GM, Peugeot seek sales of 2m cars a year in joint projects

General Motors and France's PSA Peugeot Citroen are targeting manufacturing more than 2 million cars per year under the joint projects they unveiled last month, a union source said Thursday. The two auto giants announced last February that they would work together and last month they announced three specific projects. The first is for a monospace/crossover to replace the Zafira made by GM's German unit Opel and the Peugeot 3008. The union source said some 220,000 of these vehicles, to be built on a new PSA Peugeot Citroen platform, could be built per year beginning as soon as in 2016. The second programme is for a small monospace vehicle for the two groups, which the union official said production could also begin in 2016 and reach 190,000 units per year. The third project is for joint development of a modernised platform for small, low-emission cars. The union source said the companies hope that eventually 1.6 million vehicles per year could be built from this platform. Peugeot, whose auto-financing arm was bailed out by the French government last year, announced this week that its sales plunged by 16.5 percent in 2012 to under three million vehicles due to the eurozone debt crisis. General Motors of the United States is well on the way to recovery from a state rescue and radical cutbacks when the US car industry fell into distress after the financial crisis, but its German unit Opel has been suffering in recent years.