Making Sense of Stellantis's $26 Billion EV Asset Writedown

There's one number worth remembering from February 6, 2026: one hundred dollars.

That's the price Stellantis put on its 49% stake in the NextStar Energy battery plant in Windsor, Canada. Cumulative investment in this plant had reached $980 million. The Canadian federal and Ontario provincial governments had pledged billions of Canadian dollars in subsidies for it. The site currently employs over 1,300 people. And Stellantis wrapped all of it up and sold it to joint venture partner LG Energy Solution. For a hundred bucks. Can't even buy a proper dinner with that.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford was asked about this and said: "I think it's a good business decision." I wonder what his face looked like when he said it.

Selling a billion-dollar asset for a hundred dollars doesn't happen under any normal business logic. But it happened, because it was pocket change next to the bigger number that day. €22.2 billion, roughly $26 billion, in special charges taken by Stellantis in a single stroke. How to put this. It exceeded Stellantis's own market cap that day. A company's writedown being worth more than the company itself. There is no precedent for this in the history of the global auto industry.

After the Milan Stock Exchange opened, the stock straight-up collapsed, 25% to 27%. About €6 billion in market value, gone. (Source: CNBC, 2026.02.06)

What's actually inside that €22.2 billion? Stellantis's disclosures were actually pretty granular. The number Citi analysts cared about most was the €6.5 billion in battery supplier breach-of-contract penalties, because this isn't some accounting adjustment. This is real cash going out the door, spread over four years. That one item alone is enough to keep a lot of investors awake at night. Canceling pure EV programs ate up roughly €8.5 billion; the Ram 1500 REV electric pickup and the Chrysler Airflow both died inside that line item. Then there's €4.1 billion in warranty reserve increases, which Filosa blamed squarely on product quality problems under the previous regime. European layoffs, another €1.3 billion. These numbers are already terrifying, but the one that really spooked analysts was still that €6.5 billion cash payout, because most of the rest are paper charges. This one isn't.

New CEO Antonio Filosa used a very carefully chosen line in his statement to explain all of this: "The charges disclosed today largely reflect the cost of overestimating the speed of the energy transition. This took us away from the real-world needs, capabilities, and desires of many car buyers."

Carlos Tavares. You can't make sense of the $26 billion without first understanding this man and everything that happened around him.

Tavares was your classic "cost killer" CEO. He built that reputation at PSA, where he pulled Peugeot Citroën back from the edge of bankruptcy. After PSA and Fiat Chrysler merged into Stellantis in 2021, he was named CEO and rolled out the "Dare Forward 2030" strategy: 100% BEV sales in Europe, 50% BEV sales in the US. To back it up, he signed a pile of long-term battery supply contracts, threw money at battery plants, and greenlit premium BEV development programs.

At the same time, he did something else: he jacked up prices like there was no tomorrow. By Q4 2023, Stellantis's average transaction price in the US hit $58,000. Jeep and Chrysler dealer lots started drowning in unsold inventory. Dealers were screaming bloody murder. He didn't care.

In 2023, Stellantis posted record profits. Tavares took home €36.5 million (about $38.4 million) in annual comp, making him the highest-paid auto CEO on the planet.

National Dealer Council chairman Kevin Farrish wrote an open letter in August 2024 and sent it straight to the press. One line from it got quoted over and over: "You delivered record profits for Stellantis in 2023, earning the title of 'highest-paid automotive CEO.' But the reckless short-term decisions made to achieve record profits have had devastating, yet entirely foreseeable, consequences for the U.S. market." (Source: CNN Business, 2024.12.01)

That letter was saying, in front of the entire industry: you, Tavares, walked away with $38.4 million and left behind a dumpster fire.

The way Tavares went down was bloodier than most of the public reporting let on.

In October 2024, the board convened an emergency meeting in the US. It lasted two days. According to internal sources cited by Bloomberg and Reuters, the disagreements ran on two levels. First, Tavares had 15 months left on his term and wanted to sprint toward short-term performance targets before his exit, while the board wanted him focused on the company's longer-term health. Second, and this was the fatal one, his relationships with dealers, suppliers, unions, and governments across countries had completely imploded, and the board decided this "make enemies on all fronts" approach was unsustainable.

What came out of those two days was a full-blown leadership purge: CFO replaced, North America CEO replaced, China CEO replaced, heads of Maserati and Alfa Romeo also replaced. Two months later, December 1, Tavares himself was forced out. Stellantis senior independent director Henri de Castries said: "For the good of the company, we reached a point where we had to part ways." He said the board's decision was "unanimous."

The UAW (United Auto Workers) had reached a landmark contract with Stellantis after the 2023 strike, which included commitments to reopen the Belvidere plant in Illinois, produce the next-gen Dodge Durango in Detroit, and more. By 2024, Stellantis started breaking those promises. The Belvidere reopening got pushed back indefinitely. Durango production was slated for relocation to Canada.

UAW President Shawn Fain's response was to launch a nationwide campaign called "Keep the Promise." He did something that had literally never been done before in the history of American labor: he built a website called ShitcanCarlos.com. Yeah. That was really the name. The site had a video of Fain himself, calling on every Stellantis worker to sign a strike authorization pledge card.

What Fain said in the video was so blunt it hits you even without translation: "This is about your job, your life. The question is, are you gonna let Carlos Tavares tell you to 'sit down and shut up,' or are you gonna stand up and fight for what's right?"

Thousands of workers signed. Three local chapters passed strike authorization votes. Stellantis tried to block the union by filing over a dozen federal lawsuits. Fain called it "an act of desperation."

Then things got even more dramatic. In October 2024, Italian unions staged a national strike to protest Stellantis's production cuts in Europe. UAW reps from Belvidere flew to Rome and gave a speech to a crowd of hundreds of thousands. American autoworkers and Italian autoworkers, joint transatlantic action for the first time ever, all pointed at the same man.

The UAW later claimed, without an ounce of modesty, that their campaign directly caused Tavares's ouster. Look at the timeline, and the claim isn't baseless. Six weeks after Tavares left, the newly appointed North American operations chief Filosa recommitted to the Belvidere reopening and to keeping Durango in Detroit. The UAW called it "a great victory." But as of now, over 2,000 Stellantis workers are still on indefinite layoff.

Something Chinese-language media has barely touched on: the power struggle between Stellantis's two founding families. This thread is critical.

The 2021 PSA-FCA merger was sold as a "merger of equals." Five years on, that narrative is completely dead.

According to a lengthy Detroit News report from December 2025 (Source: Detroit News, 2025.12.11), in the early days post-merger, French executives from the Peugeot Citroën side still held key management spots around Tavares. Within a year, most of the leadership had been swapped out for Fiat Chrysler people. After Tavares got kicked out, the Agnelli family's John Elkann talked the board into picking Filosa, an Italian-born Fiat Chrysler lifer. Filosa then ran another round of executive musical chairs, and the result is that Italian executives now sit in virtually every key position.

One more thing. In 2023, Tavares unilaterally pulled Stellantis out of ACEA, the European auto industry lobbying group, choosing to lobby on its own. According to internal sources, this decision never went through the board. Less than a week after Tavares was fired, Stellantis announced it was rejoining ACEA.

Someone on the Allpar forum raised a sharp question: the last three CEOs, Marchionne, Manley, Tavares, all ended in failure. Quality decline, dealer relationships rotting, prices going through the roof. The same patterns keep repeating. The one person who's been there through all of it is John Elkann himself. Does that mean the problem isn't the CEO, but someone higher up? Nobody has publicly answered that question.

Tavares didn't go quietly after being shown the door, either. In October 2025, he published a book in France.

According to content disclosed by Bloomberg, Tavares wrote: "I fear the tripartite balance between Italy, France, and the United States will be broken." He painted a disturbing scenario: a Chinese automaker buying up the European brands, while the Americans take back control of the American brands, like when GM sold off Opel and Vauxhall. He implied his departure meant "French interests" would no longer be protected. (Source: MoparInsiders, 2025.10.24)

According to MoparInsiders, based on conversations with multiple people inside Stellantis, morale and the overall outlook at the company actually improved noticeably after Tavares left. Several departed executives later joined Chinese EV giant BYD. BYD is expanding fast in Europe and is one of Stellantis's most direct competitors.

Stellantis isn't the only one that got wrecked by EVs. In December 2025, Ford announced $19.5 billion in EV-related writedowns. The F-150 Lightning, the truck CEO Jim Farley once compared to "a new Model T," got killed less than four years after production started. A massive Tennessee plant originally planned for 500,000 electric pickups a year is now being retooled for gas trucks. Ford's Model E electric vehicle division burned through $13 billion in under three years. Add the $19.5 billion writedown, and Ford's total EV losses top $32.5 billion.

General Motors has taken cumulative writedowns of $7.6 billion and hinted there's more coming. Porsche/Volkswagen issued four profit warnings in 2025, involving roughly $6 billion.

But the battery plants dumped by EV programs haven't just been left to rust. Ford spent $2 billion converting its Kentucky and Michigan battery plants into energy storage facilities serving AI data centers and the power grid. LG Energy Solution, after taking over NextStar, explicitly said it would focus on energy storage. GM is exploring the storage pivot too. EV demand cratered on one side, and the explosion of AI data centers happened to fill the hole.

Is Maserati for sale? Stellantis has denied it at least three times, but the rumors just keep popping up.

Reuters, citing two anonymous sources, reported that Stellantis secretly hired McKinsey in April 2025, nominally to assess the impact of US tariffs on Maserati and Alfa Romeo. But one of the sources said McKinsey was told to "consider all possibilities for the brand," sale included.

The Stellantis spokesperson's line: "Respectfully, Maserati is not for sale." They've said this at least three times now. Every time a new rumor surfaces, out it comes again.

Italian financial weekly Moneta reported in October 2025 that potential buyers from the UAE were in contact with Stellantis, interested in both Maserati and Alfa Romeo. Reportedly, Stellantis's condition was that both brands had to be sold as a package deal, along with the Cassino plant in Italy.

The board is bitterly split on this. One faction says Maserati is the group's only true luxury brand, and once you sell it, you never get it back. The other says the company flat-out doesn't have the resources to keep feeding it. In 2024, Maserati sold only 11,300 cars globally, a year-over-year plunge of over 50%, with an adjusted operating loss of $298 million. Its three top-selling models, the Ghibli, Quattroporte, and Levante, have all been axed, with replacements not coming until 2027 and 2028. Tavares publicly admitted during his time that Maserati was "losing money."

Maserati is just the most visible problem child out of 14 brands. Reuters, citing sources, reported that Filosa is running a "long-term viability assessment" across all 14, and shutting down underperformers has been put on the table. Chrysler is down to just two models in the US, the Pacifica and Voyager. Fiat and Alfa Romeo's combined US sales don't even match those of the widely despised electric Charger Daytona.

Wall Street's read on this writedown has split into two camps, and the gap between them is wide.

The bulls see this as a textbook "kitchen sink": new CEO dumps all the bad news at once, then marches forward with a clean slate. UBS analysts hold this view, arguing the new management's "decisive cleanup" makes the stock an attractive rebound play.

The bears point to some unsettling facts. First, just two months ago, Filosa was still assuring the market that 2025 performance targets were on track. Now he's saying the second-half net loss will be €19 to €21 billion. Evercore ISI analyst McNally said flatly that this was "far worse than expected." Second, the 2026 guidance is so vague it's practically content-free: "mid-single-digit revenue growth" and "low-single-digit margins." Third, that €6.5 billion in cash penalties is money that actually has to go out the door.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Tom Narayan wrote what I think is the single most accurate summary of the current picture: "Bulls on Stellantis will call this a 'kitchen sink' moment. We are still waiting for further evidence of an actual improvement in business fundamentals."

Here's a question worth sitting with: who gets to decide how fast a technology transition should move?

From 2020 to 2023, the answer seemed obvious: governments, CEOs, capital markets. Governments dangled subsidies and ICE bans. CEOs fell over each other announcing all-electric timelines. Capital markets slapped sky-high valuations on pure EV plays. In that atmosphere, anyone who questioned the all-electric path got stamped "conservative."

But consumers voted with their wallets. They did not buy BEVs on schedule. Especially not in the pickup and SUV segments, which happen to be Stellantis's and Ford's core profit pools. BEV performance in towing, payload, and extreme weather still wasn't there, and the price tags were too steep. Then the Trump administration axed the $7,500 federal tax credit and relaxed emission standards, handing automakers a reason to stop selling EVs at a loss just to stay in regulatory compliance. All these factors piled up, and the result was close to $60 billion in industry-wide losses.

Ford CEO Farley said something unusually honest in September 2025: killing the subsidies would "cut the US EV market in half." When he said it, he probably hadn't imagined he'd be announcing a $19.5 billion writedown three months later.

Toyota got laughed at for years through all of this. "Too conservative." "Refuses to embrace electrification." Looking back now, Toyota's stubborn commitment to hybrids led to record hybrid sales in 2025. Sometimes the least trendy choice turns out to be the right one.

But this good news is nowhere near enough to offset a $26 billion hit. Stellantis suspended its 2026 dividend and issued €5 billion in hybrid bonds to shore up the balance sheet. Since the 2021 merger, global sales have slid from 6.5 million to 5.7 million units, and US market share has dropped from 11.6% to 8%.

Whether this company can come back from this, it's too early to say. But the playbook of "scream your EV commitments to the heavens first, figure out the details later," after February 6, 2026, I doubt any investor is buying that anymore.