PSA Groupe is in a bit of a predicament. After discovering Opel’s emission woes, the French automaker seeks a refund over the brand’s sale price from General Motors, possibly up to $951 million.
Reuters originally broke the news last Wednesday, but there was another interesting piece of information buried in the report: the Opel Ampera-e was a real money loser for GM. Two sources told Reuters that GM lost about $12,000 for every Ampera-e sold. It all makes sense now since PSA has recently halted orders for the electric car in Europe and increased the car’s sale price.
The complications stem from GM’s lackluster emission strategy in Europe for Opel. Before the brand’s sale, Opel was on track to miss new European Union emission standards by a long shot; the Ampera-e was meant to offset the potential fines imposed for missing the EU targets.
But, as a source said, the plan was not economically viable.
“Their technical solution was economically unviable and would have led to enormous losses,” said one source. “So the first thing you do is drop that (product) line, but then the fleet emissions explode.”
It leaves PSA to foot the bill if the automaker can’t outfit Opel and Vauxhall cars with new powertrains quick enough. And the bill could be over $1 billion.
Comments
“It leaves PSA to foot the bill if the automaker can’t outfit Opel and Vauxhall cars with new powertrains quick enough.”
There is a possible “fix”. Just license the Bolt and Ampera-e powertrain from GM and reuse it in the newer Opel vehicles until PSA can design build and test its own, which can take two years or more.
I dot think you got the math here, to continue to use the bolt powertrain, Opel will loose 12k per vehicle when they want to actually be making money. This is part of the reason that they bought opel. If you think about it, a 40k car should be 12k profit. Each ampere e sold is 20k+ off their profit projections. For them it is easier and cheaper to drill 10 different mounting holes and drop in their engines. The harder part is taking the new machines and getting them approved by the slow government emission regulators.
PSA doesn’t deserve one extra penny! They should of checked and discovered this before they purchased the company!
Yep…it’s called Due Diligence. Clearly the bean-counters and lawyers at PSA were too highly paid, and too lazy to do a decent DD job for the PSA Board!
It’s kinda like buying a second hand car….. Does anyone see the irony here?
That is a little dirty, but they were warned … Now Opel will drive more money away from its parent company….
They would achieve similar fleet reductions with the Volt 2. It’s beyond me why Opel hasn’t brought that to Europe. I bet they would not make the same losses on it.
just wondering how much does GM lose on every Bolt sold in the US….
Originally Opel Ampera-e sticker price in Germany was set at about EUR 40K (USD 44 K) means about the same as in the US (net, because there is 19% of the VAT/sales tax included in the german sales price). Duty for US cars is 10% , transport cost not higher than 500 USD (based on the estimation of individual import).
Recently I visited the SEMA Show and some dealers in Nevada and California. The US prices for the bolt were $ 45,000 + tax and for the Volt $ 41,000 + tax. With the current exchange rate Euro € to Dollar $ the loss for an import of the Bolt as Ampera-e should be at zero!
Was GM forgetting the exchange rate hedge ???
Question: So what does PSA really want from GM? The small PSA models (M1) are low in the CO2 after the EU exhaust cycle, but PSA sells a lot of delivery vans (N1) that are not counted in the EU fleet consumption! So what the hell?
Answer: PSA wants to reduce the purchase price again. Legal EU policy with USA company ???