Peugeot and Citroën are actively looking for a partner to build a car-like, light-duty four-wheel drive. The vehicle would battle models like the Toyota RAV4 (right) and Honda CRV, but the French companies are still a long way from putting a four-wheel drive into production because they haven’t found a suitable partner.
‘We are searching’ said Frederic Saint Geours, Peugeot managing director. ‘But the suitable names already have their own products, so they don’t need us.’
Two obvious partners are Toyota and Ford. PSA is already developing a city car with the Japanese company and shares diesel engines with Ford. PSA can’t go it alone because it predicts sales of just 30,000 cars a year – a legacy of that fact that it only sells cars within the EU.
Six weeks ago it emerged that rival French manufacturer Renault was also investigating the viability of a similar SUV, built in collaboration with one of its Korean partners.
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