As I'm sure you know, the European new car market isn't in particularly good health at the moment.
Sales in Britain may be doing well -- very well, in fact -- but on the other side of the English Channel, most carmakers are struggling to shift their wares in a market which is seeing its worst sales figures for seventeen years.
Of course, it's hardly the manufacturers' fault that the market is so despondent; Europe is recovering from what we're constantly being told was the biggest recession since about the times of Charlemagne. However, that's not to say that Europe's manufacturers haven't dropped some financial clangers of their own by building cars which haemorrhage money the moment they leave the factory. Or even earlier, in some cases.
The automotive analysts at Bernstein Research have drawn up a list of these cars, each of which have lost their company billions of euros over the past fifteen years. All of the cars on this list can be viewed as financial disasters; however, not all of them were engineering ones. The VW Phaeton was a superb car, designed to prove to the world what a luxury people's car could do.
The same can be said of the Bugatti Veyron. Here was a car which was almost designed from the outset to be a commercial disaster, with each unit selling for millions less than it cost to make. However, it's impossible to say how beneficial building the best car in the world was to Volkswagen, Bugatti's parent company, in terms of brand image.
Mercedes was also responsible for some commercial disasters, with the Smart ForTwo and the Mercedes A-Class both featuring in the top ten. Both were ambitious projects from conception and both made huge losses.
The Fiat Stilo, Renault Laguna, Peugeot 1007, Jaguar X-Type and Renault Vel Satis on the other hand were not particularly ambitious projects but did miss their intended markets by miles and sold poorly as a result. All five of these cars are models which their manufacturers are probably all too happy to forget.
The Audi A2, however, could be seen as a potentially successful car which simply came too soon. The A2 still looks sensational and was Audi's first entry into the small car market. The fact that it has been replaced by another small car, the A1, more than five years after it died speaks volumes about how visionary a car it was.
See the table below for the full results.
Total estimated loss |
Loss per car |
|||||
|
|
1. Smart ForTwo(1997-2006) |
£2.81bn | £3,754 | |||
|
|
2. Fiat Stilo(2001 - 2009) |
£1.77bn | £2,293 | |||
|
|
3. Volkswagen Phaeton(2001- 2012) |
£1.67bn | £23,604 | |||
|
|
4. Peugeot 1007(2004 - 2009) |
£1.60bn | £12,919 | |||
|
|
5. Mercedes A-Class(1997 - 2004) |
£1.44bn | £1,209 | |||
|
|
6. Bugatti Veyron(2005 - 2013) |
£1.43bn | £3,878,700 | |||
|
|
7. Jaguar X-Type(2001 - 2009) |
£1.43bn | £3,939 | |||
|
|
8. Renault Laguna(2006 - 2012) |
£1.30bn | £2,982 | |||
|
|
9. Audi A2(2002 - 2005) |
£1.12bn | £6,325 | |||
 |
10. Renault Vel Satis(2001 - 2009) |
£1.01bn | £15,716 |
Click here to sign up for our monthly newsletter
| Popular news stories |
||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
