Stellantis Wants to Rebuild Trust Lost Under Carlos Tavares' Reign, CFO Says

Stellantis’ former CEO, Carlos Tavares, left the company over his views of what the automaker group should be doing in the near term to turn around a dismal year.

That’s the view of the group’s chief financial officer during a fireside chat as part of Goldman Sachs’ 16^th Annual Industrials & Autos Week.

Doug Osterman, whom Tavares had appointed to the role after heading up the automaker’s Chinese operations this autumn, says there was “divergence” between the board and Tavares over what was needed in the short term to return the group to the sort of profits enjoyed in 2023.

His comments suggest Tavares’ approach would have adopted a far more aggressive stance in terms of how the group would handle issues such as the ongoing labor union disagreements in the U.S. and government criticism over its production strategy primarily in Italy.

He says: “As far as I perceived it, there were increasing divergence on two topics. First, there were disagreements on what the priorities should be during the remaining time of his tenure, which would have been about 15-16 months. Most of these seem to be tactical issues and what action should be taken in the near term.

“The second issue was with how we should react with our key stakeholders by which I mean our dealers, our suppliers, our unions, the governments in all of the regions in which we operate. Those are areas where clearly we need to build back trust. I think there is a strong desire among the senior management to really work on that.”

However, he dismisses any real differences over long-term strategies built on the plan to reduce the number of vehicle platforms to just four and enable all of them to take multi-energy powertrains to meet consumer demand.

Osterman says this strategy should give the group the flexibility to respond to issues such as the current slowing BEV demand by consumers who are turning to hybrid and plug-in hybrid powertrains.

He also said the group are successfully tackling bloated U.S. inventories and are confident of a healthy start to 2025. Osterman adds: “That should give us a lot of confidence to be able to launch into 2025 in a much more healthy way.”