Peugeot Citroen recalls 97,000 cars “made in a factory shared” with Toyota

The FINANCIAL — The French auto group PSA Peugeot Citroen said Monday that it was recalling 97,000 of its cars in Europe, as Toyota Motor Corp.'s (TM) worldwide recall of millions of vehicles due to accelerator pedal problems spread to its partners, The Wall Street Journal reports.

According to AFP, in a statement PSA said the recall concerned cars "made in a factory shared" with Toyota in the Czech Republic and concerned "models constructed jointly" with the Japanese firm.

It said the recall was a precautionary measure and affected European car owners who would be informed of the problem by mail, the same source reports. "The biggest sales (of the cars concerned) in the largest countries," a PSA spokesman told AFP Monday, naming Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain. In France, some 15,400 vehicles are affected by the recall, he added. Both models are produced in the TPCA (Toyota Peugeot Citroen Automobile) plant, a joint venture which assembles around 200,000 Peugeot and Citroen cars every year alongside Toyota Aygo vehicles.

In a statement the company said that the recall involves 10 percent of Peugeot 107 and Citroen C1 models in circulation in Europe.

The Peugeot recall "is relatively small compared to Toyota's and hence we see limited impact from a financial perspective," Credit Suisse analyst Arndt Ellinghorst said, according to The Wall Street Journal. "But it is negative from a reputational perspective."

Nomura International analyst Michael Tyndall agreed, as the same source reports. "This is an unfortunate development for Peugeot, but the affected vehicles represent less than 10% of the Citroen C1s and Peugeot 107s on the road and roughly 3% of Peugeot-Citroen group's annual volumes, so it is small-scale for Peugeot," he said.

PSA has no other joint ventures with Toyota, AFP informs. Toyota pulled up to 1.8 million vehicles in Europe on Friday — the latest in a series of recalls that have affected almost eight million Toyota cars worldwide — more than its entire 2009 global sales of 7.8 million vehicles.