The Stellantis factory in Douvrin, in Pas-de-Calais, has lived its last years in its current form. On July 24, 2025, the group’s management announced the stopping of the production of the diesel DV engine on November 1, 2025, pending the scheduled extinction (without date) of the production of the EB petrol engine. Without pronouncing the word “closure”, Stellantis therefore acts the end of a major part of the activity of the site, specialized for more than fifty years in the manufacture of thermal engines.
For CFE-CGC and CFTC unions, it is indeed a closure that does not say its name. Both evoke a “current 2026” deadline, regretting respectively a “sacrifice of industrial skills” and an “abandonment of know-how” on the altar of electrification. If the CFTC greets the anticipation by Stellantis of the social consequences of this industrial change, it nevertheless denounces “industrial choices of production outside our borders” which would have brought a fatal blow to this flagship of French industry.
CFE-CGC also alerts to the small number of effective reclassifications to the neighboring factory of ACC, the gigafactory located right next door and partly owned by Stellantis: according to the union, only 325 employees have joined this new site, leaving 350 others on the tile for the moment.
«We know how to offer a position to everyone in the group», assure Stellantis
For its part, Stellantis tempers the diagnosis. Contacted by the new factory, the manufacturer confirms that the date of November 1 only concerns the end of the DV line, and not that of the entire site, while specifying that the EB engine is “brought to stop in a second step». He assures that no employee will be left without solution. Posts are offered to everyone, either at ACC – by advancing the figure of 330 employees who have already migrated to the new battery site opened in May 2023, but which struggles to rush -, or on other Stellantis sites in the region, in Hordain or Valenciennes. The group insists on its desire to accompany each employee individually.
Force Ouvrière and the CFTC report that a negotiation meeting was held on Tuesday July 22, devoted to the examination of possible conventional collective ruptures (RCC). “In our view, this meeting already sounded the death knell,” said the CFTC in its press release.
An emblematic site in the process of extinction
The Douvrin factory (ex-French mechanics) had been put into service in 1969, and has since become a “major pillar of the thermal engines”, in the words of the CFE-CGC. It had more than 5,000 employees in the early 2000s. Unions all demanded an “ambitious professional retraining plan”, with training, reclassification and reinforced support, stressing that the transformation of the automotive sector should not be “to the detriment of social and economic cohesion”.
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