Punchy CEO soundbites, important new concepts and yet more new Chinese brands: Paris 2024 had it all
This year’s Paris motor show was a significant upgrade on the rather sombre 2022 running of the event, with more brands, models and executives in attendance. Here’s how our editor filled his day.
7:35am
Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares’s badge gets him into places mere mortals can’t go. He was the first person in the motor show this morning, and his first stop was the BYD stand, where he was spying the firm’s range-extender hybrid drivetrain in the Seal U DM-i.
8:45am
Another motor show, another new Chinese brand to fire into Google on first sighting. Aito is backed by telecoms giant Huawei and has the typical calming, inoffensive, neutral branding that many Chinese car makers have adopted and models that look even more homogenised than the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. Writing this at the end of the day, I’d already had to revisit Google to remind myself of its presence at the show…
9:00am
Speaking of Tesla, it made a surprise appearance at Paris in what could be described as the ‘Chinese hall’, where most of China’s car makers had been sited. Yet the Tesla stand wasn’t a stand. In fact, it wasn’t even a defined area surrounded by any kind of barrier or even a carpet. It was just a series of models squeezed into some nominal square footage. Yet I’d bet that Cybertruck draws one of the biggest crowds of all on the public days. The car is the star, after all.
9:45am
Dacia CEO Denis Le Vot presents the new Dacia Bigster, the Romanian firm’s first foray out of the B-segment and into the C-segment. UK boss Luke Broad tells me it’s already had two times the amount of interest registered in it than the most recent Duster in the same timeframe, and some 60% of those who’ve done so are new to the brand. Success surely beckons.
10:15am
Luca de Meo gets all the headlines running the Renault Group, yet Fabrice Cambolive is the man running the Renault brand every day. He’s buoyed by the unveiling a few moments earlier of the new Renault 4 and dismisses the suggestion that its revival so soon after the 5 has Renault “plunging into retro mode”. Instead, Renault is using the revival of its icons to “integrate our history and to make the next breakthrough in the future” with EV technology, he said, a reference to the original 4 and the 5 “each representing a kind of breakthrough in society” in their own times.
11:00am
SMMT boss Mike Hawes is an interested attendee at Paris, fresh from spending much of this year watching the UK industry battle towards complying with the ZEV mandate and its requirement for 22% of new car sales to be EVs. The EU is set to introduce a similar scheme next year, but much like the UK a year ago, the detail has still yet to be finalised, much to the malign of European industry bosses. Hawes says that in trying to comply with the mandate without what he believes are much-needed subsidies to boost private demand, car makers have spent a collective £2 billion themselves to date subsidising EV sales themselves through discount, at an average of £6000 per car. All this does is write down residual values, thus causing more harm to the EVs car makers are obliged to sell. No wonder Hawes is calling for a review of the scheme.
11:45am
Martin Sander made a surprise switch from being the figurehead of Ford‘s EV transition in Europe to leading Volkswagen‘s sales and marketing efforts, and Paris is his own debut in that role. I pledge not to ask for once if the Fiesta is going to make a comeback, yet after an interesting state-of-the-nation on VW (the convergence of the design and potentially the naming of its ICE and EV models is the main takeaway), I tell him how I found the Ford Explorer to drive. Given its VW underpinnings, he has more than a vested interest anyway.
13:10pm
Popcorn at the ready: it’s Carlos time. Tavares’s meeting with Car of the Year jurors is always box-office, and he doesn’t disappoint, talking openly about why he had to fire Maserati’s CEO last week, why he’s dropped his battle with politicians in pursuit of a better planet and, most ominously, an imminent “correction” to Stellantis’s UK operations in response to the ZEV mandate and its damage to profitability. I fear the next time we meet may be at a short-notice press conference at either Ellesmere Port or Luton.
14:00pm
“You always ask me this question”, smiles Linda Jackson as I check in for the umpteenth time on whether or not Peugeot‘s Le Mans and motorsport involvement will ever translate to the road-car side of things. “I always would love to be able to reproduce a 205 GTi or whatever it may be,” says the Peugeot CEO. “My focus is on electric vehicles and making sure I launch those. But who knows? One of these days, you’ll get a good answer.”
14:30pm
A meeting with just-departed Alfa Romeo CEO Jean-Philippe Imparato is delayed while he deals with a surprise visit from Stellantis chairman John Elkann. Elkann (also chairman of Ferrari) is rarely seen at industry events. Indeed, the last time I saw him in person was at the unveiling of the Alfa Romeo Giulia back in 2015.
15:10pm
It’s rare to get near a car company executive for at least their first 100 days in their tenure, so it felt a coup to grab new Maserati and Alfa Romeo CEO Santo Ficili for a chat on his second working day in the job. Unlike ex-plimsoll executive Davide Grasso, whom Tavares relieved of his duties last week, Ficili is clearly a car lover and a Maserati nut, telling me twice that he’s “in love with the brand”. He says he’s not alone in that and that “people power” will help the brand “build again”. As my colleague Steve Cropley always says, great people make great cars, and on first impressions, Maserati seems to be in safe hands.
15:30pm
Many stands are in lockdown, and it’s all due to Emmanuel Macron’s inability to keep to schedule. The presence of the French president is felt everywhere at the show, not necessarily where he is but where he’s going to be, with large swathes of the venue cordoned off at short notice. Your correspondent never got near enough to ask the Renault shareholder what he thought of the new 4.
17:00pm
Leapmotor was perhaps the most talked-about brand at the Paris show. Stellantis acquired a majority stake in the brand’s export business, as part of an ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ strategy on dealing with competition from Chinese EV makers. The UK boss is Damien Dally (a role he splits “70/70” with one at Fiat), and he told me 300 Leapmotors would be in the UK by December for a soft launch across 45-50 dealers in the Stellantis network, with space to incrementally grow and give the T03 and C10 the 100sqm of showroom space they need. The pricing of the C10 is unashamedly almost identical to the BYD Atto 3 in the class below, with the C10 winning not only on space but also spec.
18:15pm
Imparato was promoted from his position as Alfa Romeo CEO to run Stellantis’s European operations last week, but at present has no idea how many cars he can sell of what type, because he’s caught up in the EU’s own ZEV mandate inertia. He’s on safer ground talking about Alfa, where he’s proud to have been a CEO who didn’t overpromise and underdeliver, instead returning the company to profitability while “not caring about volume” as a guy “not there to push metal”. His successor, Santo Ficili, has already told me how much he loves Alfa as well as Maserati, and his peers speak so highly of him that I feel the Alfa revival should continue.
