PSA has long prided itself on having been less of a relocator than Renault and has, at times, used this as an argument to get the state to arbitrate in the direction that best served the company's interests. For the moment, by adding a French gigafactory to the Chinese one, backed up by the manufacture of the first European mass-produced battery electric vehicle in France, Renault is in the lead.

Renault-Nissan had initiated a movement at the end of 2020 that seemed to give substance to the proposals of President Macron who, on 26 May, declared at the Valeo factory in Etables that the objective of one million clean cars "made in France" should be aimed for by 2025.

By implying from his arrival in September that he wanted an affordable electric vehicle to be assembled in France, Luca de Meo had sent a powerful signal: while the increasing purchases of battery electric vehicles and imported rechargeable hybrids competing with the Zoé and the Peugeot or DS seemed to contradict the ambitions of May 2020 in the French foreign trade statistics, the announcements concerning the Mégane E-Tech and then the R5 and Micra came month after month to reinforce the credibility of the French ambitions.  read more

At the end of January, it was difficult to make the link between the serene presentation of the Alliance's strategy for 2030 and the troubles in which it found itself just over two years ago. The presentation of the financial results to come will tell us what role the return to better fortune plays in this matter but, at this stage, we can only note that the work of pacification led by Jean-Dominique Senard seems to have borne fruit. It refers to the imposition of the 'leader-follower' principle which is as much a way of admitting that one does not know how to cooperate as an attempt to do so anyway.

Since the arrival of Luca de Meo (LdM) at the helm of Renault, we had almost forgotten that an "Alliance" with Nissan and Mitsubishi existed. However, with the arrest of Carlos Ghosn and in the months or years that preceded it, the procrastination of the Alliance and the states of mind of some and others concerning the distribution of work, powers and shares within it constituted the main news of the companies. read more

The very heavy national survey on the evolution of French mobility behaviour that our country is only able to afford every 10 years has just been published. The clarifications it provides are based on figures and scientific arguments. However, between the climate emergency and the yellow waistcoats, they do not exhaust the debate, which ultimately remains fundamentally political.

Mathieu Chassignet, mobility and air quality engineer at Ademe, has a very relevant blog on mobility issues hosted by Alternatives Economiques. He brought to our attention the fact that the Ministry of Ecological Transition had just published the complete results of the 2019 "Mobility Survey of People". 
This is the very cumbersome and expensive national survey carried out about every 10 years and which measures the mobility of the French and compares it over time. The last edition was published in 2008 and, even though other sources are available to understand how these behaviours are evolving, the world of specialists in these questions was eagerly awaiting this publication and had had to make do with very partial elements until now.  read more

The attacks on the plug-in hybrid vehicle by NGOs are, with fairly strong arguments, mainly for reasons of environmental policy. The issue also deserves, in France in particular, an examination in industrial and strategic terms. From this point of view, despite the success of Stellantis and its four plug-in hybrid models assembled in France, it is not appropriate to continue with a plug-in hybrid policy that mainly boosts German and Swedish sales.

In Europe, public policies to reduce emissions are mainly restrictive or incentive policies and marginally industrial or R&D policies. However, as the France Stratégie report of May 2018 on Public policies in favour of very low emission vehicles underlined, it is the countries that have real industrial and strategic projects for electric or electrified vehicles that are leading the way. 

From this point of view, the report already underlined: 
i) the opposition between China and the United States is emblematic in that it puts the nation without an industrial policy in a very defensive position compared to the one that does have one;
ii) the EU mainly emphasises the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and, within the EU, at the time, only the United Kingdom seemed to have an industrial project involving strengthening the supply chain and supporting R&D and training. read more

 The growing concern about new car prices and the ability of the European car industry to still appeal to households is well founded. This week it has come up against the contrary objectives of Euro NCap. This should be an opportunity to review a number of trade-offs that have prevailed for more than 20 years in this industry and which it seems urgent to revise.

The news at the beginning of December saw the Euro NCap offensive against Renault, which Florence Lagarde analysed for us on Thursday, intersect with the publication of figures for new vehicle registrations by households, which the Cetelem automobile observatory underlined as being at an exceptionally low level in relation to the evolution of new vehicle prices.

The observation already made by Marc Bruschet, president of the CNPA dealer branch, deserves to be placed at the heart of the analysis of what is happening in Europe and, depending on the interpretation of the figures and trends, resisting the political enterprise of the Euro NCap lobby will then appear important or not. read more

 Germany's grand tricolour coalition draws a landscape where the will of the States and of Europe to support both activity and the investment necessary for the transition dominates. In a context durably structured around accommodating monetary policies, calls for a return to more orthodox budgetary policies will probably remain timid and this can only favour an electrification that would otherwise be more complicated. read more

Monitoring the car budgets of French families on a solid statistical basis enables us to verify whether or not phenomena on which we have only partial indications are true. The processing of the 2017 'Family Budget' survey, which we are comparing with the 2011 survey, confirms that, except in the Paris region, households are not turning away from cars but are continuing to equip themselves and to 'multi-equip'. However, they are doing so by making increasing use of second-hand vehicles and by ageing their fleets. As a result, the purchase of new cars is reduced to a minimum.

INSEE, like other national statistical offices, periodically examines family budgets by recruiting several thousand households to fill in very complete expenditure diaries. As the survey is very cumbersome and costly, it is only carried out every five or six years and it takes time to process.

Researchers have access to the files and can therefore do their own processing. This is what we did for the survey conducted in 2017, as we did for the 2011 survey. The comparison largely confirms trends that have been identified for years: the number of households is growing as they age, and while this allows for a slight increase in the turnover of the maintenance and repair and used vehicle business, it is not accompanied by an increase in new vehicle sales. read more

The start-up model and the fact that they claim the right to lose money and to be supported in their desire to grow for long periods of time blurs the lines of reference: where we usually deploy clear economic and accounting criteria at the end of which companies must be profitable, we are asked to 'change the paradigm' and try to assess the sustainability of the promise of success over time. The Tesla case shows that if a sufficient proportion of investors believe in it, the innovator can benefit for more than a decade from a kind of private subsidy regime that allows the company to operate at a loss and eventually be right against the sceptics. In 2021, armed with this history, Elon Musk is embarking on a new narrative and promising to build 20 million cars a year tomorrow. Will he still find the support of the markets? read more

For several years now, the electric vehicle has been a subject on which passion prevails and where faith too often plays a more important role than reason. In this context, there is the fear of being taken for a ride by Chinese competitors who, under the guise of decarbonisation, would have invented with their administration a war machine intended to dominate us or even to oust us. The reality is not so caricatured.

For those who fear the invasion of Chinese cars in Europe, the figures for the last two years are somewhat reassuring. They allow us to propose a slightly renewed analysis of the question: a manufacturer's presence in China is vital not only to access the volumes of the world's largest market but also to become part of a teeming ecosystem of innovation which will very probably act as an accelerator of the learning process necessary to accomplish the electric revolution which is only just beginning. read more