From the article: “Once a fierce critic of the European Union’s push to restrict ICE vehicles, Stellantis is now reaping rewards from its shift in focus to EVs, with France taking the lead thanks to revised ‘green bonus’ incentives for Europe-made cars while freezing out Chinese brands. Yesterday the company announced a 7% year-on-year sales uptick yesterday, with a 37% boost in EV sales in Europe, beating out Tesla.”
“‘We secured second place in Europe over Tesla’ in overall EU sales, said incoming CFO Natalie Knight in a meeting with the group’s general assembly. Tesla ranked third in sales, while VW Group took top honors. ‘We are doing everything we can to further our [efforts], all the while responding to key short-term sector challenges and continuing our electric and technological transformation.’”
It’s going to be really interesting to see whether this policy will royally backfire, as quite a number of popular EVs in France will no longer qualify for the bonus, such as the Tesla M3 SR+, MG4, Dacia Spring and Volvo EX30 on account of being built in China. There really aren’t all that many EU built EVs that can compete on specs or price. The Stellantis EVs are pretty expensive and don’t have specs to match the Chinese built competition, if this leads to less EVs being bought in France, and economic hardship in Europe. That would be a disaster for the French EV goals, but France is leading the protectionist movement against non-EU EVs. Likely as French brands such as Renault and Stellantis (formerly Groupe PSA) were some of the early EV pioneers but have since lost ground massively to the likes of Tesla and new Chinese brands such as MG/SAIC.