- Stellantis bet on the wrong approach to the EV transition; it misread demand, and it cost billions.
- The automaker is shifting back to combustion engines after overestimating EV adoption and failing to win buyers.
- Canceled EVs and bland products showed Stellantis’ electric strategy wasn’t working.
Stellantis has just posted its 2025 financial results, and it’s in the red for the first time since its formation in 2021. The company reported a net loss of $22.3 billion last year after it had to support $25.4 billion in unusual charges attributed to what now looks like a botched shift toward electric vehicles.
The conglomerate claim itmay have pushed too many EVs too soon into a market that more and more carmakers are saying still values choice. That doesn’t quite square with its U.S. business, which has been slow to launch any EVs. The EVs the giant has launched have been broadly uncompetitive, which is why most electric car buyers looked elsewhere. Even though it has plenty of battery-powered models on offer in Europe, none of them are selling particularly well.
Its strongest sellers are the Citroen e-C3 and the Peugeot e-208, two subcompact city cars that compete with the Renault 5 E-Tech but are still considerably behind on the sales charts. In the U.S., its offers the Fiat 500e, the Dodge Charger Daytona, and the Jeep Wagoneer S, all of which have been panned by critics and shunned by consumers.
It admits that it overestimated the pace of the transition to electric vehicles, and it has had to foot an uncomfortably large bill as a result. “Freedom of choice” is the name of the game now, which is Stellantis’ way of saying it will shift more investment back to combustion-powered vehicles while still also offering plug-ins.
According to Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa, the “results reflect the cost of overestimating the pace of the energy transition and of the need to reset our business around our customers’ freedom to choose from the full range of electric, hybrid and internal combustion technologies.”
While Stellantis admits that EV supply chain changes were a big reason behind the posted losses, they also resulted from changes to warranty estimates and workforce-related costs in Europe, where thousands of employees (mostly in Italy) were forced to leave the company, and it had to cover severance costs.
Last year was undeniably a painful one for Stellantis, but it doesn’t just blame the losses on the EV shift itself, but rather its timing and miscalculations regarding EV adoption rates. It points to growth returning in the second half of 2025 when it posted 10% higher year-over-year revenue numbers. Deliveries were up by 11% or 277,000 vehicles in H2, reaching 2.8 million units, primarily helped by a 39% year-over-year increase in North America.
That’s driven by the company’s push to rejuvenate Ram and Jeep, its traditional profit centers. Quality issues, inflated prices, and the loss of V-8 powertrains all worked against the brands last year, but by the second half Ram was re-introducing the Hemi and Jeep was drastically cutting prices. Since those brands have long anchored the group’s profits, getting them back on track is extremely important.
Filosa noted that “In the second half of the year, we began to see initial, positive signs of progress with the early results of our drive to improve quality, strong execution of the launches of our new product wave, and a return to top-line growth. In 2026, our focus will be on continuing to close the execution gaps of the past, adding further momentum to our return to profitable growth.”
Stellantis had several major new model launches last year, leaning heavily on hybrids. Many of them also offered an electric variant, but the only real bespoke EV that it launched last year was the DS N°8, which is a posh rival for the Tesla Model Y. Another significant development that’s symbolic of the miscalculated EV transition is Fiat putting a combustion engine back into the 500, which was initially launched exclusively as a pure electric vehicle.
Last year Stellantis also announced that it was cancelling the fully electric version of the Ram 1500 pickup, and now it only plans to offer an extended range powertrain for that model. It also pulled the plug on the fully electric Maserati MC20 Folgore, even though it had been in development for the better part of five years. It would have likely been a fantastic-driving EV, just like the GranTurismo Folgore that did make it to market, although sales would have likely been even worse.
Its current crop of EVs isn’t the most exciting on the market, and most are built around the same platform, batteries, and motors. The ones we’ve tried both in the United States and Europe just didn’t seem good enough given how stiff the competition is among EVs.
Stellantis offers a relatively broad spread of electric models, but even though they look different, many of them are basically the same vehicle underneath, built around one of two major shared platforms. It is working to make its future models stand out more, though, with several brand-new EVs arriving this year.
