Stellantis will spend more than €30bn over the next four years developing electric cars, underlining the investment the auto industry is having to make as combustion engines are phased out.
In the first major announcement on its electric strategy since it was formed by the merger of France’s PSA and Fiat Chrysler this year, Stellantis laid out plans to open five battery factories across Europe and the US by the end of the decade.
The world’s sixth-largest automaker said it would introduce a range of cars that can drive up to 500 miles on a single charge. With brands including Jeep, Peugeot, Vauxhall and Ram, Stellantis wants 70 per cent of European sales and 40 per cent of US sales to be of low-emission vehicles by 2030.
Four out of five of these would be battery electric cars, with the rest plug-in hybrid models, chief executive Carlos Tavares said on Thursday.
The company, which is one of the most profitable in the segment, aims to achieve “double digit” operating margins from electric sales by 2026.
While its battery car margins from sales today were equal to its combustion vehicles, finance boss Richard Palmer warned of a short-term squeeze as government incentives that helped bring prices down were unwound.
The electric plans from Stellantis have been keenly anticipated because the €50bn merger brought together two companies at opposite ends of the industry’s electric spectrum.
PSA has already invested in electric vehicles, helping the group meet the EU’s CO2 targets last year. FCA, however, met them only after paying Tesla hundreds of millions of euros for carbon credits. The Italian-American group is considered the industry’s laggard on electric technology.
The ambitious plan by Stellantis to invest €30bn by 2025 echoes that of rivals. Volkswagen, the group’s largest competitor in Europe, is spending €35bn on electric vehicles, while Ford, which competes with Opel in Europe and Ram and Jeep in the US, this year raised its spending targets to “more than $30bn” by the end of the decade.
Among the initiatives and targets set out on Thursday, Stellantis said Opel and Vauxhall would sell electric cars in Europe only after 2028, two years earlier than arch-rival Ford. Opel will also launch as an all-electric brand in China, a market where Stellantis is weak.
Jeep, historically a major profit generator for Fiat Chrysler, promised to release a battery model in every segment by 2025, while its Ram brand will produce a fully electric pick-up truck in 2024.
Stellantis said it planned to build four manufacturing platforms that would allow it to make battery versions of the vehicles in its range, which run from small hatchbacks to large pick-up trucks. The models will be able to run from 300 miles to 500 miles on a single charge.
The company also aims to have solid state batteries, which allow longer ranges and faster charging, in some vehicles from 2026, a date in line with ambitions from rivals such as Toyota and BMW.
Tavares said he had agreed with the Italian government to establish a third European battery plant in Termoli, Italy, in addition to plants in northern France and Germany that PSA will run in a joint venture with Total.
Stellantis shares fell 3 per cent on the day to close at €16.05.
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2021-07-08 13:01:33Z
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