Tavares resignation, topics on the table for the next Stellantis CEO: competitiveness, platforms and car airbuses

What now? What will happen at Stellantis? What industrial and product strategy will Carlos Tavares's successor choose? And above all: is there really room for 15 brands, some of them with homeopathic sales? These are the questions being asked today, in the aftermath of the dismissal of Carlos Tavares. The Portuguese manager leaves the Italo-Transalpine but French-driven mega-group at an unprecedentedly dramatic and delicate moment in the history of the automotive industry. An industry that faces, in Europe, an epochal crisis of sales and identity, between electric cars that are not selling and thermals that will not be produced next year by manufacturers so as not to succumb under the weight of the CAFE fines for CO2 emissions.

There are rumours of an internal turnover with Olivier Francois, or Jean-Philippe Imparato and even a major appointment: Luca de Meo, CEO of Renault and architect of the relaunch of the French group, the only one not to have declared a profit warning. Certainly, Tavares's successor could bring closer the birth of the Airbus of the automotive industry, a workhorse of Luca de Meo also as president of ACEA The hypothesis, however, opposed apertis verbis by Carlos Tavares.

And that a consortium (not a super merger, mind you) is necessary now seems self-evident. The European car industry is facing its darkest hour and certainly, with the Chinese giants beating at the frontiers, heedless of tariffs, the big manufacturers can no longer go in random order. What is needed are clear-cut strategies, no wavering (electric now or electric later), technological visions and the ability to counter those unsustainable ecological choices that have contributed to generating an industrial disaster of immense proportions. Above all, the European car industry must find ideas and technological impetus by putting the product back at the centre, but it needs synergies and costs under control. This can only be done by pooling resources (see the now famous Draghi report). And this means sharing platforms and digital systems, powertrains and batteries between groups. All without making ugly photocopied cars or models that the market rejects. Yes, because the competitiveness of a given car model remains a key point (in Brussels Audi closed the factory where it built the Q8 e-tron, certainly not an example of an electric car that is competitive with Tesla).

But back to Stellantis. The new CEO will undoubtedly have on his agenda the theme of the crisis, that of the Airbus of the European automotive industry and, above all, the revival of sales, with the decision as to which brands to bring forward and which to switch off. It is clear, in fact, that the electric Abarth is a flop (small numbers, but a symbol), that the electric Fiat 500 has stalled, that DS is not working at European level and that Lancia Ypsilon is in the balance.

These are just a few examples, but the biggest one is Maserati, which perhaps the new CEO might decide to sell. Brands such as Alfa Romeo, but above all Peugeot, Jeep and Fiat instead have a solid product plan with a series of new models (also made in Italy) on the way.