MILAN — Stellantis plans to retool its factory in Turin, Italy, into an electric-car or truck hub, transferring creation of two Maserati styles to the Mirafiori plant.
The go is meant to enhance performance and safeguard work opportunities as the automaker shifts to marketing additional electric powered autos.
Stellantis will assign Mirafiori a new electrified platform to develop Maserati sedans between 2022 and 2024, generating the manufacturing unit, where the automaker currently provides the Fiat New 500 battery-electrical minicar, the group’s center for electrification in Italy.
The Mirafiori manufacturing facility is the historic middle of Fiat, utilizing some 50,000 personnel in its heyday in the 1970s when it employed to deliver far more than 600,000 autos a 12 months.
The plant at the moment builds the Maserati Levante SUV as nicely as the Fiat New 500.
Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Saturday noted that Stellantis could raise creation of the combustion-engine Fiat 500 at Mirafiori by moving some volumes there from Tychy, Poland.
At Mirafiori, Stellantis will have one production approach to make combustion engines, hybrids, and electrical powertrains.
Maserati EV system
Stellantis, which was formed from the merger of Fiat Chrysler Vehicles and PSA Group earlier this yr, will build the Maserati Ghibli and Quattroporte sedans at Mirafiori, shifting from the nearby web site of Grugliasco.
One of the to start with steps will be to build a new electrified platform certain for Maserati, Stellantis reported.
“Stellantis is working with willpower and alacrity to foresee and put together for the strength changeover of all its Italian industrial web sites,” the business mentioned in a statement Monday.
The intention is to improve overall performance at the plants “to give this nation a strategic role among the group’s key domestic European markets,” Stellantis stated.
Upcoming generation of the New 500 is also confirmed in Turin, the automaker claimed, right after presenting its prepare in Rome to the field and labor ministers and unions.
No job losses
All 1,100 workers and capabilities in Grugliasco will go to Mirafiori by 2024 with no over-all effects on jobs in the region, Stellantis reported devoid of providing information about what happens to the Grugliasco internet site immediately after that day. Assembly operations will go quickly.
Grugliasco is 4 km (2.5 miles) from Mirafiori. Its personnel have generally moved concerning the two web-sites based mostly on creation wants.
The determination marks the end of complete motor vehicle producing at the Grugliasco plant much less than a ten years following it begun manufacturing of Maserati automobiles.
Stellantis stated it will allocate far more electrification-linked activities to Mirafiori.
Italy overhaul
Stellantis’ creation in Italy has been below scrutiny for costing more than in other places in Europe.
Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares advised Italian unions in February that production costs at Fiat’s factories in Italy were being up to 4 occasions far more than at PSA’s vegetation in France or Spain for a identical product, mostly simply because of decreased-than-envisioned product sales alternatively than high labor expenditures.
In June, the automaker made the decision to reorganize output at the Melfi plant in southern Italy, its largest facility in the nation, on a single improved line that will merge two present kinds with unchanged ability. It will establish four medium-section electric powered cars, for different makes, beginning in 2024.
The corporation said in July it would build just one of its three European battery factories in Italy, at the Termoli web page, 300 km east of Rome. The plant at present can make interior combustion engines.
Italy’s Business Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti stated in a statement that there was an ongoing “substantial hard work” to aid the Termoli gigafactory initiative with public funds.
Italy’s federal government has sought assurances from Stellantis that Italy will stay a person of the principal international locations in which it builds cars as the EV shift jeopardizes 1000’s of production careers.
Stellantis previous month finalized designs for Daimler to be part of its European battery enterprise.
Bloomberg and Reuters contributed to this report