Stellantis will invest more than €10 million (£8.7m) in building a vehicle remanufacturing facility at its Mirafiori plant in Turin, Italy, CEO Carlos Tavares has confirmed.
The complex, which currently produces the Fiat 500 Electric, will become the company’s Circular Economy Hub from 2023, taking charge of second-hand vehicle reconditioning, dismantling and parts remanufacturing.
This will play a key role in Stellantis’s plan to increase recycling revenues by 10 times by 2030 (compared with 2021). Mirafiori alone is targeting €2 billion (£1.75bn) in 2030.
The focus on vehicle refurbishment mirrors that of Renault and Toyota.
The former’s Refactory in Flins, France, currently processes around 55 vehicles an hour for resale. These are typically between two and five years old, with fewer than 100,000km (62,000 miles) on the clock.
Autocar previously reported that it takes the Refactory around eight days to turn a second-hand car around for sale – a significant saving on the dealership average of 21 days.
Toyota, on the other hand, told Autocar in January that it will soon begin refurbishing British cars at its Burnaston plant for its new Kinto mobility arm. This will be aimed at extending their use after a first and second ‘use cycle’, meaning after the car’s lease expires and after the second owner moves on.
For Toyota, this is aimed at minimising waste. Agustín Martín, president and managing director of Toyota GB, said: “[This is about] how do we recycle it? How do we reuse different parts that are essential and maybe can be used for other services? How do we then rebuild the batteries, reuse them and recycle them? How do we use part of the material for the brand-new vehicle that’s going to be used in the factory?”
As part of a joint venture with Punch Powertrain, the Mirafiori factory will also ramp up production of dual-clutch automatic gearboxes for hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars from the second half of 2024.
According to an official statement, the site will twin with Stellantis’s factory in Metz, France, to supply all of the group’s car factories in Europe.
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