This man should free Opel from the European blemish

The change at the top of Opel came suddenly and surprisingly. In May, the Stellantis Group announced that the manager Florian Huettl would in future run the business of the subsidiary Opel Automobile GmbH.

The previous boss Uwe Hochgeschurtz was in office for just nine months. Now Hochschurtz was needed for another job at Stellantis. Huettl replaced him in Rüsselsheim on June 1st.

The 45-year-old manager has now been head of Opel for almost 100 days - and at a meeting with WELT he makes it clear that he will stick to his predecessor's strategy. "The transition to a pure electric car provider in 2028 is in full swing, the date for Europe is set," says Huettl.

Unlike Volkswagen, for example, Opel is focusing on offering existing combustion models with an electric motor. The Corsa, Mokka and Zafira are available as e-cars and combustion engines, while other cars are at least plug-in hybrids.

Huettl promises that every series will have an electrified variant by 2024. "The successors to the Crossland and Insignia will also be electric." Production of the large Insignia sedan in Rüsselsheim will end this year.

He has not yet revealed what the next generation will look like. It is clear, however, that the "flagship" will have a successor. The Rüsselsheim-based company is also working on a model that is intended to serve the retro trend in the automotive market: "The Manta will come back as an electric car in the middle of the decade," says Huettl.

The new boss cannot be described as a genuine Opel employee. Huettl has only been with the company since the beginning of the year, having previously worked in marketing at Stellantis near Paris for ten months.

Apart from that, Huettl has 20 years of professional experience with the French car group Renault, in France, England, Germany, Russia and Switzerland.

The change of boss at Opel is an example of how the new Stellantis group ticks, in which the brand came through the merger of its parent company PSA (Peugeot Citroën) with Fiat-Chrysler. Everything at Stellantis is tailored for CEO Carlos Tavares.

The 64-year-old has been held in high esteem in the industry since leading PSA out of the crisis from 2014. Instead of a traditional board, Tavares leads a "top executive team" that currently includes 40 more or less equal managers, all of whom report directly to him.

As brand boss, Huettl is one of these top managers, just like the bosses of Fiat or Peugeot. His predecessor Uwe Hochgeschurtz is still a member of the larger group. Since June he has been the operational head of the entire European business, i.e. he is responsible for the utilization of the plants on the continent, among other things.

With his experience abroad, Huettl fits in well with the larger group. No car company has such an international management team as Stellantis. "We are by far the most diverse car company in the world," said Tavares recently when presenting the half-year figures.

The executives meet almost exclusively virtually and their CEO often works from his home in Portugal. There is a headquarters in Amsterdam, but no brand is based there and Stellantis does not operate a factory in the Netherlands.

The plants are still closely tied to the brands, even if, like at Volkswagen, they no longer just produce cars with their own logo. Of course, the Hessian main plant is always particularly close to an Opel boss.

“The plant in Rüsselsheim will be working to capacity after the end of production of the Insignia at the end of the year. We need the capacity there for the Astra, Astra Sports Tourer and DS4. We build the Astra in Rüsselsheim in all body and engine variants,” says Huettl.

The factory in Eisenach is still busy with a model that will eventually need a successor. In England, the Opel/Vauxhall plants produce components and vans for all European Stellantis brands. They were on the brink for a few months until the British government promised the company aid for the conversion.

Like his predecessors, Huettl hopes to carry the brand with the lightning bolt beyond the shrinking home market of Europe. “We want to further internationalize Opel. We currently sell more than 90 percent of our vehicles in Europe. At the end of 2017, Opel set itself the goal of increasing export sales to more than ten percent of global sales by the middle of the decade,” he says.

Since the announcement of this export offensive, numerous new markets have been opened up. Now the Group's network around the world is to help further boost sales of Opel vehicles abroad.

However, Opel's chances of coming to China have dropped significantly again. For a long time, the fact that the brand is not present in Germany was seen as a major shortcoming in Germany – while Volkswagen has raked in billions in profits from China year after year.

In the meantime, CEO Tavares is rhetorically turning the disadvantage of hardly being present in the huge market into an advantage: "The political influence on business in China is growing every day," he says.

For some competitors, this poses an enormous risk. Not so for Stellantis. Tavares has just ended a Jeep brand joint venture in China. The signals are retreating there.

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