Italy's car rebound narrow as Cassino slides

Stellantis is on course to build about 450,000 vehicles in Italy in 2026, after output rose by 28% to 340,745 in the first nine months, according to the FIM-CISL union. The rebound is narrow: the hybrid Fiat 500 is heading for about 60,000 units against an initial target of 100,000, and output at Cassino has fallen by more than a third.

Passenger car production rose by 36.7% to 206,945 units, driven largely by the new Jeep Compass at Melfi and the Fiat Panda, which alone accounts for half of Italy’s entire car output. Commercial vehicle production was up 17.3% at 133,800 units, all of it from the Atessa plant, which now builds 39.3% of the country’s vehicles. In 2025, Stellantis built slightly fewer than 380,000 vehicles in Italy, including 213,706 cars, the weakest production year since 1954.

The Fiat 500 has been held back by weaker-than-expected demand and repeated stoppages caused by engine component shortages. Short-time working is due to return at Mirafiori later in October after an eight-month break, following late-September stoppages there and at Melfi over missing parts.

Ferdinando Uliano, general secretary of FIM-CISL, said: “Volumes continue to grow, but forecasts for 2026 are around 450,000 vehicles.” Cassino is the only Stellantis car plant in Italy still shrinking, down 37.1% on an already-poor 2025. Industry Minister Adolfo Urso has demanded a development plan for the plant with commitments on models and jobs. FIM-CISL will meet Stellantis on 15 October ahead of regional talks in Turin five days later. Employment across Stellantis’s Italian plants has fallen by around 1,000 in 2026.

Chinese brands took one in four hybrid sales and one in three plug-in hybrid sales across Europe in August. Leapmotor International, Stellantis’s joint venture, saw EU sales rise by 211% year-on-year in August, though that growth benefits Spain rather than Italian factories.

Production of the DS7 and Lancia Gamma is due to start in the final quarter of 2026, and Melfi aims to reach full capacity in 2027 once all its new lines and a new Alfa Romeo are running. FIM-CISL expects Italy to miss a half-million-vehicle target this year, and conditions are not in place for a return to the more than one million vehicles last produced in 2017.

BYD’s talks over Stellantis’s idle Grugliasco plant near Turin ended with the site declared “not for sale”, according to BYD’s European adviser Alfredo Altavilla. BYD has reportedly shifted its search for a second European plant to Spain and France. That leaves Italy’s car industry dependent on a single automaker running well below capacity and on a handful of models — the Panda, the Compass and the Atessa vans — demand for which it cannot guarantee.