They play a leading role in the fall in French automobile production. They are the city cars, these small cars which supported thousands of workers in France… until their massive relocation at the turn of the 2000s. Whether it is the Twingo and the Clio at Renault, Peugeot 208 and Citroën C3 on the Stellantis side, none of these models are produced in France. And this, while they compete each year for the top of the rankings of the best-selling vehicles in France. With its high costs, France is no match for Eastern countries or Spain in the production of small, inexpensive cars, the two French manufacturers have long explained.
An argument from which Renault seems to have returned, which has decided to produce its battery-powered R5 in its factory in Douai (North). Stellantis refuses to make such a change. Last July, his boss Carlos Tavares brushed aside Bruno Le Maire’s request to locate production of the electric Peugeot 208 on French soil. And this, even though the vehicle has benefited greatly from the social leasing system implemented by the government. In an interview given to FigaroCarlos Tavares explained that he had “very big doubts about the fact that we can produce very compact electric vehicles profitably in our country”.
However, the arrival of battery cars is precisely changing the situation, according to Jean-Philippe Hermine, the director of the Institute for Mobility in Transition – an emanation of the Institute of Sustainable Development and International Relations (Iddri), a thinking group. The study that this former head of Renault’s environmental strategy published at the end of May with the Foundation for Nature and Man (FNH) demonstrates that the competitiveness gap between France and its competitors in the production of small electric cars is much lower than one might have thought.
“Short-term business strategies”
By studying a host of indicators – labor costs, energy prices, investment subsidies, production taxes, etc. – the authors conclude that the cost price gap by the next decade would only be l around 2.5% with Spain, 2% with Slovakia and 6% with China. Or amounts ranging between 390 and 960 euros per vehicle. “For a generalist brand, a competitiveness gap of 6% would potentially place it outside the core market. This is the case for the gap with China, which is therefore sufficient to explain relocations,” agree the authors of the study. Hence the interest in considering, according to them, an increase in customs duties between 15 and 17% – compared to the 10% currently practiced in Europe on electric vehicles – and the deployment of an environmental score on a European scale. , like the system implemented to calculate the ecological bonus in France.
“On the other hand, a difference of 2.5% or 3% corresponds to half of the standard deviation within a market,” they decide. And to conclude that the relocations which today benefit the countries of Eastern Europe or Spain “are rather the result of short-term (commercial) business strategies aimed at maximizing margins with less effort , that is to say without working on the productivity of an installed industrial fabric.
Beyond the ecological interest, Iddri and the FNH estimate that the production of 700,000 city cars from segments A and B in France would save 25,800 direct jobs and nearly 70,000 on an industry scale. automobile, while reducing the trade deficit by 14 billion euros. Enough to make it a winning operation on all counts.