Stellantis announces mass layoffs in US and Europe
It’s not a good week to be working at Stellantis. As it (finally) moves to try to sell EVs in the US, the automaker just laid off 400 US salaried tech workers and software engineers on Friday. Today the company announced that it was slashing more than 1,500 jobs in Turin, Italy, due to what it says are slow sales of its all-electric Fiat 500e city car.
Last Friday, some 400 salaried, nonunion workers in the US were told to work from home for a “mandatory remote work day,” and then all fired during a remote group video meeting, reported the Wall Street Journal. So much for the personal touch.
One mechanical engineer told Fox2 Detroit that “it was a mass firing of everybody that was on the call.” He added that he believes the rationale for the layoffs was to move jobs to “low-cost countries,” with Stellantis outsourcing jobs to India, Mexico, and Brazil. Stellantis says that the layoffs would affect about 2% of employees in those units “after rigorous organizational reviews.” In total, Stellantis had 11,800 salaried US employees as of the end of last year.
Today, Stellantis added to the pile by announcing that it has now signed a deal with unions to slash some 1,500 jobs in Turin, Italy – but being that all of the employees are unionized, they will presumably have a softer landing than their US-based counterparts.
The historic home of Italy’s own Fiat, owned by Stellantis, is Turin, and that is where up to 1,520 employees, including 300 at the Miafiori factory and 744 staff, can take the option of voluntary leave with financial incentives, according to the UILM union, reports Automotive News Europe.
In January, Stellantis decided to temporarily lay off some 2,250 workers at its Mirafiori plant, with more than half of the affected workers handling the production of its all-electric Fiat 500e, Stellantis’s first all-electric vehicle to launch in the US.
A statement from an Italian union indicated that buyers in Italy at least were postponing the purchase of electric vehicles, anticipating government incentives to stimulate adoption.
As for the US workers, Stellantis told the Wall Street Journal that laid-off employees would be given a “comprehensive separation package and transition assistance.”
Electrek’s Take
Stellantis aims to spend over $50 billion through the end of the decade in its delayed shift to electric cars. The automaker says it will offer eight new EV models in the US by year’s end, and more than two dozen by 2030.
And as the company has been shifting gears, it hasn’t shied from shedding workers to save money. Last December announced that it planned to cut thousands of jobs from its Jeep plants in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, blaming California’s emissions regulations for putting the company at a competitive disadvantage. It has recently signed on to a deal with California saying that it will comply with the state’s stricter emissions policy requiring two-thirds of new cars to be zero-emissions or all-electric by 2030 – and will commit to the deal even if former President Donald Trump makes a return to office and tries to dismantle the policy.
Stellantis’s first EV available in the US is the Fiat 500e, priced at $32,500 plus a $1,595 destination fee (being made in Italy, it’s not eligible for the $7,500 federal tax credit). The two-door hatchback comes powered by a 118-hp electric motor for a 149-mile range – not amazing, but enough to get around town, and Fiat is targeting the upmarket urban consumer who apparently has money to burn, good city parking, and isn’t concerned about range. But of course, so far, this strategy hasn’t been working that well.
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EV sales kept up their momentum in December 2024, with incentives playing a big role, according to the latest Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book report.
December’s strong EV sales saw an average transaction price (ATP) of $55,544, which helped push the industry-wide ATP higher, according to Kelley Blue Book. The December ATP for an EV was higher year-over-year by 0.8%, slightly below the industry average, and higher month-over-month by 1.1%. Tesla ATPs were higher year-over-year by 10.5%.
Incentives for EVs remained elevated in December, although they were slightly lower month-over-month at 14.3% of ATP, down from 14.7% in November.
EV incentives were higher by an impressive 41% year-over-year and have been above 12% of ATP for six consecutive months. Strong sales incentives, which averaged more than $6,700 per sale in 2024, were one reason EV sales surpassed 1.3 million units last year, according to Cox Automotive, a new record for volume and share.
(My colleague Jameson Dow reported yesterday, “In 2024, the world sold 3.5 million more EVs than it did in the previous year … This increase is larger than the 3.2 million increase in EV sales from the previous year – meaning that EV sales aren’t just up, but that the rate of growth is itself increasing.”)
Kelley Blue Book estimated that in December, approximately 84,000 vehicles – or 5.6% of total sales – transacted at prices higher than $80,000 – the highest volume ever. KBB lumps gas cars and EVs together into this luxury vehicle category, so this is where Tesla Cybertruck is slotted.
However, Tesla bundles sales figures of Cybertruck with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi(!) into a category it calls “other models,” so we don’t know for sure exactly how many Cybertrucks Tesla sold in Q4, much less in December. However, Electrek‘s Fred Lambert estimates between 9,000 and 12,000 Cybertrucks were sold in Q4, and that’s not a stellar sales figure.
What will January bring when it comes to EV ATPs? What about tax credits? Check back in a month and I’ll fill you in.
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Tesla is now claiming that Cybertruck was the ‘best-selling electric pickup in US’ last year despite not even reporting the number of deliveries.
There’s a lot of context needed here.
As we often highlighted, Tesla is sadly one of, if not the most, opaque automakers regarding sales reports.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model or even region.
For comparison, here’s Ford’s Q4 2024 sales report compared to Tesla’s:
You could argue that Tesla has fewer models than Ford, and that’s true, but Tesla’s report literally has two lines despite having six different models.
There’s no reason not to offer a complete breakdown like all other automakers other than trying to make it hard to verify the health of each vehicle program.
This has been the case with the Cybertruck. Tesla is bundling its Cybertruck deliveries with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi deliveries.
Despite this lack of disclosure, Tesla has been able to claim that the Cybertruck has become “the best-selling electric pickup truck” in the US in 2024:
It very well might be true. Ford disclosed 33,510 F-150 Lightning truck deliveries in the US in 2024 while most estimates are putting Cybertruck deliveries at around 40,000 units.
Those are global deliveries, but Tesla only delivered the Cybertruck in the US, Canada, and Mexico in 2024, and most of the deliveries are believed to be in the US.
However, there’s essential context needed here, as we highlighted in our recent ‘Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous‘ article.
First off, Tesla had a backlog of over 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck that it has been building since 2019. This led many to believe Tesla already had years of demand baked in for the truck and that production would be the constraint.
However, based on estimates, again, because Tesla refuses to disclose the data, Cybertruck deliveries were either flat or down in Q4 versus Q3 despite Tesla introducing cheaper versions of the vehicle and ramping up production.
Again, that’s after just about 40,000 deliveries.
Furthermore, with almost 11,000 deliveries in Q4 in the US, Ford more likely than not outsold Cybertruck with the F-150 Lightning in Q4.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla is in damage control here. There’s no doubt that it is having issues selling the Cybertruck.
Inventory is full of Cybertrucks and Tesla is now discounting them and offering free lifetime Supercharging.
Tesla is great at ramping up production, and it’s clear the Cybertruck is not production-constrained anymore. It is demand-constrained despite having over 1 million reservations.
Again, those reservations were made before Tesla unveiled the production version, which happened to have less range and cost significantly more.
The upcoming cheaper single motor version should help with demand, but I have serious doubts Tesla can ramp this program up to more than 100,000 units in the US.
As a reminder, Tesla installed a production capacity of 250,000 units annually and Musk said he could see Tesla selling 500,000 Cybertrucks per year.
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