The biggest loss making cars of Europe
When talking about the car industry we also have to look into the less successful parts of the business and today we’ll be looking at the biggest loss-making cars of Europe, starting with the Smart Fortwo from Mercedes who lost the German car-maker $5 billion and the Bugatti Veyron who lost the Volkswagen Group &6.7 million per car.
Automotive analyst Sanford C. Bernstein has released a top 10 vehicles – starting in 1997 – that have proven to be financial disasters.
One common denominator for several of the cars on the list is ambitious technological advances.
The Smart Fortwo tops the list, and it was Mercedes-Benz’s grand plan to transfer their automotive know-how into the world of micro-sized city cars, while including things like unique platforms and three-cylinder engines.
Something similar came from the initial A-Class, a model that was expensive to develop because of its innovative ‘sandwich’ platform and this made it costly to build as well. The vehicle cost the German carmaker a whopping $2.5 billion.
This is a major reason for why Mercedes turned to the more conventional hatchback for the latest-generation A-Class, this one being a platform utilized for several models.
Then there’s the rather aluminium-intensive Audi A2, sold between 2000 and 2005 and it was regarded as a car ahead of its time but due to the material costs, the project lost in total about $1.9 billion, about $11,000 loss per car.
Two other Volkswagen Group models were included on the list, but those were designed to be image builders and nobody expected them to make profits.
The Bugatti Beyron was the company’s technological tour de force being a quad-turbo supercar, while the Volkswagen phaeton was designed as a technical flagship for the rest of the brand. the supercar cost the Volkswagen Group an incredible $6.7 million per Veyron.
