Stellantis pledges to preserve jobs throughout transformation plan

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares is committed to preserving jobs across the company's global manufacturing network throughout the shift to electrification. Speaking at the Financial Times' Future of the Car summit, Tavares highlighted the various initiatives that Stellantis is undertaking with a view to retaining workers in various positions across its 14 brands. He said the firm, a little over a year on from its formation, is now in "execution mode", having established its long-term electrification plans earlier this year. It will launch only EVs in Europe from 2026, boost revenues by 72% by 2030 compared with 2021 levels, up battery production capacity to 400GWh globally by 2030 and achieve carbon-neutrality by 2038. "The major challenge in this execution mode," Tavares said, "is to bring everybody with us. We will need all the talents; some of them will learn new things, be educated and retrained on other technologies." His comments will come as reassurance to employees at Stellantis's numerous production and research facilities worldwide, where the focus until recently has been on launching and refining a traditional ICE product offering. "We can benefit from the talents of this newly created Stellantis and we can benefit from their learning capability, because we also need to trust their learning capability - the fact that they need to learn new things, new disciplines and new technologies," said Tavares. "With those highly educated, smart and well-intended people, we intend to create a very successful Stellantis - not only for 2030 but beyond, of course." He said this arrangement is important from "a quality of management standpoint" but acknowledged that "a production line for a battery cell is different to that for an internal combustion engine". He added: "People can learn. People can be trained and educated, and this is what we're going to do massively through an academy for software, another academy for data-crunching and a third one to learn the new manufacturing processes." Following the recent announcement of a partnership between Stellantis and technology giant Amazon, Tavares reaffirmed his commitment to connectivity and explained the part that it will play in preserving the workforce. "We're setting up a specific software academy to train more than 1000 engineers and educate them on the software technologies every single year," he pledged. It all forms part of what Tavares calls a 360deg approach to electrification that considers every facet of the process beyond the mobility offering. Sourcing a clean energy supply for EVs and encouraging the development of infrastructure to operate them were cited as examples of his focus areas.