Stellantis announces €15,000 EV to be built in Italy with Chinese tech
Stellantis says its new "E-Car" will roll off the Pomigliano line from 2028 at around €15,000 - using battery technology developed with "selected partners," chief among them its 21%-owned Chinese affiliate Leapmotor.
Stellantis has confirmed plans to build a sub-€15,000 electric car at its Pomigliano plant near Naples from 2028, the company announced on 19 May, with battery technology developed jointly with "selected partners" - chief among them Leapmotor, the Chinese EV maker in which Stellantis took a 21% stake in October 2023. CEO Antonio Filosa argued that the absence of cars below €15,000 was "one of the major causes" of the European auto industry's troubles.
In UK money, €15,000 is roughly £12,800 at current rates. That is cheaper than the full-price version of every battery electric car currently on sale in Britain - though only just cheaper than the Dacia Spring, which has been pulled down to £12,240 on the back of a £3,750 manufacturer-funded grant from Dacia itself. Compared with Stellantis's own Citroën ë-C3 (from around £22,000, or £18,495 in shorter-range Urban trim with the UK Electric Car Grant) and the newly crowned UK Car of the Year - the Renault 5 E-Tech, from £22,995 - the E-Car would land thousands of pounds cheaper. It would also undercut the BYD Dolphin Surf, the European-badged BYD Seagull that BYD sells in Germany from €22,990.
Pomigliano, 2028 - and a platform for multiple brands
Beyond Filosa's price target, detail is sparse. Stellantis did not confirm which of its nameplates the E-Car will carry, indicating only that the platform will spawn variants for "several brands" - which, given the affordable end of the group's portfolio, points at Fiat, Citroën and possibly Opel/Vauxhall. Battery capacity, range, charging speed and right-hand-drive availability for the UK are all unstated.
The plant near Naples currently produces the Fiat Panda and the Alfa Romeo Tonale, and is - somewhat astonishingly - the most productive Stellantis factory in Italy. Stellantis's Italian production fell 37% in 2024 to its lowest level since 1956, then a further 20% in 2025; almost half of the company's Italian workforce is currently on short-time working arrangements, and the Italian government has been publicly pressuring Stellantis for the better part of a year to commit production to its domestic plants. Pomigliano gets it the cleanest possible headline.
The Stellantis-Leapmotor partnership in 2026
Stellantis bought into Leapmotor in October 2023 for €1.5 billion and set up a joint venture, Leapmotor International, with exclusive rights to sell Leapmotor cars outside China. That arrangement already produces the Leapmotor T03 city car, a rebadged Chinese model assembled at Stellantis's Tychy plant in Poland. On 8 May this year - eleven days before the E-Car announcement - the partnership expanded again, with Leapmotor production confirmed for Stellantis sites in Zaragoza and Madrid.
The E-Car will be assembled in Italy, but the foundational engineering work appears to come from Leapmotor's Chinese operation. Italy supplies the factory, the workers and a European supply chain story to put on a press slide. That preserves Italian jobs and sidesteps the additional 17-35.3% EU tariffs imposed on Chinese-made EVs in October 2024. It also gives the lie to the idea, much repeated in 2023 and 2024, that European OEMs would respond to the Chinese EV threat by building cheaper European cars. The response, in practice, is to build Chinese cars in European factories.
Filosa, who took over from Carlos Tavares last June, has notably stopped repeating his predecessor's warnings about the existential Chinese threat. Tavares spent two years arguing that European OEMs needed to match Chinese cost structures or be killed by them. The Leapmotor partnership is, in effect, the matching being done for him.
What the EU's new M1E rules mean
The 2028 launch date also lines up with a Brussels policy change. In December 2025 the European Commission proposed a new vehicle category, M1E, for EU-built battery electric cars under 4.2 metres long. Once approved (expected mid-2026, into force from 2027), an M1E-certified car would count as 1.3 vehicles against a manufacturer's CO2 compliance target between 2030 and 2034. For an automaker with a fleet still leaning heavily on Fiat 500s and Jeep Avengers, the maths is hard to ignore - and a 4.2 m sub-€15,000 city car built in Pomigliano fits the M1E template exactly.
The competition for that slot is already crowded. Volkswagen's ID.2 lands this year at around €25,000, with the smaller ID.1 targeting around €20,000 from 2027. Renault has the 5 in market now and a successor to the Twingo on the way. Dacia has the Spring. BYD has the Dolphin Surf, and from 2026 will be building it at its new plant in Hungary, sidestepping the same EU tariffs Stellantis is leaning on. The Stellantis E-Car arrives a clear two years after Volkswagen's ID.1 and several years after the established Chinese small-EV players have settled in.
If the €15,000 figure holds, this is the affordable European EV the market has been asking for since 2023. The catch is that the easiest way to build it turned out to be in partnership with the country Europe spent the last two years trying to keep out.
