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Here is Elkann and Tavares’ Christmas present to Mirafiori: facility closed until January

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Here is Elkann and Tavares' Christmas present to Mirafiori: facility closed until January

In 2023, despite the halving of Maserati's volumes, 85,940 cars were produced: this year Mirafiori risks churning out just 20,000. The plant which produces 97 percent of electric cars never really restarted from the summer holidays, which were brought forward by two weeks

Difficult to find the Mirafiori plant open. Despite many promises from the management, the Stellantis hub actually never really reopened after the summer break , except for short periods that were immediately suffocated by other closures. And before that it hadn't gone any better having lost the entire month of May and brought the holidays forward to the 15th of July. Also in July there was the mockery of the lines being closed " due to rain ".

THE TURIN PLANT HAS BEEN STOPPED LONG BEFORE THE SUMMER

But it was after the summer that the Turin plant began to understand that it would be difficult to return to those lines capable, at least on paper, of churning out 200 cars per shift.

They should have restarted at full capacity in mid-September, but the workers at the Piedmont hub gradually saw that date move: first to mid-November, then with the end of the year. Now it is official that we will talk about it again after the Epiphany.

In short, there is a risk of turning into reality the prophecy of the trade unionists who already in September claimed that in the body shop department from August to December no more than a fortnight would be worked.

MIRAFIORI MAYBE REOPENS ON 8.1

Stellantis has announced that the plants will stop from 2 to 17 December. In this way the holidays will be directly connected, from 18 December to 5 January 2025. With return scheduled for 8 January. And already the disconsolate workers are whispering that the stop will last at least until Valentine's Day.

It is now difficult for them to believe the company's promises. Above all, it is difficult to imagine a miraculous recovery in orders for the electric 500 in the next few weeks, on whose sales the fate of production depends.

ALL THE NUMBERS OF THE MIRAFIORI CRISIS

The crisis at Mirafiori, which now produces 97 percent of electric-powered cars, is all in the numbers: in June the negative gap on the previous year exceeded 60 percent, at the beginning of September the plant which produces over 500 electric and one of the last Maserati models still on the market was stuck at 18,500 cars produced compared to 52 thousand in the same period in 2023, with a drop of now 83 percent .

And the gap risks widening ruthlessly even further. Ninety days have now passed since the last sampling but counting the closures those numbers are unlikely to have changed, so much so that there are those who dare to hypothesize that this year Mirafiori will churn out just 20 thousand cars in 12 months.

COMPARISON WITH 2023 DATA

To understand industrial desertification, it is sufficient to dust off the 2023 data: the total was around 86 thousand cars produced. All this despite the fact that last year we had already seen Maserati's volumes halved. In '22 the overall number was in fact 9.3 percent more.

THE STELLANTIS INDUSTRY CRISIS

The Mirafiori production chasm has repercussions at a telluric level on the entire Piedmontese industrial fabric, an undergrowth of companies – sometimes family-run, very often with a single customer: Fiat – which arose in the post-war period around the imposing roots of the Agnelli family's automotive giant.

THE WHOLE OF PIEDMONT SUFFERS

But if the tree suffers, everything that has germinated around it risks drying out first. Fiom highlighted that in the first seven months of 2024, requests for layoff hours increased by 100% in Novara, 72% in Turin, 54% in Vercelli, 30% in Asti and 140% in Biella . Verbano-Cusio-Ossola goes against the trend with -8% and Cuneo with -54%. Only the figure for Alessandria is stable and is in line with that of the past year.

THE (LONG-TERM) PROMISES OF TAVARES

Only Carlos Tavares , CEO now expected to be out by '26 (when his contract expires) precisely because of the crisis into which Stellantis has fallen, does not want to hear about the crisis in Mirafiori.

Again in October, at the hearing of the of the new 500 hybrid: “We worked to reduce development times and bring the model onto the lines at the end of 2025 and not in 2026”.

Nothing new, however, on the Maserati front despite workers' representatives having been asking for some time to bring forward new models to re-oxygenate the situation of the Trident and thus avoid ending up like the nearby Grugliasco plant, closed at the end of 2023. So we will necessarily have to wait Fiat's hybrid city car which should arrive at the end of next year. The question remains whether the Turin factory will still exist in 12 months. Many of Mirafiori's third parties almost certainly do not.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/ecco-il-regalo-di-natale-di-elkann-e-tavares-a-mirafiori-impianto-chiuso-fino-a-gennaio/ on Fri, 29 Nov 2024 09:53:40 +0000.