Cars - Captive import

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	Cars - Captive import

Captive import is an automobile marketing term denoting a foreign-built vehicle which is sold and serviced by a domestic manufacturer through its own dealer body.

The foreign car may be produced by a subsidiary of the same company, be a joint venture with another firm, or acquired under license from a completely separate entity. The brand name used may be that of the domestic company, the foreign builder, or an unrelated marque entirely. (This is one type of badge engineering.)

This arrangement is usually made to increase the competitiveness of the domestic brand by filling a perceived "hole" in its model lineup, which it is either not practical or not economically feasible to fill from domestic production. Captive imports are often aimed at the lower end of the market, but this is not always so.

Mixed success

In the American market, captive imports have had a spotty record of success. Ford added its own European Ford Capri to its US Mercury line in the 1970s and saw very strong sales. During the same period, Dodge did quite well with several small Mitsubishi models, mostly sold as Dodge Colts.

However, some others, such as the Plymouth Cricket (born Hillman Avenger) and Ford's entire Merkur line, gained a reputation as being poorly suited to American tastes and faded away quickly. Other experiments, such as GM's sale of Opel models like the Kadett through Buick dealers in the late 60s and early 70s, yielded ambivalent results; the Opels were generally well-regarded and sales were decent but never substantial.

The Nash Metropolitan, sold in the US from 1954 to 1962, was an interesting example because it was a captive import produced by Austin in the UK specifically for foreign sale with Nash styling. It saw reasonable success.

In Europe, there have been relatively few cases of captive imports, and most have been unsuccessful. The Chevrolet Venture minivan was sold as the Opel/Vauxhall Sintra in the late-1990s, but was not only not to European tastes, but also gained a bad reputation due to poor results in safety tests.

In Japan, where foreign car manufacturers have traditionally struggled to compete in the local market, even rebadging of US models like the Chevrolet Cavalier as a Toyota have failed to improve sales. In some cases, this can be attributed to the manufacturer's lack to attention to the desires of the Japanese consumer, even to so basic a requirement as availability with right hand drive.

Various reasons have been suggested as to why captive imports often fail. The question of exchange rates is clearly important, as a sudden shift can quickly raise prices to uncompetitive levels. Some models have been justly criticized for marginal quality, or being a bad match to the local driving environment. The commitment of domestic sales and service staffs to an unfamiliar vehicle has also often been questioned, particularly if the import is seen as reducing sales of other, more profitable vehicles in the lineup.

Others fail due to no fault of their own; the Sunbeam Tiger, for instance, an early 1960s example of the concept of an American Ford Windsor engine in a British (Sunbeam Alpine) body and chassis, enjoyed substantial success until Sunbeam became a captive import of Chrysler Corporation in North America. Chrysler could not be realistically expected to sell a car with a Ford engine, and Chrysler V8 engines all had the distributor positioned at the rear of the engine, unlike the front-mounted distributor of the Ford V8, making it impossible to fit the Chrysler engine into the Sunbeam engine bay without major and expensive revisions. Thus this niche of the automotive market was left to be filled with legendary success by the Ford engined Shelby Cobra.

There may be a deeper, structural issue at work, however. It could simply be that a domestic buyer is unlikely to want an import, and an import buyer is unlikely to enter a domestic showroom. A captive thus easily falls between two stools. This is probably why the practice of using a separate brand name, such as Merkur and General Motors' short-lived Geo, has ceased — the foreign-ness of the car is thus discreetly made less apparent.

Trivia

Captive imports have generated their share of interesting trivia. The Nash Metropolitan of the 1950s, despite its close resemblance to the senior U.S. Nashes, was actually built in Britain with Austin components and became one of the few small cars to sell well in that bulk-obsessed decade. In the late 50s, Mercedes-Benz, seeking entry into the American market, signed a marketing agreement with Studebaker-Packard and briefly became a captive brand in their showrooms. Around the same time, in a venture now largely forgotten, Pontiac dealers briefly sold Vauxhalls. In the 1970s, when Buick decided to phase out its Opels and sell small Isuzus instead, the result was a handful of cars carrying a truly global but very amusing brand, Buick Opel by Isuzu. The Buick Motor Division was not the first to rebadge Isuzus — Chevrolet did the same with their LUV pickup truck back in 1972.

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