American Car Companies Just Don’t Care Very Much About Europe

While I was being infused this morning, a couple of items caught my eye that I bookmarked for later research when I was back in front of my desktop computer. The first is American market share of the European auto market. Note that this has nothing to do with imports. Virtually all of the American cars listed here are manufactured in Europe itself:

For GM, I included the Opel badge that they sold to Peugeot last year. For Chrysler I pulled out the Jeep and Chrysler badges from Fiat/Chrysler.

Altogether, it adds up to 14 percent, nearly all of it from GM and Ford, which have been making and selling cars in Europe since before World War II. Despite this heritage, their European divisions have been disaster areas. Ford Europe has been rickety for long enough that selloff rumors are never far away; GM/Vauxhall was an enormous money pit for decades and finally did get sold off to Peugot, which then asked for half the purchase price back when they got a closer look at the books; and Chrysler has never had a presence at all (their current sales come almost exclusively from Jeeps).

So if you want to know why American car companies can’t seem to export cars to Europe, the first question to ask is why they can’t even sell cars that are made in Europe specifically for the European market. It’s not tariffs and it’s not regulations, since all EU carmakers operate on a level playing field. They just can’t seem to make good cars that Europeans want to buy. If they can’t do that, all the trade posturing in the world isn’t going to change things.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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