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Automotive Industry
Stellantis aims to start producing a mild hybrid version of its Fiat 500e battery-electric city car in November.
The hybrid minicar will be built at the Mirafiori plant in Turin and is meant to revitalize the Fiat brand in Europe as well as to boost flagging production levels in Italy.
Assembly of the first pre-production units has already begun in Mirafiori, Fiat said, calling it “a crucial step in the model’s industrialization process.”
Production is on track to begin by the end of the year, with November as the target month, Fiat said in a news release.
The 500e is currently available only as a full-electric model. Converting a car designed to be electric-only to a hybrid internal combustion car is highly unusual but it gives Fiat an ICE version of the 500 after Fiat stopped production of the original 500 gasoline model in June 2024 because it had not been updated to meet new European safety regulations.
Adding a mild hybrid version of the 500e to Mirafiori will also help to ease unions’ fears about declining volumes of the 500e, as well as help satisfy the Italian government’s goal of maintaining the country’s auto production at no less than one million per year.
Stellantis last year saw its Italian car production slide to the lowest level in almost 70 years. The company presented a plan in December to revitalize its Italian output but warned that production numbers were set to grow only from 2026.
Fiat sold 4,288 units of the 500e in Europe in the first quarter, down from 9,308 in the same period last year, according to Dataforce market researchers. European sales of the gasoline 500, which was built in Tychy, Poland, plunged to 2,698 in the quarter from 25,836 year-on-year as Fiat cleared stocks.
In its last full year of European sales, 2023, Fiat sold 104,600 units of the 500 ICE model, Dataforce figures show.
The 500 ICE is still built in Algeria for North African markets.