Decision to build Renault 5 EV in France boosts French workers

PARIS -- The coming Renault 5 small full-electric car will be built at the automaker’s factory in Douai, northern France, as Renault seeks to maintain production levels at a cluster of factories in the economically depressed region.

It represents something of a homecoming for the 5, as the original model was built at Douai from 1972 to 1984. The decision to build the EV in Douai is a boost for workers at the factory, which once built nearly 500,000 vehicles a year but in 2019 produced fewer than 100,000.

The retro-styled Renault 5 hatchback, ordered by new CEO Luca de Meo, will be the first vehicle on the CMF-B EV platform, which has been adapted from the architecture used for small cars in the Renault-Nissan Alliance.

It will be the second EV model assigned to the Douai factory, after the production version of the Megane eVision concept, a compact car that will enter production by the start of 2022. That model is on the larger CMF-EV platform.

Renault Chairman Jean-Dominique Senard made the announcement this week that the R5, as it is known, will be built at Douai. He did not give any production targets.

“It’s a commitment,” he said Monday on the French news channel BFM-TV. “We intend to develop this ‘north pole’ (of factories), and it’s a question of making sure we fill these factories completely.”

Other factories involved in the effort are nearby Maubeuge, which builds commercial vans, and Ruitz, which builds transmissions for Renault’s E-Tech hybrid system.

Renault invested 1 billion euros in 2018 to prepare those sites and others in France to produce electric vehicles and components. Last year it hired Luciano Biondo, the director of Toyota’s Valenciennes factory in the region, to direct the three “north pole” factories. 

The Douai factory, with about 3,000 workers, now builds the Scenic/Grand Scenic compact minivan, the Espace midsize minivan and the Talisman midsize sedan – but all of those models are in shrinking segments and it is not clear whether they will be replaced. Espace production is scheduled to stop this year. 

Just 92,000 vehicles were produced there in 2019, including a little more than 8,000 Espaces -- far from the record of 469,510 in 2004.

Senard said Renault’s EV volumes in France would grow sharply in coming years. The automaker sold about 100,000 EVs in 2020, with about 90,000 of them the small Zoe model, built at Flins, near Paris. The remainder were small Kangoo vans, which are built at Maubeuge.

"We intend to produce in France almost 400,000 electric vehicles and make the ‘North Pole’ the most important European region for electric vehicles,” Senard told BFM, wihout giving a time frame for that volume. He noted that it was important to support French production. Late last year French unions objected to Renault's plan to import the Dacia Spring EV from China.

He said that one condition is a nearby battery cell factory “that can supply these factories at a reasonable cost.”

Renault currently sources most of its batteries from LG Chem in Poland, but executives have said they are open to participating in a Stellantis-Total joint venture called ACC that is planning two gigafactories, one in eastern France and one in Germany.

A report Thursday on the French business news site Les Echos, without naming sources, said that the tie up with Stellantis-Total was "at a standstill" and that Renault was in discussions with LG or a French startup, Verkor, to build a cell factory.