Five cars that aren't made where you think

Monday, 18 December 2017

Equinox: the badge is Australian, but the company is American and the car is actually made in Mexico.

The car game is a truly global one and the days of being able to say you own a car built in the country that its brand calls home are well and truly over. Because your new vehicle could come from literally anywhere in the world.

Current Holdens are a very good example of this, because the Australian company is owned by an American one and sources its cars from all over Asia, Europe and the Americas. With that in mind, today we take a look at five cars that aren't built where you might expect them to be.

Abarth 124 Spider

Let's start with one you actually may have expected. The Abarth 124 Spider we get here in New Zealand is the hot version of the Fiat 124 that is based heavily on the Mazda MX-5. And it is not built in Italy.

Mercedes-Benz GLE has never been anywhere near Germany: it's made in America.

If this was a Honda Civic sedan it'd be Japanese. But it's a hatch, so it's British.

* Mercedes-AMG versus the GLE SUV

* Civic Type R puts Honda back on an interesting track**

Jeep Renegade is like pizza: something Italian that Americans think is theirs.

Mazda and Fiat developed the 124/MX-5 together (well, Mazda did the work and Fiat supplied the cash) and both are built side-by-side at Mazda's Hiroshima plant in Japan. The Abarth version we get here is also built in the same plant, but for LHD markets Abarth paints the fantastic matte-black bonnet in Italy. So we don't get that option, because our cars come directly from Japan.

Mercedes-Benz GLE

Korea is closer to NZ than Slovakia. But our Kia Sportages come from the latter anyway.

Mercedes-Benz cars are built in Germany, right?

Not all of them. In fact, the GLE SUV (formerly known as the M-class or ML-class) has never actually been built in Germany. When production started in 1997 it was built in the USA. Production started in Austria in 1999 for a few years before it all shifted back to BMW's Vance, Alabama plant in 2002. Then when the third-generation ML was launched in 2012, CKD assembly of cars produced in the USA started in India, Indonesia and Thailand. In NZ, all our GLEs come from the American plant.

Honda Civic hatch

The Honda Civic is as Japanese as they come. Except for the ones built in the UK. That's right, if you bought a current-generation Honda Civic hatch, you can start telling your friends that you bought a UK-built car. On second thoughts, given the dire history of British car assembly, that probably isn't a boast you're likely to make.

To be fair though, the Civic hatch is produced to the same high standards as the Japanese sedan, just in Honda's Swindon plant alongside the CR-V. So while the Civic hatch and sedan may look like they roll down the same assembly line, they do in fact come from completely different sides of the planet.

Jeep Renegade

Boy-howdy, there ain't anything more American in this world than baseball, apple pie and Jeeps! Except, that ain't quite true.

The small Jeep Renegade is, in fact, that most reviled and feared thing in this era of Trump - an immigrant. Based on the Fiat 500X, the Renegade rolls down the same assembly line as the Fiat in Melfi, Italy. The engines are all Fiat units as well, so the US can't even claim that good ol' Detroit power is under the hood. While the Renegades we get here in NZ are all of Italian extraction, it's also built in Brazil and China.

Kia Sportage

While its origins are clearly Korean, the Kia Sportage is very much an international citizen, being built in South Korea, Malaysia, Algeria and Slovakia. NZ Sportages come from Korea though, right? After all, its the closest to us.

Well, nope. Ours, in fact, come from Kia's Zilina plant in Slovakia. Zilina is an ancient city (the area was inhabited in the Stone Age, around 20,000 BC) and is the third largest in Slovakia. Kia is the largest employer in the city, with around 3,000 employees churning out 300,000 cars a year.

And your shiny new Kia Sportage was just one of them!