Au revoir to the French badges, bonjour Dacia

Not long ago cars like this lovely Peugeot 504 were everywhere in Morocco. With its brown cloth and leather upholstery, its low dash, and its thin layer of desert dust, it’s the epitome of the lingering French in‡luence in North Africa. But times are changing, and today the rising force in new-car sales is Dacia: a Romanian company but truly global, owned by Renault, with half of all the world’s Dacias produced at Dacia-Renault factories in Tangier and Casablanca, Morocco. There are Lodgys, Dokkers and Sanderos everywhere you look.

French colonialism remains a touchy subject in Africa. While the romance of the Dakar still evokes warm, exotic thoughts for some Europeans, the harsh reality is that locally produced cars with nonFrench badges are now economically and politically more successful.