000 vehicles in Europe last year, not even 5 percent of its total sales, giving it a market share of just 0.7 percent. Zetsche's goal is to double that share within five years.
Cadillac sold 1,500 cars outside North America last year, also less than 5 percent of its total. Taylor, who says Cadillac must be a global brand, is aiming to increase that to 20,000 by 2010.
As they ready their product campaigns, however, the carmakers are taking sharply different approaches to the European market. Cadillac's strategy is to appeal to drivers here on their own terms -- with a car that, in scale at least, could have been built by a European company.
Indeed, the Cadillac BLS, as the new model is known, will be built in Sweden, at the assembly plant of Saab, another GM subsidiary. The BLS will share the same platform as the Saab 9-3, and producing it there will help fill what has been an underused factory.
The BLS, which will go on sale here in the spring of next year, is 15cm shorter than Cadillac's current entry-level model, the CTS. It will be available with a diesel engine, the first Cadillac has ever sold. The BLS is so suited to European tastes, in fact, that it will not even be sold in the US.
"There's no Cadillac guy in the US who is going to buy a four cylinder low-displacement engine," Taylor said, using industry shorthand for the BLS' lower-powered engine.
Dodge, on the other hand, plans to win over Europeans largely on its reputation as a muscular American brand.
That is the same approach taken by its sister brand, Chrysler, which has had considerable success in Europe with models like the PT Cruiser and the 300C, its burly sedan.
"By no means are we trying to hide the American identity," Zetsche said. "Chrysler is about elegance and expressive styling. Dodge is more in-your-face, brutal."
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