Six months ago, when we first reported on Stellantis shuttering factories to dodge EU emission fines, the company’s Europe chief called electrification targets “unreachable.” On Friday morning, the bill for that failed strategy arrived: €22.2 billion ($26 billion) in charges, a suspended dividend, and a 28% stock crash that wiped out billions in market value before lunch.

The writedown is the largest single EV-related charge in automotive history. Combined with Ford’s $19.5 billion writedown in December and GM’s $7.6 billion in charges announced last month, Detroit’s Big Three have now absorbed roughly $53 billion in losses from electric vehicle bets that collapsed when government subsidies disappeared.

The fact: Stellantis announced €22.2 billion ($26 billion) in charges on Friday, with €14.7 billion ($17.4 billion) tied directly to scrapping EV product plans and writing down battery-electric platforms.
The buried number: Stellantis will pay €6.5 billion in cash over the next four years to unwind these EV commitments. That is real money walking out the door, not just an accounting exercise.
The buyer impact: The company canceled the fully electric Ram 1500, is pivoting to range-extended and hybrid powertrains, and brought back the HEMI V-8 for the Ram 1500. If you were waiting on an all-electric Jeep or Ram, that timeline just got a lot longer.

Stellantis CEO Admits the Company “Over-Estimated the Pace of the Energy Transition”

Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa used Friday’s earnings call to pin the blame squarely on the company’s previous all-electric strategy, calling the charges “largely the cost of over-estimating the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from many car buyers’ real-world needs, means and desires.” The company’s press release went further, stating the shift to EVs “needs to be governed by demand rather than command.”

That phrase reads like it was pulled from an EVXL editorial. We have spent the better part of two years arguing that regulatory mandates were forcing automakers into EV investments that actual consumer demand could not support. Filosa just confirmed it from the C-suite.

The breakdown of the €22.2 billion charge tells the story clearly. The largest portion, €14.7 billion, covers write-offs on canceled EV products (€2.9 billion), impairments on battery-electric platforms (€6 billion), and projected cash payments tied to abandoned and downsized EV programs (€5.8 billion). Another €2.1 billion goes to “resizing the EV supply chain,” which is corporate language for unwinding battery manufacturing contracts the company no longer needs. The remaining €5.4 billion covers warranty cost increases from quality failures under previous management and European workforce restructuring.

Stellantis also sold its 49% stake in NextStar Energy, the battery joint venture with LG Energy Solution in Canada. That deal, announced the same morning, is another piece of the EV retreat.

The $53 Billion Scorecard: How All Three Detroit Automakers Retreated in Four Months

Stellantis is the third and most expensive domino. Between October 2025 and today, every major Detroit automaker has recorded massive charges to abandon or scale back electric vehicle strategies built on government subsidies and regulatory mandates that no longer exist. The combined damage: approximately $53 billion in writedowns, impairments, and restructuring charges.

Ford moved first. On December 15, the company announced $19.5 billion in EV-related charges, killed the all-electric F-150 Lightning, scrapped a planned electric truck called the T3, and dissolved its $6 billion battery joint venture with SK Group in Kentucky. CEO Jim Farley admitted that large EVs would never make money for Ford. The company converted its Tennessee EV factory to build gas-powered trucks. Ford’s Model E division had already lost over $13 billion in less than three years before the writedown.

The Lightning’s death was slow and public. We tracked it from the first Wall Street Journal report on cancellation discussions in November through Ford’s refusal to provide any production restart timeline. When aluminum ran short after a supplier fire, Ford immediately prioritized gas-powered F-150 production. That decision told you everything about where management saw sustainable profits.

General Motors followed in January with $7.6 billion in charges, including $6 billion for its money-losing Ultium EV platform and $1.1 billion tied to its China business. As we reported when Chinese brands captured nearly two-thirds of China’s passenger car market, GM’s retreat from China was not a strategic pivot. It was a forced exit from a market where domestic competitors build better EVs for half the price.

Now Stellantis takes the biggest hit of all. The €22.2 billion charge actually exceeds the company’s entire current market capitalization. Investors are valuing Stellantis at less than the cost of its EV mistakes.

The September 30 Tax Credit Cliff Triggered the Collapse

Every one of these writedowns traces back to the same inflection point: the September 30, 2025 expiration of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit and the $4,000 used EV credit. Congress passed the legislation in July 2025. The market response was immediate and brutal. EV sales cratered 24% in October compared to September. Q4 2025 EV sales collapsed 36% year-over-year.

The Trump administration’s rollback of Biden-era emission rules removed the regulatory stick at the same time the subsidy carrot disappeared. Automakers that had built their entire EV strategies around government mandates and taxpayer incentives suddenly had neither. The $28 billion Battery Belt we documented in November, the string of taxpayer-funded battery plants across the Midwest, collapsed into stalled construction sites and mass layoffs within weeks of the credit expiration.

Stellantis CEO Filosa referenced this directly in the press release, noting that charges were tied to “re-aligning product plans with customer preferences and new emission regulations in the US.” Translation: the regulations that justified the investment no longer exist, and customer demand without subsidies cannot support the products.

Stellantis Stock Hits Six-Year Low as Investors Flee

Stellantis shares fell as much as 28% on Friday, dropping to around $7 on the NYSE and hitting the stock’s lowest level since 2020. The selloff was harsher than what Ford or GM experienced after their respective announcements, and analysts pointed to several reasons why.

The dividend suspension hit hardest. Ford and GM maintained their shareholder returns. Stellantis cut its entirely, removing what income-focused investors considered a safety net at a beaten-down valuation. The company also authorized €5 billion in hybrid bond issuance to shore up its balance sheet, signaling that management views the financial situation as serious enough to require new debt.

Stellantis also has problems that extend beyond the EV writedown. Jeep inventory sat at a 90-day supply at year-end 2025, nearly double the healthy industry average. Global sales under former CEO Carlos Tavares fell 12.3% from 6.5 million units in 2021 to 5.7 million in 2024. U.S. market share dropped from 11.6% to 8% over the same period. The company has fallen from fourth to sixth in U.S. sales rankings.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Tom Narayan put it bluntly in a Friday note:

“While charges were expected, the amount comes in above Ford ($19.5B) and GM ($7.6B). We continue to believe STLAM is a show-me-story. In the US, the company has lost substantial market share given high pricing and a perceived lack of product investment.”

The EU’s 2035 Ban Is Already Crumbling

Stellantis’s retreat is not only an American story. The European side of the equation is deteriorating just as fast. The European Union’s planned 2035 ban on new combustion engine vehicles has been watered down to allow 10% of new cars sold after 2035 to remain plug-in hybrids or ICE vehicles. That carve-out, announced in December, came after intense lobbying from automakers including Stellantis.

We covered this pressure campaign extensively. France demanded EU “flexibility” in October as Stellantis shuttered six plants across Europe and 350,000 automotive jobs hung in the balance. Italian production under Stellantis hit its lowest level in nearly 70 years. The company’s stock had already crashed from €27 in April 2024 to €8.50 by September 2025 before Friday’s additional 28% decline.

European appetite for EVs has been weaker than automakers expected. Charging infrastructure remains inconsistent across the continent. Stellantis is responding by pivoting hard to hybrids and advanced ICE vehicles, launching the hybrid Fiat 500 and bringing back combustion powertrains across its European lineup.

EVXL’s Take

This is the third time in four months I’ve written a variation of the same article. Ford, $19.5 billion. GM, $7.6 billion. Now Stellantis, $26 billion. The combined $53 billion in Detroit writedowns is the most expensive admission of strategic failure in automotive history. Every dollar traces back to the same miscalculation: building an industry on government mandates rather than consumer demand.

What makes Stellantis’s situation worse than Ford or GM is the lack of a profitable fallback. Ford has its Pro commercial division generating nearly $2 billion per quarter. GM has strong truck and SUV margins and pricing discipline. Stellantis has a 90-day Jeep inventory glut, a quality crisis inherited from the Tavares era, and no dividend to keep investors patient during the turnaround.

Filosa’s “demand rather than command” line is correct. It is also years too late. We wrote in November that the Q3 2025 EV sales surge masked a manufacturing collapse, that companies watched Americans panic-buy EVs before the credit expired and responded by cutting factory investments 30%. They knew those sales were artificial. The October collapse proved it.

Meanwhile, all three Detroit automakers combined hold less than 5% of the global EV market. BYD, Geely, and Tesla together control nearly 40%. The retreat from EVs does not solve the competitive problem. It just delays the reckoning with Chinese manufacturers who built affordable EVs without subsidy dependence.

My prediction: Stellantis will not return to profitability in 2026 despite Filosa’s assurances on Friday’s call. The company’s 2026 guidance of “low-single-digit” operating margin improvement is already below analyst consensus of €6.2 billion in adjusted operating income. With €6.5 billion in cash payments still ahead, a product lineup that needs years of work, and no dividend to attract new investors, STLA stock stays below $10 through Q3 2026. The “Freedom of Choice” strategy is the right direction, but the financial hole is too deep to climb out of in twelve months.

Editorial Note: AI tools were used to assist with research and archive retrieval for this article. All reporting, analysis, and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.