Workers Walor factory in eastern plants that make auto parts worry about the shift to electric vehicles - FRANCOIS NASCIMBENI / AFP
PARIS: As France faces a 2035 deadline to phase out new combustion engine cars, workers in the industry worry their days might be numbered too.
While there is plenty of optimism in certain regions of France, in particular in the north of the country where a “Battery Valley” is emerging, workers at parts suppliers elsewhere are pessimistic.
With the sale of new cars with petrol and diesel engines allowed for only the next decade in Europe, the industry that employs 200,000 people in France faces a forced march to change.
“The transition (to electric vehicles or EVs), it could have been done when Walor bought us but they didn’t invest,” said Severine Person, a quality control expert at the company’s facility in the town of Vouziers in France’s north-eastern Ardennes region.
Walor bought the facility in 2018. Its production of connecting rods for tractors and trucks is not threatened by the shift to EVs, but demand for transmission differential housings and engine manifolds is likely to see big changes.
Walor was bought out last year by a German fund that specialises in turning around struggling firms and is looking to sell the site in Vouziers and another nearby.
“Before, Citroen would distribute work to everyone in the Ardennes. They didn’t go to the other side of the world to get parts,” said Bruno Bodson, a shop steward with the CFDT trade union.
Person and her colleagues are resigned to the factory’s likely closure given its shrinking order book. But the mood is different in the north of the country where a number of battery “gigafactories” are being built, including that of the Automotive Cells Company (ACC) in Douvrin.
The joint venture includes automakers Stellantis and Mercedes along with French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies. ACC built its massive battery plant on the site of a factory that makes engines for Stellantis, whose cars include French brands Citroen and Peugeot. — AFP
