Your family owns a slice of a European car company that makes a couple of million cars a year. Your name is on the hubcaps, literally, so the way your family firm does business is as important as its success. What kind of person do you want to run it, to safeguard its future and to make it pre-eminent in an arena where distinctiveness matters?
These questions run through my mind as we walk through PSA’s glassy out-of-town Parisian HQ towards the corner office of 52-year-old Jean-Philippe Imparato, Peugeot’s CEO this past two and a half years. We’ve not met before but his reputation precedes him. Imparato is PSA chief Carlos Tavares’ (and the Peugeot family’s) choice to devise, orchestrate and extend the historic recovery of Peugeot’s carmaking business, a remarkable climb from near-bankruptcy in 2013 to record profits and sales in 2017-18. Everyone who knows him says Imparato is very different from your usual chief executive.
Five minutes in and it’s clear how right they are. Different is the least of it. Even ‘larger than life’ is a grievous understatement. Imparato is tall, imposing and instinctively friendly. He talks loudly, smiles quickly, waves his arms for emphasis in huge, uninhibited gestures and seems positively to enjoy answering questions without the warm-up others need. His feet rest naturally on the coffee table (because it’s comfortable) and he’s a jacket-off man. Start talking Peugeot business and he’s instantly brilliant.
Egged on by my probing, Imparato talks first about his childhood in southern France as part of an Alfa-loving, motorbike-mad family (“I am more or less Italian. It’s a long story”) and how the focus of his car love changed completely after an encounter with a black Peugeot 205 GTi just as he was lining up his first proper job after university and national service. Listening to Imparato talk is like riding a roller coaster: he skates over unimportant details, ignores grammar and delivers concentrated fragments of meaning faster than you’d have thought possible. Every sentence arrives as if there’s something even more important just waiting to be verbalised.
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"But it looks as if A- and B-segments will be pure battery. C and D will go plug-in.” I'll be surprized if it ends up that clear cut. Honda reckon their Urban will around £30k which looks crazy compared to a VW UP with it's cheap a chips ICE or a Suzuki mild-Hybrid.
Most successful EV's are currently anything with a Tesla badge on, LEAF, Zoe, Kona, i3, I-Pace. The Electric 500, e-UP, iOn, Gwizz have all failed to reach reasonable sale figures. Maybe when batteries are ALOT cheaper and ICE are all but banned but you can't make a finacial argument for cheap small EV's for several years to come.
Simples
Design vehicles that customers (not necessarily your employees) want and relentlessly pursue/eradicate quality issues. Straight to the point - I like this guy.
Not sure about saloons coming back though, at least in this market.
Owned 8 pugs over the years