RÜSSELSHEIM (dpa-AFX) – After a strong warning shot, the production quality in the German Opel plants has improved significantly. The boss of the Opel parent company Stellantis, Carlos Tavares, expressed this view in an interview with the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung”. Tavares himself had publicly denounced the insufficient product quality at Opel last spring. There was a reaction to that, he now told the “FAS”. “Our German colleagues accepted the challenge and delivered results in a short time.”
According to Tavares, the main focus last year was on the quality problems in the main plant in Rüsselsheim, which employs around 9,000 people. Among other things, the compact model Astra is assembled there. “Rüsselsheim is the plant that we looked at the most,” said Tavares. “It had the weakest rating of the three German factories and was in the bottom 25 percent of our factories worldwide.” The Opel factory in Hesse has now worked its way into the midfield in the group’s internal quality ranking.
The future of the three German Opel plants in Rüsselsheim, Eisenach and Kaiserslautern is “secure in the medium term,” said the Portuguese, who is recognized as a cost killer. However, the Stellantis boss calls for further cost reductions at Opel: “The costs in Germany must continue to be greatly improved. Germany is currently the most expensive place in the world to manufacture cars. These are facts,” he said. The former Peugeot parent PSA took over Opel in 2017 and brought the brand into the European-American Stellantis group in 2021.
The Stellantis boss again warned of growing competition from cheap electric vehicles from China. “I’m worried about importing Chinese cars to Europe – a market that’s completely open to Chinese manufacturers.” A sharp increase in imports is to be expected, which could put a lot of pressure on the European car industry./ceb/DP/nas
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