France's PSA Group, the maker of Citroën, DS, Peugeot, and now also Opel cars, has a mission to sell cars in the United States, though the automaker, which is Europe's second biggest by volume, isn't rushing things.
It has a decade-long plan split up into three phases, and right now we're only in the early stages of the first phase.
Progress is being made nonetheless and a new milestone was reached this week with PSA's announcement on Tuesday that it has chosen Atlanta, Georgia for its U.S. headquarters. The site will be opened in February and initially house a core team focused on steering the execution of the automaker's U.S. strategy. Heading the team is former TrueCar and Nissan executive Larry Dominique.
So what exactly is PSA's U.S. strategy? The first phase is test the waters with mobility services. We saw the first application late last year with the introduction of the car sharing comparison tool Free2Move in Seattle, Washington. It will be rolled out to other major cities in the coming months.
The second phase will be to introduce mobility services that rely on cars from one or more of PSA's brands. The third and final phase will be PSA actually selling its cars in the U.S. It’s not clear what brand(s) PSA will introduce, though the automaker has hinted in the past about making DS a global luxury player. Opel is another brand that PSA is looking to expand into new markets.
