An underappreciated piece of news recently came out of France. It was the declaration by the CEO of Alpine — the high-end sports car brand of Renault — that the brand intends to move into the U.S. market.
Laurent Rossi told reporters that his fledgling brand, which sold barely 3,500 cars last year and has just one factory with a production capacity of only 6,000 vehicles a year, expects to grow to about 150,000 a year by 2030. And getting there, Rossi made clear, will rely critically on entering the American market in 2026 or 2027.
Here's why this is a remarkable ambition: It reveals the sort of change that's now coming to what had been Carlos Ghosn's Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance.
As head of two automakers for most of a generation, Ghosn wrote and enforced the ground rules for Nissan and Renault until his leadership ended after his arrest for alleged financial improprieties in Japan in 2018. The basic understanding was that Nissan and Renault would work together on everything, but the U.S. market would be Nissan's turf. The separate companies of the alliance would thrive together — but not if Nissan had to compete against its mighty French partner in Nissan's bread-and-butter U.S. market.
Fast-forward to 2023, and Ghosn is far out of the picture, in exile in Beirut. And as the French say, "Les temps changent." The times are changing.