Stellantis cuts 800,000 European cars

Stellantis, the world’s fourth-largest carmaker and owner of Fiat, Peugeot, Opel and Jeep, has put a €60 billion five-year investment plan on the table. Around $41 billion of brand investment, roughly 60%, is going to North America.

Europe gets the contraction. Stellantis will cut European production capacity by more than 800,000 vehicles a year. Some factories will survive, but on different terms: several are being turned into assembly lines for Chinese-designed cars. For Malta, which buys cars rather than builds them, this still matters. It is the supply chain behind the vehicles on Maltese roads being redrawn.

The profit gap driving the pivot

Stellantis is targeting margins of 8–10% in North America and just 3–5% in Europe. Energy costs in the US are about half Europe’s. A 25% American tariff on imported cars makes local production almost unavoidable.

That pull remained even after Washington cancelled the $7,500 electric vehicle consumer tax credit last September. The attraction is not one subsidy. It is a cost structure Europe cannot easily match through grants and industrial announcements.

In Europe, Stellantis wants factory utilisation, meaning the share of plant capacity actually being used, to rise from 60% to 80% by 2030. That sounds efficient on an investor slide. On the ground, it means fewer production lines, fewer shifts and fewer workers, even where no factory gate is formally locked.

CEO Antonio Filosa has promised there will be no closures. The problem is that the pledge only covers 2026.

Chinese partners in, European engineering out

The clearest signal is what Stellantis plans to put into the space it is freeing up. In Madrid, factory ownership has been transferred to Leapmotor, its Chinese electric vehicle partner. In Zaragoza, Leapmotor will produce an electric SUV carrying the Opel badge from 2028.

In Rennes, a joint venture with Dongfeng will assemble Voyah premium electric vehicles alongside Citroëns. European workers will still be on the line. But the engineering, platform logic and industrial centre of gravity will increasingly sit elsewhere.

Opel, Germany’s most established mass-market brand, has been pushed down into the “regional” category. Regional brands receive just 30% of brand investment, while the four “global” brands, Jeep, Ram, Peugeot and Fiat, take 70%.

The plan is also thin on batteries. The ACC consortium shelved planned gigafactories in Germany and Italy in February. With 29 battery-electric models planned by 2030, Stellantis will be relying on Asian suppliers for the most valuable component in every electric car it sells.

Who actually pays

Italy takes the hardest hit. Stellantis plants there were running at 23% utilisation. The Cassino factory operated for just 19 days in the first quarter.

The Fiom metalworkers’ union says 12,265 jobs have been lost since 2020. Italy is also the only major EU country without a single battery plant. That leaves it exposed at both ends: too much old capacity and too little control over the new technology.

France faces a different constraint. The Poissy plant near Paris will stop assembling cars after 2028, cutting roughly 900 of its 1,900 jobs. In another cycle, Paris might have tried to buy time with subsidies.

But S&P, the credit rating agency, has downgraded French sovereign debt to A+, making it more expensive for the government itself to borrow. That reduces the fiscal room to fight an industrial battle of this size.

Poland is losing 740 jobs in Tychy and 500 in Gliwice, yet it was not even named in the plan. Germany’s government, IG Metall and the VDA auto lobby have stayed silent on Opel’s demotion.

Spain and Portugal come out better. Mangualde already assembles eight electric models backed by €119 million in EU recovery funds. But the reward is a narrower role: assembly, not engineering leadership.

One company, wider problem

Investors are not convinced. Stellantis shares fell roughly 5% on the day the plan was announced. Of 107 planned vehicle launches, 39 are combustion or mild hybrid, a quiet wager that the EU’s 2035 ban on new petrol and diesel cars may not arrive in full force.

Stellantis is moving with the wider industry, not against it. Bosch, ZF and Continental, Europe’s three largest auto suppliers, have all announced major job cuts over the past year.

What is being lost is more than one company’s production map. It is a European industrial base that employed a generation, trained workers in complex manufacturing and gave the continent some control over what it drove. For a small market like Malta, the consequences will show up later, in prices, choice and dependence on decisions taken far from the showroom.