It was once Europe’s biggest car factory. Today it’s an icon of Europe’s deindustrialization

For much of its life, Fiat’s Mirafiori factory in Turin was the top car maker in Europe. The vast, Fascist-era industrial spread in Northwest Italy pumped out almost 30 million vehicles after it reopened just after the Second World War, turning Fiat into a global brand.

Today Mirafiori is the poster child for Italian – and European – deindustrialization. For Italy, it was a slow-burn crisis that suddenly accelerated in the spring, when Stellantis, Fiat’s parent since 2021, went from stock-market darling to dog at alarming speed.

Early this week, Stellantis ousted chief executive officer Carlos Tavares, leaving the company leaderless and the future of Mirafiori and some of the company’s other factories in Europe and North America in doubt, as the market share of its brands goes into reverse. Its global portfolio includes Jeep, Dodge, Citroën, Peugeot, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Maserati.

Stellantis shares have plunged by more than half since their 2024 peak in March. Production at the company’s Italian factories fell by a quarter in the first half of the year, according to Fim-Cisl union data. In November, the company said it would close its Vauxhall van factory in England. There will be more blood, especially since electric vehicle sales are in near free fall.

Mirafiori remains open, but its output has declined steadily in recent years. All car production was suspended this month, though the shutdown hardly came as a shock. The site was making only three slow-selling models: the Fiat 500e – the electric version of the iconic little 500 – and two low-volume Maserati sports cars.

In its heyday, Mirafiori pumped out a million vehicles a year and had 60,000 employees. They worked in a “city within a city,” as Stellantis’s communications team calls it. Today, the plant officially employs 13,000, though the figure includes 1,800 who are being paid to stay home after the 500e and Maserati lines went idle. They are to return to work when production of the 500e resumes after the new year – if it resumes.

Marco, a veteran Mirafiori engineer who would not provide his last name because he did not want to be seen as critical of his employer’s strategy, told The Globe and Mail before passing through the entrance gates Wednesday morning that the industrial site’s hollowed-out state has left him sad. “There is hardly anything left here,” he said. “More and more production is being moved to cheap locations overseas.” (Stellantis last year opened a factory in Algeria that will make six Fiat models.)

Not so many decades ago, Mirafiori represented the industrial might and engineering savvy of Italy, which was then (and remains) the second-biggest manufacturing power in Europe, after Germany. The site’s 1939 opening ceremony was attended by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, but mass production did not start until 1947, with the tiny Topolino, or Little Mouse. Over the years, Mirafiori made dozens of Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Maserati models.

The Mirafiori and Lingotto factories in Turin (the “t” in Fiat stands for Turin, or Torino in Italian) put tens of millions of Italians and other Europeans on the road. Lingotto, famous for the rooftop test track that appeared in the 1969 comedy caper The Italian Job, closed in 1982 and found a new life as a shopping arcade, hotel and convention centre, leaving Mirafiori as the last survivor of Fiat’s once-vast Turin empire.

The site is a self-contained marvel that would never be replicated today, even if the car markets were buoyant – they aren’t. It covers two million square metres (almost 500 acres) and includes 20 kilometres of rail lines, 11 kilometres of tunnels, a generating plant and a test track. The handsome, five-storey main office building, made of ivory-white limestone, lies empty, awaiting reincarnation as an ecology centre.

As late as 20 years ago, during the era of Sergio Marchionne, Fiat’s workaholic Italian-Canadian CEO, Mirafiori seemed to have a bright future. Mr. Marchionne took over the near-bankrupt Fiat in 2004 and went into overdrive to repair it.

He took a blowtorch to Fiat’s clapped-out car fleet. The company was saddled with 19 different “architectures,” or platforms, with few parts shared among models. The number of platforms was reduced to six by 2012. Car development times were cut by almost half. New models were rolled out, including the compact Grande Punto, the car that more than any other is credited with turning Fiat around, and the 500, an instant hit. Fiat’s Italian market share rose from 24 per cent to 33 per cent in five years.

In 2009, Mr. Marchionne bought a stake in Chrysler, mostly for the Jeep and Ram brands, and officially merged Fiat and Chrysler in 2014. His massive restructuring plan saw the seven Chrysler factories cut loose. The Mirafiori plant survived, partly because Mr. Marchionne feared fighting the powerful Italian unions – partly because Fiat sales volumes were back on the rise and non-Italian products, such as Jeeps, could be built there.

Mr. Marchionne died in 2018. Two years later, Fiat Chrysler agreed to merge with France’s PSA Group, the owner of Peugeot, to create the world’s fourth-largest automaker. Mirafiori by then was turning into an echo chamber but survived. Stellantis, the new parent company, called the factory a centre of “excellence” and “the birthplace of ingenious ideas and futuristic projects.” In 2020, it became apparent its future would rely on EVs – the Fiat 500e would be made there.

The 500e has not sold well on either side of the Atlantic. Only a few hundred were bought in the United States this year. With production suspended, Mirafiori is struggling to find a purpose. A state-of-the art production line with 850 workers that makes transmissions for electric and hybrid cars remains open. Engineering, design and project management work for a few brands, including Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Jeep, fills some space in the cavernous buildings.

But a factory site the size of a small city that makes no cars at the moment does not seem to have a bright future. Stellantis is not alone. EV sales, along with those of regular combustion engines, are sagging across Europe. Volkswagen plans to close three factories in Germany and force a 10-per-cent pay cut for the survivors. Ford is axing 4,000 European jobs.

Mr. Tavares, the ousted Stellantis CEO, mostly had a good run since his appointment in 2021. The share price soared after the pandemic. Aggressive cost-cutting and price increases propelled profit margins ever higher. But the cars’ high sticker prices eventually repelled buyers, putting the company into crisis mode by the early autumn. Stellantis’s market share plummeted. Today, in the crucial U.S. market, it’s about 8 per cent, down from 14 per cent in 2019, according to Citi analysts. As sluggish 500e sales show, the company’s EV strategy needs work.

This week, Stellantis chief financial officer Doug Ostermann hinted that any tariffs imposed by incoming U.S. president Donald Trump would not bode well for the non-American factories and that some production could be shifted to underutilized factories in the United States. At a Goldman Sachs conference, he said, “We have available capacity in the U.S. that will allow us to adjust. It’s not ideal for us, as it won’t be for other automakers.”

The Trump tariffs do not bode well for any foreign automaker that covets the U.S. market. Mirafiori is 85 years old. The factory is alive – barely. Its future depends on Stellantis getting its act together on EVs and gambling that Mirafiori can become more than a relic from a lost industrial era.