France owns stakes in both of the OEMs it is pressuring, but are they enough to outweigh the cost arithmetic of deeper Chinese ties? By Stewart Burnett
The French government is urging Stellantis and Renault to favour local parts suppliers and resist the pull of low-cost Chinese alternatives, Finance Minister Roland Lescure said in an interview published in La Tribune Dimanche on Sunday. “They must play their part on European preference, including in terms of purchases with their suppliers,” Lescure said. “Industrial sovereignty must be a collective battle.”
The statement arrives at a moment when both companies are moving in precisely the opposite direction, albeit through different mechanisms. Renault is pursuing what amounts to targeted component substitution: the upcoming Twingo E-Tech, developed in under 22 months at Renault’s Advanced China Development Center in Shanghai, sources its electric motor from Shanghai e-Drive rather than local option Valeo.
Valeo, a French supplier Renault had previously partnered with for next-generation motor development, reported a 3.6% year-over-year decline in revenue—to €5.12bn (US$5.96bn) —during the first quarter of 2026. Final assembly will be retained at the Cléon plant in Normandy with parts sourced from China, a concession clearly intended to manage political exposure rather than reflect any true industrial preference.
Stellantis’s dependence on China arguably goes a step further; instead of merely relying on China for components and research talent, it is building its future European models on the platform architecture of a Chinese automaker. Following several weeks of speculation, Stellantis confirmed that an upcoming battery-electric Opel SUV will be developed in close partnership with Leapmotor. Like Renault, it is targeting a development cycle of 24 months or less.
Leapmotor and Stellantis have been tightening their bonds for years, with the latter acquiring a 21% stake in the former late in 2023. Concurrent to this, the two launched a joint venture for global markets, Leapmotor International, in which Stellantis owns a controlling 51% stake. Alongside the Opel co-development news, the two announced that Leapmotor production will also being brought directly into Stellantis’s Spanish plants at Zaragoza and Villaverde, with the latter’s ownership potentially transferring to the joint venture entirely.
The reasons France is focusing specifically on these two companies, rather than the broader European field, are not arbitrary. The French state holds a 15% stake in Renault, giving it direct board-level standing in procurement decisions; its state investment vehicle Bpifrance also holds a position in Stellantis. Both companies have deep roots in the French industrial supply chain, and both are named explicitly in the Force Ouvrière union’s warnings about Chinese partnership risks to engineering jobs and local supplier networks. When Renault sources its motor stators from Shanghai e-Drive, the downstream effect on French tier-one suppliers is immediate and measurable.
Of course, France has not limited itself to public statements. Its electric vehicle (EV) eco-bonus scheme was redesigned specifically to disadvantage Chinese-sourced vehicles through lifecycle carbon scoring—a methodology that explicitly penalises coal-heavy Chinese manufacturing and long-distance shipping. Perhaps most critically, the Emmanuel Macron-led government is leading efforts to impose local content requirements for European manufacturing that would tie public procurement to high percentages of in-EU value creation. This could potentially prove difficult for a company like Stellantis, which is increasingly reliant on Chinese platforms to make its vehicles in European plants.
The difficulty is that neither company’s Chinese reliance is incidental; rather, it is load-bearing. Renault cannot hit a sub-€20,000 price point on the Twingo using either Europe’s expertise or its motor components. Nor can Stellantis achieve China speed or software development prowess using its own legacy engineering infrastructure. It could easily be argued that the only realistic way to produce low-cost EVs—the kind that will prove absolutely essential for meeting Europe’s 2035 internal combustion engine vehicle ban—is to lean on Chinese expertise and manufacturing to some degree or another.