Recent reports claim that Renault, via its Alpine sub-brand, may return to the U.S. market sometime before the end of the decade. Those same reports note that Renault last sold cars here in the States in 1987, but that’s a) not for lack of trying, and b) not really the case, considering U.S. car buyers have been buying Renaults almost the entire time since.
As Automotive News reported last week, Laurent Rossi, the CEO of Alpine, plans to increase the sub-brand’s sales volume and product portfolio from the 3,500 Alpine 110s that it sold last year to more than 150,000 examples of at least three models by 2030. “We want to go to the U.S., which will create the bulk of the extra volume,” he said. While Rossi has plans to introduce a small EV resurrecting the Renault 5 model name in Europe, his U.S. plans center around a midsize electric crossover and a larger electric crossover to be introduced sometime in 2027 or 2028.
Eagle Medallion 1989 Advert USA “Expect The Best”
When did Renault leave the U.S. market?
The Automotive News article makes note of Renault’s partial ownership of AMC that ended when Chrysler bought the latter in 1987 but also claims Renault models were last sold in the U.S. in the early 1990s. Both are true.
Renault started exporting cars to the United States before World War I but sales of its luxury cars had slacked even before the onset of the Depression, and Renault didn’t re-establish itself in the States until the introduction of the Caravelle and Dauphine, the latter of which often came close to eclipsing the Volkswagen Beetle’s U.S. sales figures in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The French carmaker took third run at the U.S. market in 1979 when it entered an agreement with AMC to sell its cars through the latter’s dealership network. That agreement led Renault to take a 22.5 percent interest in AMC the following year, which Renault expanded to 46.4 percent in 1982.
The partnership ended up benefiting both parties. Renault got to sell Jeeps in Europe. AMC netted a massive infusion of cash from Renault and was able to invest in its Brampton Assembly Plant in Canada. The two automakers even began to collaborate on design, engineering, and product development, resulting in the Renix fuel injection system for Jeeps and the Renault Alliance compact front-wheel-drive sedan. Under Georges Besse’s leadership, the French government-owned Renault began to turn a profit, with AMC right on its heels.
While some sources point to Besse’s assassination in November 1986 in Paris as the main reason why Renault decided to sell AMC and Jeep to Chrysler, Besse and Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca had already started talking about cooperative ventures (resulting in AMC building some Chrysler cars in Brampton) and the potential for more as early as the spring of 1986. Besse and Iacocca’s discussion about selling AMC to Chrysler even took on a codename, Project Titan, according to Pat Foster’s “American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America’s Last Independent Automaker.”
The sale proceeded in March 1987 with the stipulation that Chrysler would sell the Renault 21-based Medallion – which went on sale as a Renault just eight days before the sale – for five years. Chrysler essentially left it alone for the 1988 model year, rebadged it as an Eagle for the 1989 model year, then discontinued it altogether. The Alliance, despite early reports that Chrysler would continue to market it and despite the existence of press kits for a 1988 model year Alliance, came to an end in June 1987. The Encore, Le Car, and other Renault models sold via AMC dealerships, had all been discontinued well before the Chrysler purchase.
Renault’s Chrysler LH legacy
That’s not to say Renault vanished entirely from the American market in the late Eighties. AMC and Renault had for several years been working on the Giugiaro-designed, Renault 25-based Premier full-size sedan, and pre-production prototypes were spotted with Renault badging. As with the Medallion, Chrysler’s purchase agreement also stipulated that the company would continue to sell the Premier at least through 1992, with a minimum sales figure of 300,000 over that five-year period, so Chrysler put an Eagle badge on it and sold 117,000 Premieres – plus another 21,000 badge-engineered Dodge Monacos – through 1992. (According to some reports, parts bearing the Renault logo could be found on Premieres through the 1989 model year.)
Even then, that wasn’t the last of Renault. The Premiere’s chassis, complete with its longitudinal front-wheel-drive layout, had been designed under Francois Castaing when he served as AMC’s head of product engineering and development, and he was loathe to let it expire so soon, so when he transitioned to Chrysler’s vice presidency of engineering, Castaing made sure the Premier lived on as the basis for Chrysler’s lineup of LH “cab-forward” cars. The chassis packaging, the suspension, and all of the hard points became the basis for the LH platform, which underpinned a number of Chrysler products, among them the Eagle Vision, the Chrysler Concorde/New Yorker/LHS, the Dodge Intrepid, and later, the Chrysler 300M. The LH cars rolled off the same Brampton platform, and Chrysler’s prototypes even ran around disguised as Premieres.
(We’ll note here that Castaing and Renault engineers also had a hand in the development of not just the Jeep XJ Cherokee but also the Jeep ZJ Grand Cherokee, two SUVs widely heralded for their European influences on their introductions. Credit for the former, however, goes to Roy Lunn and Bob Nixon while the latter is often attributed to Castaing and Larry Shinoda, and neither was based on a Renault platform.)
Certainly, none of the Premiere’s or LH cars’ parts carried Renault logos anymore, but strong Renault influence on cars sold on American soil remained unbroken through the end of LH production in the 2004 model year.
Re-introduced as Nissans
Renault certainly wasn’t making money on the LH cars, so it started to eye a return to the U.S. market as early as 1999, this time through another alliance: the one it entered into with Nissan that year. As reported not long after the alliance was announced in March 1999, Renault executives had planned to sell its cars in the United Stated badged as Nissans. Louis Schweitzer, chairman and chief executive of Renault, told reporters that Renault had no plans to use Nissan’s assembly plants in Tennessee, but “you may find a product (in the United States) that looks like a Renault, but they would be called Nissans.”
That report predicted the alliance would pay off as early as 2003 with jointly developed cars rolling off the same assembly line. That wouldn’t actually happen until 2006, when Nissan introduced the Versa and the Sentra, with the latter built on the Nissan/Renault C platform (the same platform that underpinned the Renault Megane II) and the former riding a stretched version of the Nissan/Renault C platform (the same that underpinned the Renault Clio III). A number of other Nissan products sold in the United States since then – including the Cube, the Juke, the Rogue, and the Murano – have used one of multiple common chassis designed by Renault and Nissan.
Of course, none of those vehicles have carried the Renault diamond logo on their grilles, and it remains to be seen whether the Alpines planned for later this decade actually arrive for a fourth run of Renaults in the States. Or is that fifth? Sixth? We’re about to lose count here.
