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Originally Posted by fubar
The biggest impact on ford doing the next focus (2012) more euro then american will be the success of the new saturn astra. that is identical to the euro model so if this thing struggles to sell then ford will be more hesitant to make the focus closer to euro flavor then american. Everyone needs to buy a new astra (sell it back the next day)   |
I need to dig up the sales numbers some time, but GM isn't spending a lot on advertising and isn't pushing the Astra right now and I doubt they're selling in big numbers. They said they weren't going to make money on the car and that was before the dollar-to-Euro exchange rates slid even further. It wouldn't surprise me if due to that they intentionally aren't pushing the sales harder with regional/national level advertising campaigns (which isn't much besides a couple billboards here in SoCal) because they mostly just want a car to fill the entry level, establish a better reputation, and are waiting until the redesign in the next year or two when they move production to the US (car will still be nearly identical to the Euro Astra's) to really start pushing the car.