Fiat in The United States
Fiat has a long history in United States. In 1908, the Fiat Automobile Co. was established in the country and a plant in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., began producing Fiats a year later. These luxury cars were produced long before Chrysler Corp. started in 1925. Fiat was sometimes used as a jocular backronym for 'Fix it again Tony', referring to poor reliability and problems, such as rust, which some Fiat owners in the United States encountered in the 1970s and 1980s. Partly as a result, Fiat sales in the US fell from a high of 100,511 cars in 1975 to 14,113 in 1982. In 1983, Fiat left the United States car market with a reputation for poor quality cars. However, Fiat has made significant improvements since then.
In January 2009, the Fiat Group acquired a 20% stake in US automaker Chrysler LLC. The deal saw the return of the Fiat brand to North America after a 25-year absence. The first Fiat-branded model to appear in the US was the popular Fiat Nuova 500 city car. The Fiat Nuova 500 model is built at Chrysler's assembly plant in Toluca, Mexico which currently makes also the Dodge Journey and Fiat Freemont crossovers.
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