- A guide to how certain car manufacturers are closely related
- Some cars have an awful lot in common
- Citroen, Fiat, Vauxhall, Peugeot - all part of Stellantis family
- VW Group cars share similarities, while Volvo, Polestar and Lotus are all Geely owned
Car making is a family affair, but does anybody know or care?
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been driving two apparently very different cars, but with an awful lot in common.
First up was the new Citroen C3 Aircross – an impressive family-friendly model that majors on comfort, but has some welcome Citroen quirkiness of old, especially in the design. I used to own a C3 Aircross and the new one is bigger, more stylish, more comfortable and would be more fun to own – I loved it.
I also fell in love with the Fiat Grande Panda (above), another new car with the spirit of Fiats of old, more than a nod to the original Panda, and brought bang up to date with new technology including an all-electric powertrain.
What do these cars have in common, other than bags of individual appeal and a temptingly low price – even the EV models are in the low £20,000s?
Both Citroen and Fiat live in the Stellantis family, so they share the same batteries, motors, chassis parts and even a few bits and pieces you might spot in and around the cabin.
Stellantis is huge – the fourth biggest car maker on the planet with brands that not only include Citroen and Fiat, but also Peugeot, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, Jeep, Lancia, DS and a few more. Vauxhall (and Opel) are also part of the family, so the new Vauxhall Frontera (above, and thankfully a world away from the dreadful original) also uses the Stellantis Smart Car platform, which means it, too, shares much with the Grande Panda and C3 models.
Of course, this has been happening for years in the Volkswagen Group, but perhaps it’s been a little more obvious that the Golf shares so much with the Audi A3 (below), Seat Leon, Skoda Octavia and a host of others. In fact, stick a Cupra Born next to a VW ID. 3 and you’ll soon see the relationship.
What’s impressed me with the Stellantis siblings is how each brand has given each car on the Smart Car platform a different look, feel and character. Other than the same gear selector, customers will not be able to notice much in the way of sharing.
And that’s the way of the automotive world these days – car companies need economies of scale to make the numbers work when developing new cars. It’s why Renault still has an Alliance with Nissan, while the French car maker also thinks of itself as a group now with Dacia and Alpine being spun off from the mothership.
Even car makers that would once be rivals work together to bring down costs in various areas, and that includes Mercedes and BMW.
Then there are the enormous VW-like families springing up elsewhere. The Chinese, unsurprisingly, have cottoned onto this and Geely has a host of brands that you have never heard of sharing tech, plus a fair few brands that you will know: Volvo, Polestar and Lotus are all Geely owned, as is LEVC, the company that makes London’s part-electric black cab.
BMW and MINI are joined at the automotive hip, while the most British of car brands, Rolls-Royce is also BMW owned.
Vying for the best of British title is Bentley (above), part of the house of VW and increasingly sharing its technical underpinnings with VW Group siblings Porsche and even Audi.
Hyundai and Kia are Korean twins, with the posher Genesis part of the family. GM in the US – former owners of Vauxhall and Opel in Europe – still have a host of brands under its umbrella on the other side of the pond, but Ford is somewhat lonelier these days without its Premier Automotive Group that used to include Jaguar, Land Rover, Volvo and Aston Martin. Now Ford only has Lincoln of note.
Jaguar Land Rover is another outlier; owned by Tata Group of India but going it alone with much of its tech. Bizarrely, JLR, as we must now call it, has even chosen to take different paths for the Jaguar brand and what used to sit under the Land Rover umbrella: Range Rover, Discovery and Defender. That’s an expensive way of doing things, but hopefully the high margins JLR vehicles bring mean its economies of scale work.
This all begs the question whether anyone really cares about all this technology sharing quite as much as the many miserablist journalists who are constantly banging on about it without realising the financials behind the decisions.
Does the car buyer care? The simple answer is that they don’t seem to; it hasn’t stopped the Volkswagen Group – the original exponents of component sharing – being one of the world’s biggest car makers. And here at home, Volkswagen is Britain’s favourite car brand.
Does Rolls-Royce lose customers who say they’ll just go and buy a BMW 7 Series – which uses much of the same tech – instead? No. And the Polestar 2 (below) has been a huge hit for the start-up EV brand, even though it was originally conceived as a Volvo and does little to hide that.
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Nor does where a car is made really matter to consumers these days. Despite tariffs and political wranglings, the car buyer just wants a great car at a great price. Sure, it would be nice to buy local, but not if the car isn’t good enough or costs more. The success of British-badged and Chinese-made MG proves that. And not every MINI is built in Oxford and hasn’t been for a very long time.
It's a global world where brand is becoming just as – possibly more – important as product. Stellantis has proven that it can make three very different, very distinct and very attractive cars already from one box of bits. If that difference remains, and cars get better without getting more and more expensive, it’s something I both applaud and welcome.
** Steve Fowler is one of the UK’s best-known automotive journalists and currently EV Editor of The Independent and a regular contributor to The Guardian. He’s the only person to have edited three of the UK’s biggest car titles – Auto Express, Autocar and What Car? – and has interviewed the biggest names in the car world from Tesla’s Elon Musk to Ford’s Jim Farley. Steve has also presented documentaries for BBC Radio Four and is used as a resident ‘car guru’ on TV and Radio. He’s a World Car of the Year juror and a judge on both Germany’s and India’s Car of the Year Awards. Read more of Steve's work at stevefowler.co.uk.
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