There is a certain poetry in the situation Europe’s automotive industry now finds itself in. Brussels spent 2024 constructing an elaborate tariff regime — provisional duties of between 17 and 35 percent on Chinese-made EVs — specifically designed to slow BYD’s advance into the European market. It is now May 2026, and BYD’s executive vice-president is sitting at the Financial Times Future of the Car conference in London, calmly announcing that the company is in talks to take over idle European factories.
BYD is negotiating with Stellantis and other European carmakers about taking over underutilised factories across the continent, according to Stella Li, BYD’s executive vice-president for the Americas and Europe. “We are talking to not only Stellantis, we’re talking to other companies too,” Li said. She added, with admirable simplicity, that BYD is “looking for any available plant in Europe, hoping to utilise spare capacity.” One imagines this is not quite the sentence the architects of the EU tariff regime were expecting to read in 2026.
The economics are, as ever, the engine of the story. Stellantis carries roughly 30 percent excess production capacity across its European plant network. Plants in Mirafiori and Pomigliano in Italy, Eisenach in Germany, and Hordain in France have been operating well below break-even. An empty factory costs money whether it builds cars or not. BYD’s strategy of taking over existing facilities rather than building from scratch would let it bypass the EU’s provisional EV tariffs by producing inside the bloc — while simultaneously solving Stellantis’s utilisation problem. For BYD, it is years of infrastructure investment compressed into a single negotiation. For Stellantis, it is the least bad option available.
BYD is not alone in reading this opportunity. Geely is said to be in discussions to acquire Ford’s assembly plant in Spain for its European EV expansion. Leapmotor — in which Stellantis holds a 21 percent stake — is confirming plans to build cars in Europe, with discussions underway to add a new production line at Stellantis’s Figueroelas plant in Spain to manufacture a new Opel electric SUV alongside Leapmotor’s B10. The pattern is becoming clear: the idle factories of Europe’s legacy manufacturers are becoming, plant by plant, the manufacturing base of the Chinese EV industry’s European chapter.
BYD has already committed to a passenger car factory in Hungary, where trial production has begun this year, and a second production base in Manisa, Turkey, expected by the end of 2026. The Stellantis discussions would accelerate that footprint considerably — and in the most symbolically resonant way possible: by manufacturing on the same Italian and German factory floors that once defined European automotive pride.
Then there is the detail that will make the boardrooms of every Italian luxury brand briefly stop breathing. Asked whether BYD might add European brands to its portfolio, Stella Li called Maserati “very interesting.” Maserati, it should be noted, is currently owned by Stellantis, currently unprofitable, and currently the subject of considerable internal uncertainty about its future. Whether Li’s comment was a genuine statement of intent, a negotiating nudge, or simply an observation delivered with excellent timing is unclear. What is clear is that she said it at a Financial Times conference, on the record, and the room noticed.
Julia Poliscanova from Transport & Environment articulated the concern that nobody in a European government is quite comfortable saying out loud: “Once they help the Chinese brands get that brand awareness and once people get the car and see that it’s not such a bad car, I think it can be a point of no return.” It is a precise summary of the dilemma. The tariffs were designed to slow Chinese market penetration long enough for European manufacturers to close the technology gap. If those same manufacturers are now opening their factories to Chinese production — because they need the cash and the utilisation rates — then the delay strategy has not worked, and the industry is now at the negotiating table rather than the drawing board.
The European automotive industry finds itself in the position of a homeowner who built a very expensive fence to keep the neighbours out, then quietly rented them the spare bedroom. The fence is still there. The neighbours are inside. And they’ve noticed the Maserati in the garage.
