You’ve got to feel for poor Antonio Filosa (not for too long though, he’s on a really good salary) – he took over the top job at Stellantis in June 2025, fast forward six months and he’s having to give shareholders their medicine in the annual financial report. 

For it’s not looking brilliant at the French behemoth, friends. The company that controls Citroen, Peugeot, Vauxhall/Opel, Alfa Romeo, Maserati, DS, Jeep, Fiat, etc, etc (seriously, there are still more) has reported a €22bn (£19.2bn) loss on €154bn (£134.5bn) of turnover. 

Yikes, will he have to step down?​

Probably not – Filosa is only in the job because previous company boss Carlos Tavares had to resign over 2024’s poor performance and even that was a €5.5bn (£4.8bn) profit. He’s probably allowed one bad year before he’s #opentowork on his LinkedIn page. He might want to keep those protective goggles though – here he is pictured (right) touring a Stellantis factory with outspoken company chairman John Elkann. 

Just last week a spokesperson for Stellantis in the UK denied that the company was shifting back to combustion engined powertrains because of poor EV performance, but now the big boss has said that’s exactly what he’s planning to do. 

Filosa is blaming the poor performance across the board on sluggish EV sales. “Our 2025 full year results reflect the cost of over-estimating 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,” he said in the company’s report. 

So has Stellantis actually lost €22bn? 

Well, no. Losses were still bad – almost €1bn in actual cash monies – but what the company has done is decide to take all of the financial hits at once to try and set itself up for the future. 

Part of the loss is cancelled future product lines (cars that were well on the way to production but won’t now see the light of day), reworking of current electric products to take a more diverse range of powertrains to maximise commercial attractively (trying to squeeze petrol and hybrid engines back into cars that weren’t designed to take them) and a writing off of investments in platforms and other areas of research that were started with an expectation that they would bring in lots of money. 

Are EVs not as popular as people thought? 

Hmm. It's probably more along the lines of ‘Stellantis EVs are not as popular as Stellantis thought they’d be’. Plenty of other carmakers are building very nice little electric cars and selling plenty of them, yet it's very hard to think of a Stellantis electric vehicle that's really captured the collective imagination. 

The issue for Stellantis is that Carlos Tavares put together this huge company to try and take on the likes of Volkswagen and Toyota, and thought that the answer to selling lots of cars and making lots of money would be for all the different manufacturers to share the same engineering underneath. 

As Volkswagen learned many years ago, the danger is what then happens is all the cars across the board look and drive the same as each other – there’s minimal opportunity for brands to differentiate and all the personality is squeezed out.

Are we all doomed? 

There seems to be some light at the end of the not-too-long tunnel – cars like the Citroen e-C5 Aircross above are both practical and good value. 

And when we were at the Brussels motor show recently the message across the Stellantis brands was that there was a lot of work going on behind the scenes to update the company’s platforms and give individual manufacturers a bit more flexibility to make their cars different. 

How long before any of that bears fruit? Who knows – maybe we’ll start to see some interesting things happening at the Paris motor in October. Good luck to Antonio.