The French group, known fully as PSA Peugeot Citroen, has just been rescued with state guarantees for its banking arm and is enacting controversial restructuring.
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. At the end of February, the two giants announced that they would work together and said that they would come up with firm projects by the end of the year.
The two groups are complementary to the extent that they offer each other technologies, models, markets and distributions networks to achieve global scale and range, but they come from different cultures.
The US administration imposed massive plant and job cuts on GM as a condition for rescue help. The group is now well on the road to recovery.
In France, a programme by PSA to close a plant and axe about 8,000 jobs provoked national controversy and hostility from the newly installed Socialist government which has since had to step in with guarantees of about 7.0 billion euros ($9.3 billion) for the group's banking and credit arm. GM, which owns the Opel and Vauxhall brands in Europe, remains a leading auto group and PSA is the second-biggest auto maker in Europe despite losing huge ground to the German VW empire in the last 10 years. GM has announced that it will close a factory of its struggling Opel subsidiary in Bochum from 2016 when production of the Zafira model ceases.