The European cars that were a dud in America

This makes it less likely that models built in North America will do well in Europe, or vice versa, but that hasn’t stopped manufacturers from trying. Sometimes this works out okay, but sometimes it very much doesn’t.

Here we take a look at some of the European cars which, for one reason or another, bombed in the US, presented in alphabetical order:

The second-generation Audi 5000 (America’s equivalent of the third-generation Audi 100 as it was named elsewhere) should have sold well, but it became famous for cases of a phenomenon called sudden unintended acceleration. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administation (NHTSA) determined that there were several reasons for this. The best remembered is “inadvertent and unknowing driver application” of the wrong pedal – or, as writer P.J. O’Rouke (1947-2022) put it, “They… stepped on the gas instead of the brake.”

No matter who was to blame, the incident was a disaster not just for the 5000 but for Audi’s US reputation as a whole. The brand’s sales plummeted from just over 74,000 in 1985 to under 13,000 in 1991, and did not fully recover until the end of the century. To this day Audi sells fewer cars every year in the US than BMW, Mercedes and Lexus.

The Cascada is one of several cars in this list which was actually built in Europe (Poland, in this case) despite being marketed in the US by an American brand. Also sold as a Vauxhall, an Opel and a Holden, the four-seat convertible performed better in the US than it did anywhere else, but that wasn’t saying much. Sales peaked at 7153 examples in 2016, and fell every year from then on, dipping to just 2535 in 2019, when production was abandoned.

Cadillac’s determination in the 1990s to sell a European-style car which would appeal to younger customers led it to produce the Catera, a very slightly modified version of the Vauxhall/Opel Omega manufactured in Germany.

This did not go well. Backed by a strange advertising campaign which featured Cindy Crawford and an animated bird, the Catera found only 95,000 US customers in eight years, more than half of them in 1997 and 1998. It was roundly outsold by a similarly sized contemporary rival, the Lexus GS.

Devised when Chrysler and Daimler were in bed with each other, the Crossfire was a very close relative of the recently discontinued Mercedes SLK-Class – and, like that car, was built in Germany – but featured very American styling.

US sales nudged 15,000 for a couple of years before falling rapidly. An obvious rival, the comparably priced but significantly more powerful Nissan 350Z, was far more popular. The failure of the union with Daimler, followed soon after by the credit crunch of 2008, forced Chrysler to abandon the Crossfire, along with some other unsuccessful cars.

In what was soon regarded as a misguided attempt to improve its image, Chrysler collaborated with Maserati on a convertible grand tourer around 1990. Built in Italy, it sold in the low thousands (a reported 3298 in its best year). That was comparable to the fortunes of the Cadillac Allanté, which is never quoted by anyone as being GM’s finest vehicle.

One of the problems was that its base price – never less than $30,000 – was perceived as being very high for a car which didn’t seem to deserve it. At the same time, it was far too low to cover the project’s cost, estimated by Chrysler Executive Bob Lutz as being in the region of $600 million, or around $1.3 billion in today’s money.

Although it was intended mainly to be sold in the US, the DeLorean was manufactured in Northern Ireland with the help of a lot of British government money, trying to inject jobs into the troubled region. The car looked great, but its Renault 2.7-litre V6 engine didn’t produce much power, and there were many quality issues. The story ended soon after it began when the DeLorean company was declared bankrupt.

Fewer than 7000 were sold in the States, around a thousand of them after the company had collapsed. Thanks to a certain film of 1985 survivors have a cult following.

The 124 Spider was a close relative of the Mazda MX-5, and built alongside it in Hiroshima, Japan, but fitted with a turbocharged Fiat engine. In the US car industry, the optimal time between a car arriving at a dealership and finding a customer is considered to be 60 days. Any less implies a supply problem, any more suggests a lack of demand.

In 2019, the Fiat 124 Spyder’s figure was quoted at 461 days. Americans were, on the whole, simply not interested in the car, which never found more than 4500 US buyers in a single year. European sales were usually much higher than that, twice exceeding 7500 units.

There is this much to be said for the 500L: it was an absolute smash hit in Serbia, which also happens to be where it was built. To say the least, the little MPV whose styling slightly echoed that of the impossibly cute 500 hatchback found less favour with US buyers than with the Serbs.

There was a brief flurry of activity in 2014, when 12,413 were sold, but demand soon collapsed, and by the end of the decade only a few hundred were being shifted annually. For comparison, Fiat sold over 50,000 examples in Europe in most years, and at one point exceeded 94,000. Total US sales from 2013 to 2021 didn’t quite reach 35,000.

With apologies to Fiat enthusiasts, the 500X crossover is another model which has drastically failed to capture the interest of American buyers. European sales have regularly been in the high five figures, and reached nearly 105,000 in 2016. In the same year, Fiat found homes for 12,599 of the 500X in the US, an achievement it has not come close to matching since.

The first Jaguar to be sold with either four-wheel drive or a diesel engine was not a great sales success anywhere, but particularly in North America. US sales started strongly in 2002 at just over 33,000, around 10% more than in Europe, but while the European figure grew briefly before fading away, interest across the Atlantic soon plummeted. By 2006, sales there had dipped into the mid four figures.

Having missed the chance to acquire the Bentley or Rolls-Royce brands to its primary German rivals, the long-wheelbase Maybach 57 and the even longer 62 were Daimler’s attempts to break into the ultra-luxury car market. The project began early in the 21st century and was finally abandoned in 2013.

Maybach’s fortunes in the US were similar to those it endured elsewhere. Shifting more than 200 examples each year in a country with a population well over a million times that proved to be almost unachievable for the German brand. Rolls-Royce could do it easily, and has continued to increase its presence in the States long after Maybach’s demise. Today the Maybach name exists as an ultra-luxury trim level on certain Mercedes models like the S-Class and GLS-Class.

PICTURE: Maybach 62

The second-generation B-Class was only ever sold in the US as an electric vehicle, which scuppered its chances of selling in large numbers. But there was more to it than that. The B-Class didn’t even do well against other EVs, some of which were bought at the rate of over 20,000 per year. The B-Class broke through the 1000 barrier only once, and never came close to doing so again. An official range of just 87 miles may have been part of the problem.

The Merkur was a variant of the Ford Sierra built by Karmann in Germany and sold in the States with a turbocharged 2.3-litre Lima engine from the Pinto family. Its chances of success were limited by its looks (which seemed even stranger in the US than they did in Europe, where there were other Sierras to compare it with) and by some confusion about how the brand name should be pronounced.

Sources vary on how many were sold, but it seems to have been under 50,000 in model years 1985 to 1989.

American name notwithstanding, the Plymouth Cricket was simply a mildly altered version of the Hillman Avenger. This came about when Chrysler bought the Rootes Group in 1967, thereby gaining access to the latter’s UK-built models.

In 1970, the Cricket was introduced to American customers, who reacted to it negatively at a time when home-grown compacts were launching. 1971 sales were around a tenth of what the rival Chevrolet Vega and Ford Pinto were achieving at the time, and two years later Chrysler gave up on the project.

The Dauphine started out as a sales triumph in the US, with annual sales quickly rising to over 100,000 (an excellent figure for an imported car in the late 1950s), but it soon became clear that the build quality wasn’t good enough for the high mileages typically achieved by American drivers, with the country’s inherent distances. Secondhand values collapsed, and finance houses began refusing to offer instalment plans for new cars. Tens of thousands of Dauphines lay idle across the land.

The resulting loss of income nearly floored Renault, whose subsequent recovery was led by the launch of the immensely successful 4 in 1961 – but the company never imported that model to America.

The last Rover-badged car sold in the States was the 3.5-litre V8 version of the SD1. American customers might have been expected to have some interest in a good-looking car with a V8 engine and rear-wheel drive, but a relative lack of power - only 133bhp – dubious build quality and limited marketing stifled any chance of success.

The 3500 was officially available only in the 1980 and 1981 model years, though a few stragglers were purchased in 1982. Total sales exceeded 1000 units, but not by much.

Still confident, six years after withdrawing the 3500 from the market, Rover hoped that US buyers could be persuaded to exchange money for a car again, changing the branding in case that would help. Perhaps it did, slightly.

The Sterling, a version of the car known in other markets as the 800 Series and closely related to the Honda Legend, started off fairly promisingly with 14,000 sales in 1987, but by the time it was withdrawn four years later it was no longer able to reach 3000. Build quality and reliability was frankly awful, and the contrast with its Japanese-built Honda sister added to its shame.

The Mayflower was an oddity in the British motor industry. Unusually for the early 1950s, it had unibody construction, along with excellent visibility and front suspension capable enough to be used on the later Triumph TR2 sports car. On the other hand, it was notably slow, and by no means the small-scale luxury model it was designed to look like.

Its reception in the UK was tepid, but far more enthusiastic than in the US, where it inspired millions of people to buy something else instead. While estimates of how many were sold there vary, the widely accepted figure is 510.

With a beautiful body designed by Giovanni Michelotti (1921-1980) and a fruity 3.0-litre V8 engine, the Stag should have been a big hit in the US, and indeed almost everywhere else. The fact that it wasn’t is partly due to that engine, which has been made reliable in recent years but definitely wasn’t while the car was still in production, with extremely delicate cooling system and cylinders.

The Stag was manufactured for most of the 1970s, but exported to the US only from 1971 to 1973, when sales amounted to 2871 examples, less than half the number still on UK roads today. Nevertheless, there is enough love for the car across the Atlantic to have sustained the Triumph Stag Club USA for three decades.

Vauxhall had a presence in Canada for quite some time, but the only model it ever sold in the US was the first-generation Victor, which was sold by Pontiac dealers. Early hopes were high, since the Victor would be GM’s contender in the increasingly popular compact car class.

Around 50,000 were sold in the six months following its launch in late 1957, which was reasonably promising. Soon afterwards, though, it became clear that the Victor had a serious rust problem. This, along with the introduction of the Pontiac Tempest and Chevrolet Corvair compacts, pushed sales down to just 22,000 in the whole of 1961, at which point Detroit decided that importing Vauxhalls wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Admirable as it was in many ways, the Phaeton struggled in most markets. The most often quoted reason for this is that putting a mainstream badge on a luxury car created a conflict which customers found it difficult to resolve, and didn’t try to.

European sales were modest, but easily eclipsed those in the US. Volkswagen took the hint that American customers just weren’t interested in the car, and stopped selling it there after just two model years.

Based on Fiat technology but manufactured in what was then known as Yugoslavia, the Yugo seemed at first sight to be very much not the sort of thing that US buyers would be interested in. However, the importers briefly scored a hit, largely due to the fact that the car was amazingly cheap at just under $4000, or a little over $10,000 in today’s money.

From its US introduction in 1985, sales quickly rose to nearly 50,000 within two years. They then fell dramatically when people realised the car just wasn’t much good, at least compared with what else you could buy in the States. War in Yugoslavia brought imports to a halt, though it seems unlikely that they would have lasted much longer in any case. For any American roughly over the age of 40 today, the Yugo name is a byword for clunker.