Originally posted by Mike Rotch
👍
Do you get any Renault or Alfa models there M5?
Renault left the United States in 1989. Their final vehicle was known as the Renault Premier:
The Premier was basically absorbed by Chrysler in 1989 and was sold as the Eagle Premier from 1989 to 1992 and the Dodge Monaco from 1990 to 1992. Only idiots bought these cars - looking back today, they're utterly trash. If you're looking to buy a cheap, cheap, cheap used car and can find one that runs, you're probably looking at $50-$500 for a Premier or a Monaco (I don't usually inject opinions into rants about obscure used cars, but in this case it's more than deserved).
The Premier/Monaco were effectively replaced in 1993 by the Eagle Vision and Dodge Intrepid, the latter of which, though redesigned in 1998, still exists (and the former of which still exists in spirit as the Chrysler Concorde). So technically, though Renault is gone, their legacy lives on. It's difficult to find a used Renault today in any shape, and even if you do, there's no support network, so owners have basically no chance.
Had Renault managed to stick around this long, they probably would've gone out during the "French boycott" since they depend on volume sales of high-priced objects. For context, there was a minor call for a boycott of Nissan because of their ties to Renault.
Alfa's a different story - their final product in the United States died in 1995 as the 164 (the Sentinel and Sentinel XS in Grand Theft Auto 3 are styled after it). It was, in my opinion, a decent BMW 3-series competitor and though that was a widely-held opinion Alfa couldn't really penetrate the market and got out. Today, Alfa 164s aren't hard to find - any big city has a few in the classified pages and Autotrader always turns up a couple of pages of them. Their only service comes at a Ferrari dealer, though, so labor's expensive (but available).
Ooops.
)
