February 20, 2026: One of Europe’s flagship gigafactory developers is set to permanently drop plans for two new plants — blaming EU leaders’ faltering support for the battery sector amid intense Chinese competition.
Yann Vincent, CEO of the Stellantis-backed Automotive Cells Company (ACC), said on February 16 it would be “totally irresponsible” to go ahead with building factories in Kaiserslautern, Germany and Termoli, Italy.
Vincent’s statement said the projects faced “possible termination”. However, Italian trade union, UILM, said on February 7 workers had already been told work at both sites had been permanently shelved.
ACC had announced in 2024 it was pausing work to evaluate the viability of developing LFP technologies at the sites.
Now Vincent says ACC’s two customers, Stellantis and Mercedes, are suffering from the high level of uncertainty surrounding the market, which has been made unstable by fierce competition from China.
In rebuking EU leaders over investment policies to shore up the bloc’s nascent battery industry, Vincent added: “We have repeatedly said the European battery industry is at a turning point in its young history… and this is now the case.
“There is an urgent need for action to turn it into a massive financial instrument worth €750 billion-800 billion (around $1 trillion) per year.”
He bemoaned the lack of progress within the EU. One year after the European Commission unveiled its ‘competitive compass’ initiative*, aimed at reducing dependencies on raw materials for batteries and boosting investment in clean energy tech, this was “still only a framework for guidance”.
No one could doubt the inevitability of the ongoing shift towards EVs and their importance to supporting decarbonization. However, who will manufacture batteries for European cars is still a crucial question, Vincent said.
He noted that Asian players, particularly Chinese firms, “already supply 99% of the market — putting the strategic independence of European car manufacturers in the hands of battery makers such as BYD, CATL, South Korea’s LG and others.
“ACC’s 2,300 employees have been fighting every day for more than five years to show that alternatives exist,” Vincent said.
He revealed that the ramp-up of another ACC’s gigafactory, in Hauts-de-France, was taking longer, costing more than anticipated, and weakening the firm’s financial position.
“But we are too close to our goal to give up now. Several thousand Peugeot, Opel and DS vehicles (to name but a few brands) are already equipped with ACC batteries, which are unanimously recognised as being at the cutting edge of technology.
“Our production lines are currently producing twice as many modules as they were two months ago.
Our scrap rates, the lifeblood of this industry, are steadily decreasing thanks to the many actions we have taken and the internal and external resources we have mobilised.”
Meanwhile, ACC’s ‘upstream’ operation, made up of teams based in Bordeaux-Bruges and Nersac, France, is experiencing a decline in activity proportional to the delay in our portfolio of future products, he said.
Vincent’s criticism is the latest in a plethora of reports warning that the EU is doing too little and too late to underpin the bloc’s aspirations for a home-grown EV battery industry.
Last October, EU leaders were urged to take urgent action to support European battery manufacturers — after being warned the industry faced costs that are some 20% higher that Asian competitors.
Earlier this month, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) said lengthy and complex permitting was still a significant bottleneck, delaying the start of EU mining projects.
Most EU recycling targets “neither incentivise the recycling of individual materials nor encourage the uptake of recycled materials”, according to the ECA.
*The ‘competitive compass’ Vincent referred to in the wake of recommendations made by Mario Draghi, a former European Central Bank president, in his 73-page report ‘The future of European Competitiveness’, published in 2024.
Draghi said in the report the EU should develop an industrial action plan for the automotive sector. “In the short term, the main objective for the sector should be to avoid a radical delocalization of production away from the EU or the rapid takeover of EU plants and companies by state-subsidised foreign producers.”
