Sunday 3 December, in the institutional meeting with the Premier Giorgia Meloni, the Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has announced the launch next spring of Electric Fiat Panda at the Kragujevac plant.
The mystery of the small electric car which was assigned to Serbia in the spring of 2022 after the meeting in Belgrade with the CEO of Stellantis, has therefore been revealed. Carlos Tavares, with President Vucic himself. The Serbian plant is one of the three historical settlements of the "Iron Curtain" where Fiat cars were produced.
Fiat in Eastern Europe, a long-standing bond and the Marchionne effect
Fiat was the only Western automaker that stipulated productive collaboration agreements, during the "cold war”, with “beyond the Curtain” countries such as Soviet Union for the production of the Fiat 124 in Togliatti, La Poland for the Fiat 126 in Bielsko Biala, and the Jugoslavia with the Fiat 600 and then the Yugo derived from the Fiat 127.
It was stipulated precisely with Yugoslavia in 1952 the first agreement, promoters were Prof. Valletta, president of Fiat, and Marshal Tito, President of Yugoslavia, for the establishment of a state company, Zastava, in whose factory in Kragujevac, 70 km from Belgrade, Fiat cars would be assembled.
For a tragic fate in 1999, during the NATO war against Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia the factory was heavily bombed by Tornadoes, including Italian ones, causing dozens of deaths among workers and the total suspension of car production.
In implementation of its internalization plan, Sergio Marchionne in 2008 he decided to have Fiat take over the damaged factory by signing a joint venture with the Serbian state.
With a pilot plant investment of over 700 million euros, in acquiring 67% of the former state-owned Zastava, renaming it Fiat Srbija, Fiat proceeded with the complete restructuring and modernization of the plant, where starting from 2012 it was produce the Fiat500L.
A detail: the Fiat men who arrived in Kragujevac, after years, still found technicians and workers from the "old guard" who spoke Italian and remembered when, almost thirty years earlier, they had been in Turin at the Fiat Student School before returning to work at Zastava.
Stellantis and the electric Panda in Serbia
The joint venture continues today the largest foreign industrial investment in Serbia and, in past years, it was also the country's largest exporter, when production of the Fiat 500L was at full capacity on three daily shifts for six days a week, with a annual production of approximately 100.000 cars.
In May 2022 Stellantis, the automotive group, born from the merger of FCA and PSA, announced the discontinuation of the 500L in the summer and the conversion of the plant to the production of a new electric car.
The announcement made on Sunday by the Serbian President, and not denied by Stellantis, has also shocked the Italian union which, starting from the already scheduled meeting on 6 December at the ministerial level with Stellantis, intends to put priority over Pomigliano, where the Panda is now produced, to obtain all the guarantees of safeguarding national production and employment levels.
In Pomigliano today the AlfaRomeo Tonale and its twin Dodge Hornet are produced on one line, while the Endothermic panda, which could continue to be produced at least until 2026 - 2027, benefiting from the euro 7 postponement.
These productions have allowed the elimination of the redundancy fund and the sending of over a thousand workers on missions from other factories.
Moreover, in a hypothesis of bi-allocation of the production of the electric Panda in the Serbian and in an Italian plant, it would be more plausible, to streamline production costs, to assign it to the Mirafiori on the electric 500 line, rather than on the current Panda line where it would be largely disused.
A new model could go to Pomigliano according to the announced medium-high range productions that the Italian factories would receive.
The automotive discussion table
We will be able to begin to understand something on Wednesday 6 December when a discussion table on the automotive sector which the Ministry of Business and Made in Italy established with Stellantis and in which Regions, trade unions and Anfia (National Automotive Supply Chain Association) will also participate.
The objective of the table is to identify the appropriate instrumentation to allow Stellantis to bring its production in Italy to one million cars against less than five hundred thousand in 2022.
In almost thirty years we have gone from being one of the leading European motor vehicle producing nations, with around two million, on a par with Germany and France and ahead of the United Kingdom, to being in the last positions behind Slovakia, which produces one million a year, and on a par with Romania.
