Fiat Chrysler Will Basically Fund Tesla’s Gigafactory 4
In a sense, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) will be funding Tesla’s Gigafactory 4 (GF4). This insight comes from Automotive News Europe. FCA could spend around $2 billion all the way through 2023 riding Tesla’s zero-emissions coattails.
FCA made a deal, which we reported back in April 2019, to pool its fleet with Tesla’s in order to comply with Europe’s stricter emissions rules. According to a U.S. investment bank, this is funding Tesla’s upcoming German factory. That $2 billion can be split into about $150–200 million per quarter and will give Tesla’s profit margins a nice cushion for 2020.
https://twitter.com/kimpaquette/status/1215632560350486528
In 2019, FCA’s CEO, Mike Manly, said that FCA will not have to pay fines for not complying with the tougher European CO2 regulations in 2019 and 2020. The reason is because of the credit deal with Tesla, along with FCA’s forthcoming plug-in hybrid versions of the Jeep Compass, Renegade, and Wrangler. There is also a new fully electric Fiat 500 coming. (The Fiat 500e has been sold in California for years. We reviewed it in 2016 and 2017.)
Some may think that more EVs and hybrids out there are bad for Tesla, but in reality, this is Tesla’s overall goal — to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles and clean energy. Elon Musk once noted that Tesla’s true competition isn’t the EVs coming onto the market, but the gas vehicles that are still being produced.
Our true competition is not the small trickle of non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2019
I believe that 2020 will be the decade of the EV, and this is all thanks to the push from Tesla and Elon Musk (and perhaps partly the mainstream media, which keeps putting Tesla in the news — whether good or bad). The more people focus on something, the larger that something becomes. With more people talking about Tesla, the more people buy a Tesla, and the more the costs come down (as we’ve seen with the Cybertruck).
It’s good to see FCA contributing to the cause, as Kim Paquette said in her tweet. They will end up contributing one way or another, and thus help Tesla achieve its mission, a great way to help lower the amount of CO2 in the air.
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