Renault's Luca de Meo calls for 'Airbus' to build EVs in Europe

GENEVA -- Europe’s automakers, facing a stiff challenge from Chinese automakers and hard questions about the affordability of electric vehicles, could work together to create an "Airbus” to develop and build accessible cars, Renault Group CEO Luca de Meo said.

“We need to be creative to find a solution,” de Meo told journalists Monday at the Geneva auto show, where the Renault brand launched the Renault 5 small EV, which will sell for about 25,000 euros in lower-range configuration. That price would undercut current small EVs on the market.

“Partners can share the investment and reduce the costs,” he added. The European consortium Airbus rivals Boeing as the largest airliner maker in the world. Its largest shareholders are the French, German and Spanish governments.

Renault is also planning to launch the next-generation Twingo minicar as an EV built in Europe that would sell for less than 20,000 euros. The group currently sells the Chinese-built Dacia Spring EV for that price, but it has lost a key subsidy in France. 

Renault is in early stage talks with Volkswagen Group to potentially share the Twingo’s platform, which will be a version of the AmpR Small architecture that underpins the Renault 5. It could use less-costly lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, for example, de Meo said.

The challenge, said de Meo, who is also president of ACEA, the European automakers’ lobbying group in Brussels, is to create a value chain in Europe that includes batteries, electric motors and electronics, much as China has done with government support. “The goal is to source everything in Europe at a competitive price,” he said.

De Meo said that Europe’s automakers have cooperated in the past on a number of projects, including a recent minicar shared by Toyota, Peugeot and Citroen. Another project in the 1980s involved the common “Type 4” platform that was shared by Alfa Romeo Fiat, Lancia and Saab.

He also said EU rules for small cars should be more flexible, for example to allow tiny Japanese “kei” cars in urban areas. Other options could included lowering the value-added tax on small EVs with batteries smaller than 30 kilowatt-hours, rather than offer a bonus, as France currently does, or giving such cars free parking in cities.

Renault’s Twingo project, announced last autumn with the creation of Ampere, Renault’s standalone EV business, will take two years to develop from “freeze of concept” — the final design — to start of production, de Meo said. That time frame has been cut from four years to three with the Renault 5, and now to two, he said, in order to compete with Chinese competitors.

“Speed is important against the Chinese,” he said. “We’re in an uncertain world. In the past, with internal-combustion cars, you could foresee what was coming.” 

Now, he said, “if you take four or five years to react, it’s too late.”