Stellantis to invest €1bil in French electric vehicle production

PARIS: Stellantis, owner of the Jeep and Fiat brands, “will invest more than €1 billion” to produce electric vehicles at a site in eastern France, French President Emmanuel Macron said Tuesday.

Macron spoke at a meeting of France’s so-called “electrification team” at the Elysee Palace, urging businesses to speed up the electrification of transport as the country seeks to phase out planet-heating oil, gas and coal by 2050.

“Stellantis in Mulhouse is set to invest over €1 billion in new funding to produce new generations of electric vehicles from 2029 onwards,” Macron said.

The automaker did not immediately confirm the announcement, saying it was working “on the future of our factories”, including in Mulhouse, and would provide further details “when there are official announcements”.

Stellantis last week announced a €60 billion investment in a five-year push to bolster profitability, including plans for more than 60 new vehicle launches by 2030.

But the Mulhouse site, one of Stellantis’s five factories in France, had yet to be assigned a new model for production, making the potential investment a boost for its roughly 4,000 employees.

Current production, at around 135,000 vehicles a year, has “never returned to the pre-Covid levels of 200,000 vehicles a year”, a union representative for the Mulhouse site, Laurent Gautherat, told French newspaper L’Alsace in April.

The site’s assembly line was running at half capacity pending the allocation of a new vehicle and underwent several days of furlough last year due to a slump in sales, he added.

The potential investment comes as France ramps up efforts to move away from fossil fuels, including through a major push into electric vehicles.

In late April, the government unveiled its “roadmap” setting deadlines for ending fossil fuel use across the economy, the second-largest in Europe.

As part of the plan, France wants two out of three new cars to be electric by 2030.

French manufacturers are expected to produce 400,000 electric vehicles by 2027 and one million by 2030.

المصدر: Free Malaysia Today