Carlos Tavares, the executive in charge of mega global automotive parent company Stellantis, was clearly not going to stay in his job for long, though it was recently announced that he’d retire in 2026 at the end of his contract. Friends, he didn’t even make it out of 2024.
None of this is a surprise. Tavares, pictured above, managed to accomplish record profits during the pandemic at the expense of almost any sort of obvious plan for the future. His management style put French managers on top of Italian and American subordinates. He frequently feuded with the Italian government. Dealers, workers, suppliers, and customers were all mad at him.
Perhaps most telling of all, Tavares couldn’t keep making big margins in North America, which is a necessity for Stellantis as the company needs North American profits to offset losses in Europe and other markets. Stellantis announced today that Tavares had resigned. Here’s the statement:
Stellantis N.V. (“Stellantis” or “the Company”) announces that the Company’s Board of Directors, under the Chairmanship of John Elkann, accepted Carlos Tavares’ resignation today from his role as Chief Executive Officer with immediate effect.
The process to appoint the new permanent Chief Executive Officer is well under way, managed by a Special Committee of the Board, and will be concluded within the first half of 2025. Until then, a new Interim Executive Committee, chaired by John Elkann, will be established.
Stellantis confirms the guidance it presented to the financial community on October 31, 2024, in respect of its full year 2024 results.
Stellantis’ Senior Independent Director, Henri de Castries, commented: “Stellantis’ success since its creation has been rooted in a perfect alignment between the reference shareholders, the Board and the CEO. However, in recent weeks different views have emerged which have resulted in the Board and the CEO coming to today’s decision.”
Chairman John Elkann said: “Our thanks go to Carlos for his years of dedicated service and the role he has played in the creation of Stellantis, in addition to the previous turnarounds of PSA and Opel, setting us on the path to becoming a global leader in our industry. I look forward to working with our new Interim Executive Committee, supported by all our Stellantis colleagues, as we complete the process of appointing our new CEO. Together we will ensure the continued deployment of the Company’s strategy in the long-term interests of Stellantis and all of its stakeholders.”
This is immediate, so he’s out.
The big question is: What were those “different views” referenced here? At least one view is probably that Tavares wanted to stay with the company and not many other people seemed to share that view. Dealers called the brands helmed by Tavares a disaster, customers were upset with the company’s direction, and even Tavares himself called his view of North America “arrogant.”
It sort of sounds like the classic “If you do X I’ll resign” bluff might have occurred and the Board called his bluff, but that’s just a wild guess.
There are a lot of words that need to be written by me, specifically, but I’m going to give Tavares and others a chance to chime in before picking this up in TMD tomorrow.
Image: The Wedding Singer
Ah yes, another helping of my favorite dish, “(pictured above)”
A+ GIF work!
I can’t wait until the next guy gives us his heartfelt emotional breakdown with 3 chords on an electric guitar.
There was no disagreement, wait, in fact there was a disagreement, yeah, the board wanted to give him even more money because he was doing such a great job, but he turned it down and then resigned when they wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, because he’s that great of a CEO. Yeah, that’s the ticket. In fact, he has another job offer waiting right now from, eh, Micro…Goog…Amazon, that’s right, yeah, he’s been offered CEO of Amazon, but, eh, he might have to turn it down, because the start date conflicts with his honeymoon. That’s right, he just married, um, Jaime Bergman, in fact, she proposed to him, yeah
There was talk of using a 3.9L Ferrari V8 in the new Charger. Tavares was the one pushing the idea…
Good riddance.
Stellantis reminds me of a superhero group comic book whose characters couldn’t all justify solo books…with the right team in place, you get Justice League. With the wrong team, you get Force Works.
what the eff is Force Works
Exactly.
It’s a shame we don’t have Mergio Serchionne around to comment on these matters. But I’m sure he’s in a better place… Like Vancouver.
Bahahaha
I will be a little sad at him not being (pictured above) going forward though.
What a greedy, avaristic, useless chunderhead. No one was upset when he was madly squeezing the company for every cent at clear expense to the company’s operations 15 minutes into the future. Now it’s 15 minutes later and everyone is surprised at how squeezed the company is. They all deserve each other.
yep.
Now, cut all Jeep prices 25% tomorrow.
Wait, what? No?
Damn fired on a Sunday. In the immortal words of Smokey- “You’ve got to be a stupid mother fucker to get fired on your day off.”
or a crazy one, I worked at a place that fired an employee on his day off. He owned guns and was not all there. Also Management was screwing him over.
This disgusting lizard’s insatiable greed will wind up costing tens of thousands of working class people their jobs and he will face 0 consequences for his actions
Sounds familiar for our delightful (/s) fourth stage capitalism
Fourth Stage Capitalism is leading to global ecocide and poverty. I think the future is going to look like a mix between the 1984 film Runaway, the 1979 film Mad Max, and the 1973 film Soylent Green.
Worse still, the clown probably still gets a multimillion dollar pension plan.
In the immortal words of George Carlin, it’s a club, and we’re not in it.
An escalator cannot break, it can only become stairs
0 consequences? He just got fired.
That just means he doesn’t have to show up at the office to collect his golden parachute. At $39.5 million in compensation this last year, he won’t be panhandling at a freeway off ramp for a while.
You can save money by firing me for half that.
Getting fired as a CEO is the closest to no consequences I can think of. A fired CEO only really gets hurt in their ego; the implications of getting fired from such a high-profile job are normally just getting a shit-ton of money from it and some time off until they’re back at it in another board of directors.
lol
They’ve already laid people off in Toledo, which is a city that really depends heavily on Jeep, and I’m concerned for what’s coming next for the dealers. Stellantis seems to have basically zero future plans outside of the new Charger and I highly doubt that becomes the volume seller it once was.
Per haps the difference of opinion was “I’m staying on until 2026” countered by “No, you’re not.”
“Hello, Carlos Tavares? This is Donald Trump. How’d you like to be my Transportation Secretary? You’re my kind of guy.”
Nah… he’s too knowledgeable in this field. Put him in something less related… like the director of NIH or something.
I mean it couldn’t be worse than Mrs. WWE as Education Secretary, right?
**Trade Alert**
Department of Transportation receives
Stellantis receives
Stellantis to take on most of this seasons salary in dead money. Dot offensive hasn’t looked good in recent weeks. Really struggled in the red zone. Picking up a slot receiver in Traves will add another option. Kid Rock is salary filler and likely to be cut by Stellantis, who builds for the future.
Oh, time to polish up my LinkedIn. I mean, I can’t be any worse than the previous guy, can I?
I had high hopes for Carlos considering the work he did with PSA and Opel. Needless to say, he’s a disappointment. I ended up selling my Jeep earlier this year in part because I had little confidence in the future parts supply with him at the helm.
Can we use Norm MacDonald for the next guy? Or maybe Dan Ackeroid?
I can only hope that John Candy from Uncle Buck would be their future CEO
Excellent choice. I love Uncle Buck’s Mercury. And for that matter, Bug’s MGB.
Mr. Bean
I want to recommend Blackadder, but he’s way overqualified for the job.
Baldrick, then?
For he always having a cunning plan? That may just be what Stellantis need.
(Fun fact: when I typed “Stellantis” Google Chrome flagged it as spelling error.)
Chris Farley.
Well, he knows about vans, down by the river.
That’s a massive step up from camping out in a bando. I wouldn’t think vanlife is so bad. Beats sharing the literal gutter with the blues sharks.
Ah, I could make a suggestion…
The late, great Phil Hartman.
Hi, I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such corporate disasters as the Jaguar rebrand and Nissan: Ghosn in Sixty Seconds! Today I’m here to talk to you about Stellantis, global company with a deep portfolio of car, truck, and van! *accidental on-camera nip from flask*
No, money down.
Yes. Phil is the answer.
“…put French managers on top of Italian and American…“
Well, doesn’t THAT qualify as a mortal sin 🙂
On the background of his other shortcomings, how is this a thing at all ?
I suppose showing blatant favouritism towards executives of a given nationality in a mock UN like Stellantis is a big deal.
Blattant ?
Would’ve been just a shining meritocracy if they were anglo-saxons of any kind 🙂
But they are – British, French, German, American, Italian, they’re everything, or at least try to be.
Unless you mean what if he favoured Anglo-Saxon managers, in which case I think I see your point 🙂
I never heard the origin story of “pictured above” and John Lovitz. It has to be good and I’m sure it has boosted John’s recognition
I think it started with Lovitz in that Devil costume, but I’m sure someone else will be able to say specifically.
Maybe I’ll explain that tomorrow.
Yes, please; I have never gotten this connection. At all.
It’s clear for us olds
*sneaks in Morgan Fairchild reference
*ducks
I remember a John Lovett’s bit where he was giving dating advice to women. Advice was “lower your standards“
I remember an SNL sketch where Lovitz was a bee (?) and the late, great Phil Hartman was Lee Iacocca. Bee!Lovitz asked Iacocca if he would date a gay bee, and Iacocca said “sure, as long as you buy a Chrysler!”
This is the closest automotive connection I can think of involving Lovitz and a CEO of an automotive company 🙂
EDIT: can’t believe I found it (at least a part of it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytoIx_91IHo
I think it was because Jon Lovitz played a reality-denying liar so convincingly that he seemed a perfect stand-in for a delusional CEO.
Just the other day the wife priced getting her Grand Caravan’s brakes done at the dealership versus a good local independent chain’s shop. The local chain beat the dealership by a nontrivial bit on labor, and big margin on parts. At a time where local shops are often having a hard time competing with dealers’ service pricing.
My answer to her question of why the heck is the Dodge dealer’s price to crazy, mya answer was simply, “Because Stellantis. They’ve been gouging the heck out of prices on everything just to keep the corporate lights on. Until Tavares is out as CEO, there’s no hope for them to compete or maybe even survive.”
And, a few weeks later, here we are.
I’m actually kind of surprised there wasn’t a hostile putsch in the boardroom to get him out sooner; the company has been an utter dumpster fire for a while now.
Smell ya later Carlos!
Oh he’s left quite the smell behind that’s for sure
I don’t even think a V8 Charger built on a Banshee platform will be able to save them now.
The EV Chargers delivered to stealerships were bricks right from the factory. All of this drama could have been avoided by making them not much more complicated than a golf cart without all of this proprietary software crap seen in modern vehicles. Dodge could have had the first easily-repaired mass-market OEM EVs on the market, and greatly reduced the cost of the cars in the process. Instead, they tried to use underpaid 2nd/3rd-world engineers to come up with an overly complicated tech-bloated design intended to compete with Tesla, when the market for tech-bloated vehicles is already over-saturated, in a segment where the buyer really wants V8s and no-nonsense, not stupid gimmicks like the Fartzonic exhaust.
Had Stellantis met buyers halfway with a crude, simple, high performance EV Charger for CHEAP, without all of those stupid bells and whistles to brick the car, they may not be flailing about today looking for someone to save them from themselves. The EV should really be the budget option, and the V8 the premium one. Instead, we get tech bloat in both electric and gasoline offerings, and the buyer of the latter gets a thirsty and unreliable straight-6 that is a downgrade from the V8s once available.
DOA.
They’ve been in trouble long before your screeded EVs. They generally make crap cars targeted at people with not much money for a new car. When even Jeep can’t make a profit, you know the problems are deeper than “EV”.
You’re not wrong but we can also make fun of them for how badly they borked that incredibly stupid car when so much was on the line
As an OEM, they chose willingly to make crap cars. Every OEM has the capability to make good, quality, long-lasting, efficient cars, that are repairable with basic tools, that are as close to ecologically sustainable as is possible, and inexpensive by virtue of not being loaded with expensive crap extraneous to the purpose of getting from A to B.
In the USA, absolutely NO ONE does this. The technical capability to make basic-bitch 80 mpg midsized sedans running ICEs or 130 Wh/mile EVs was there in the 1980s. But it’s all about that next quarterly report. The inexpensive Chinese offerings that almost do this are tariffed into non-viability, because the entrenched moneyed interests despise competition and have purchased the government to enforce their will and preserve the privilege of their benefactors.
EVs by virtue of their inherent simplicity, should effortlessly excel at the above, but the EVs on the market do not and are generally even worse than ICE cars on most metrics. They’ve been engineered to fail, deliberately. The offerings we get are a total backwards use of the technology, and the electric SUVs/CUVs/trucks/oversized musclecars are entirely the wrong application for it.
Do not misconstrue what I’m saying as investment advice, but I predict Stellantis stock is going to crater and there is going to be a buying opportunity soon. And if it is bailed out(which it probably will be given the historical record, and I say this as someone adamantly against such bailouts), the value of the stock will eventually rise to a massive multiple of its low point.
I see opportunity there, with significant risk of losing everything put into it. But $10,000 put into it at its low point could be very much life changing to someone who wasn’t born into wealth and currently has spare capital to invest such as myself. I’d take that gamble, and I’m paying attention to that stock price like a goddamned vulture.
BS on that. Wishful thinking amalgamating incompatible stuff.
Older cars were funnier and had good mpg because they were lighter. They were lighter because they didn’t have today’s standards to comply with. And they were already heavier than earlier cars before them.
The Citroen AX14 diesel did a verifiable, day and day out 65mpg on highway driving, in the late 80’s. It was light. Very light. And its rear hatch was so light it would break from vibrations. Good luck crashing with that.
Same for the ability to make good cars. It’s a matter of culture less so than a matter of money. When you have a shitty culture with shitty everything and shitty suppliers you’ll make shitty decisions and build shitty stuff. It won’t mandatorily cost you less. Ask why everything Fiat ever touches will be cute, amazing on paper, amazing as an idea, and plagued by shitty electronics. Because they had shitty electrics before electronics existed, and probably had shitty candles before electricity was a thing. And the Italians are still amazing engineers. It’s just that they don’t give a shit somewhere down the chain.
Man I wish I could get a $39 million comp package, plus I’m sure an exit package, for fucking up this colossally. But I don’t exactly envy the person having to clean up his mess. There’s so many issues in so many places, where do you even begin?
Like
America they will have to find a democrat.
The modern Democratic party is economically to the right of and more authoritarian than 80s Republicans. And 80s Republicans were literally fascists. It was easy for the orange turd to flank them on their left, of all places. Consider who the teamsters endorsed.
America needs to reject the duopoly outright, and save itself. A leader is not going to save America. The American people have to take charge, and the intelligence bureaucracy is NOT going to like it if they do. We could have our own version of Mexico’s “dirty war” should Americans try to rightfully take back their country… Albeit, that’s unlikely. Boobus Americanus hasn’t been taught civics in school for 3 generations now, and they don’t read books.
Hey, my people worked hard to set up this shambling mess.
Sad part is, lizard people destroying the world governments would be better than the reality that people keep buying into the shambling mess on their own free wills. Now that is scary.
All hail David Icke!
Hmm given general education trends for the past 30 years and the current state of information flow to The American People I wouldn’t hold my breath on any common sense awakening. But the only reason I am not running for the hills is that the Democratic rout was kinda well deserved.
Worse, the American “education” monopoly is run by Marxists who are intent on tearing down American society. The inculcate the students with the idea that everything American is evil, poor, oppressed people are virtuous, all white people are racialism and capitalism is totally bad. The only reason communism hasn’t taken over the world with superior results is because ”nobody has done it right yet”.
Speaking as a teacher…yeah, this ain’t really true.
I won’t deny dumb shit like Weingarten and some of the toppest (I made that word up) tier wingnuts have done. Or, dumb shit like the debacle known as Common Core (I loved the idea! But force everyone to do something, don’t explain anything, and give incorrect materials? Sounds great!).
I won’t out myself for where I am, but where I am and the entire region around me is hampered more by shitty admin than by any sort of Marxist leanings. Lots of good teacher peeps doing lots of good things all around us.
I assure you, if anyone was teaching “America is evil” your ass would be walking the bread line, tenure or no tenure, and this is true for just about anywhere.
As a former faculty brat, I thank you for your service.
Not facetious: much of my family has taught, and I’m well aware of the conditions & budgetary constraints teachers operate under. The fact that CEOs get a massive payout when they’re tossed out for borking a company while schools* have to fund raise for basic supplies tells a grim tale of our society.
*and many teachers buy the kids’ supplies out of their own (small) pockets
Do you know this for a fact or are you just reciting what the TV told you?
I don’t know, man. I have 2 kids in public schools and they have not been taught literally any of these things. Nor was I during my school days.
Kind of sounds like you might be regurgitating another batshit rightwing conspiracy talking point.
We need him and Ghosn to get together for a new company called CARlos. Only the finest of Carlos-based cars! Tried and true designs that say “someone was not willing to invest in any of this.” Enough space to store even the most suspiciously large boxes of instruments.
Don’t you mean CARloss?
When can I order my Hellcat-powered Nissan Crosscabriolet?
Now that’s something to be thankful for!
C Ghosn is polishing his CV already
I’ll tell them I resigned. It was all my idea. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Later, bitch. Can’t wait to see what kind of clueless person they put in there as a replacement.
I’m pretty dumb, I’ll take the gig but will need $45M in total comp. I don’t dumb for cheap and if they want more of a mess then I’m going to need more of the monies.
I’ll do it for $20M, what do I win
And the race for the bottom begins!
I’ll do it for $19M, btw.
A new chapter begins for the morning dump without him lol
I am inconsolable
Yeah, you wasted no time posting this article. I can’t think of anyone who will miss Mr Carlos quite as much as you. Don’t despair, life will go on.
With a bit of research, can’t you find someone at VW instead?
Definitely could use some Sprockets references on this blog.
Pablo Di Si is also punching the clock! Shame, I thought he had a ton of swagger. 🙂 Do people still say that today?
I am genuinely going to miss the pictures of John Lovitz in his place. That bit never fails to make me laugh.
Someone has to hire him so i can keep writing about him.
I hope someone does!
Carlos Tavares, no longer in the picture
I saw a news article on the guy the other day and said to myself “oh, that’s what he looks like”.
Matt’s been doing him a favor. He can still show his face in public because nobody will recognize him.
I think 2 or 3 months ago there was an article here that showed his actual picture. I didn’t believe it at first and thought maybe they mixed up photos with another article, so I had to google him to verify that was really him.
I checked as well as I genuinely didn’t know what he looked like