Turkey: Nation's Car Talk Getting Serious

Although Turkey has no international car brand of its own, the country is no stranger to the automotive industry. Ford, Fiat, Renault and several other international car companies, for example, have significant plants in Turkey (Ford's successful Transit Connect minivan is made in a plant on the outskirts of Istanbul).

“We will make a bid very shortly, there’s no question,” Zamier Ahmed, a board member of the Istanbul-based group, said today in a phone interview.
Brightwell, which invests in energy, transport and technology, wants to buy all of the Trollhaettan-based carmaker and plans to keep production in Sweden, Ahmed said from London. His firm is in discussions with the administrators overseeing Saab’s bankruptcy as well as with Saab Chief Executive Officer Victor Muller, Ahmed said.
Saab, owned by Zeewolde, Netherlands-based manufacturer Swedish Automobile NV (SWAN), filed for bankruptcy on Dec. 19 after running out of cash. Production at the plant in Trollhaettan stood still for most of last year starting in March. The company can emerge from bankruptcy if a viable bidder comes along, Muller said last month.
Brightwell will need at least two weeks before submitting any offer as it’s still evaluating Saab’s assets, including inventories, to decide how much to pay, Ahmed said.

More significantly, there is growing talk about creating a truly "made in Turkey" car, rather than one built in the country for another manufacturer. In fact, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has suggested Turkish carmakers should make this a priority. From Today's Zaman:

Local automotive manufacturer TOFAŞ, which produces cars in partnership with Italian auto giant Fiat, is close to producing Turkey’s first domestically manufactured car, Koç Holding CEO Mustafa Koç told reporters in İstanbul on Thursday.
A government initiative introduced last year to produce the country’s first national car brand has attracted the attention of both foreign and local firms; the government requested that Turkish industrialists introduce plans for the project. Koç’s remarks came amidst heated discussions as to how the first local car brand could be produced. The initiative has been in the works for over a year and has been receiving more attention, as 80 percent of consumers support a domestic brand and 72 percent have expressed an interest in one, according to a recent survey. Seeing much potential, various companies earlier contacted the government in anticipation of receiving a share in the newly created local car market. The first vehicle should be designed as a passenger car and Koç says TOFAŞ is a reliable company to undertake this project. His partner, Fiat CEO Sergio Marchionne, recently told the Turkish press that the company was continuing talks with the Turkish government and the Koç family in order to produce a national car brand for Turkey. Acknowledging Marchionne’s statements, Koç added that the local car would be manufactured in a completely new production platform in their Bursa facility. “We are not going to use the already-existing platforms for Fiat’s Palio and Albea model passenger cars produced in Turkey,” he said, indicating his company placed great emphasis on the new car being manufactured with the highest local contribution possible.

Turkey has produced its own brand of cars in the past, the most famous among being the Anadol, of which several vintage models can regularly be seen still rolling along Turkish roads. Turkey's first attempt at building a domestic car took place in 1961, when a group of scrappy engineers essentially conjured a working prototype of a model called the Devrim (Turkish for "Revolution") after the country's President ordered the creation of a local automotive industry (a somewhat schmaltzy film telling the Devrim story was made in 2008). The Devrim effort ultimately failed to get off the ground, with only four prototype models built, the reasons given for the failure ranging from the practical (the engineers failed to create proper technical drawings) to the conspiratorial (American car companies, fearing a rising Turkish automotive behemoth, sabotaged the project).