If your image of Brazil has anything to do with "The Girl from Ipanema" played by 1,001 Strings, you may be a little out of date. The country that will host the 2016 Summer Olympics has come a long way since the dawn of the bossa nova craze a half century ago, though it still has plenty of nagging problems left to deal with.Brazil is now the world's fourth-largest national automotive market.
The recent Sao Paulo Auto Show provided one clear clue as to how much things have changed in recent years. When I first visited Brazil 15 years ago, the vehicles available to Brazilian motorists were, for the most part, decades out of date common practice among automakers like Ford, Volkswagen and General Motors, who would dump generations-old tooling into these backwater markets rather than anything close to new.
Today, however, Brazilians motorists are likely to get the latest and greatest. Indeed, October's Sao Paulo show gave local buyers and the rest of the world a look at a number of all-new offerings, some designed specifically for the Portugese-speaking nations, others for global markets, such as the next-generation Ford Fiesta sedan. Significantly, the new model will land in Brazilian showrooms well before it reaches dealers here in the States.
Paul A. Eisenstein is Publisher of TheDetroitBureau.com and a 30-year veteran of the automotive beat. His editorials bring his unique perspective and deep understanding of the auto world to Autoblog readers on a regular basis.Via: Brazil becoming a major world market for automakers... again
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