The Mercedes Citan was never a commercial success. So now the Germans are pulling the plug after one year with 5,000 copies of the Renault Kangoo.
Mercedes is pretty much done with Renault. The Germans have long expressed their desire to withdraw from their collaboration with the French.
This is what Automobilwoche writes.
And now it's happening. First of all, the Renault Kangoo-based Mercedes Citan is dying. The car was never a success for the Stuttgart brand.
In fact, Mercedes had very little to do with the Citan in the first place. All models – including the T-Class minibus, which was sold to private customers – are built at the Maubeuge factory in northern France.
In 2023, Mercedes sold just 5,117 units of the T-Class. That was a drop of a whopping 31 percent. That came to 23,351 vans. A drop of 3 percent.
But it hurts worse when Volkswagen sold 107,000 copies of its competitor Caddy during the same period.
Mercedes has been signaling for months that it is increasingly distancing itself from the collaboration with Renault.
But whether this also means that the 1.3-liter gasoline engine called M282 , which was developed in a joint venture with the French, will be discontinued, is uncertain.
For its part, Renault has teamed up with Volvo's Chinese owner Geely to develop the Horse Powertrains engine collaboration.
The goal is to build several factories both in Europe and China. The factories will not only supply to the Renault and Geely groups. Read more about it here .
