LA TRIBUNE – As a startup in the automotive sector with industrial ambitions, how do you receive speeches on reindustrialization?
Benoît FINDS – I receive them very well but I think it’s still politics. The France 2030 plan helps us in certain parts but it lacks a real territorial organization with long-term planning. We are at a time when we have to make real choices which do not depend only on money but on how we organize ourselves together. There are complete sectors to structure and it is not a pile of money at a given moment that will change the situation, France has become so deindustrialized. It’s not just gigactories that count in life!
We are historically a nation of automobiles, it is a trait that we must try to maintain but this requires extremely expensive, heavy, polluting infrastructures. We haven’t wanted to have that in our home for twenty years and we have become dependent on it. Reindustrialization is a long-term vision that organizes the interfaces of everything we need to produce what we ultimately want. Do we still have to produce huge volumes? It’s a social project, I’m not sure we all need a two-ton electric car. We can do things smaller, more local, cheaper and less polluting.
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What can France do in the face of a market dominated by China?
Given the state of the market, the challenge will not be played out at the national level but at the European level. Three major decisions will be important: whether or not to maintain the Green Deal, the ban on thermal vehicles for 2035 or later and the level of protectionism at the borders. Do we do like the Americans with very high taxes to protect ourselves or do we stay as we have always done to get eaten alive? Chinese electro-mobility technologies are much more competitive, these brands are deployed everywhere: they buy European brands or are distributed by them. The war is already almost lost, we will need a very strong message if we want to continue manufacturing in Europe with European technologies. That’s the entry point that determines the rest.
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Do light vehicles have a place in this race?
Yes, we think that the intermediate vehicle represents a market of ten million units in Europe for 2030, reaching 5 to 10% of the automobile fleet in 2035. It meets everyday needs. Today, in an infinite world you can have a very large vehicle that does everything, tomorrow you need a vehicle that just meets your needs. What we don’t know is how long this change will take. The sooner we are structured and able to produce, the sooner it will arrive. Mobility has a particular threshold effect which means that as long as we do not have a visible volume of vehicles, people do not change.
Today, we have demands increasing by 200 to 300% in the intermediate vehicle market. The data leads me to believe that we are experiencing in the intermediate vehicle what we experienced in the electrically assisted bicycle in 2007-2008. Nobody believed it when Bosch released its first electric assistance system but it became a success story. Electric mobility is very expensive, so people wonder why they would change their diesel for a model costing more than 30,000 euros. Everyone has understood that less is more, we stop BMWs at 70,000 euros, it no longer makes sense.
We also have a very urban society with public policies that close these zones: ZFE [Zones à faibles émissions, ndlr], fewer parking spaces, pedestrian areas… These are the underlying trends which lead us to move towards the intermediate vehicle, these machines between the bicycle and the car which will weigh between 100 and 500 kilos. We must meet the needs of transporting people and goods. We have seen surges in demand for the first category, but we didn’t start with much: we’re talking about a market today of a few hundred vehicles per year.
Are you primarily targeting metropolises?
Constrained zones, in which there are two verticals. Urban areas yes but that’s not where we sell the most. It is on closed sites which have space and activity constraints, such as industrial sites, hospitals, airports, military sites, amusement parks or campsites. We choose to address professionals who need to transport objects in these restricted environments. It works well because you need to be able to fit everywhere, versatility and security.
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Why is the recyclability of new vehicles not mandatory for manufacturers?
You have to think that these are linear, century-old industries that are structurally organized like that. What do you do when you have hundreds of thousands of employees who have always done it like this? Reorganizing factories does not happen with the wave of a magic wand, manufacturers reuse the same recipes while changing at the margins. These beasts have no choice but to maintain their model and we think that the only way to change will come from the outside. We are trying to prove that a sustainable design model is possible, we are competing for cost per use and not for manufacturing cost. We sell the service, the mechanic who will maintain this vehicle, it will be digitalized and the user will visit him often to change hardware and software, do preventive maintenance, collect data, etc.
It is not the same type of vehicle as those of the classic automobile. So its industry is also different, production must include reconditioned, recycled parts. And we can imagine that once the need is served with an infrastructure of X thousand vehicles, there will no longer be any need to produce them since they are made to last. The industry will then spend its time repairing and it will have been calibrated to address and adapt to other markets.
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