Stellantis Rennes Plant
The Stellantis Rennes Plant is one of the principal car plants in France, producing approximately 340,000 cars in 2005. The Rennes plant was acquired by the PSA Group in 1976 when Peugeot took a majority stake in the Citroën company which had built the plant. Stellantis Rennes is the largest private employer in the Rennes conurbation, with approximately 2,000 people as of 2021. In January 2021, PSA and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles merged to form Stellantis. Location and site The plant is located to the south-west of Rennes in the commune of Chartres-de-Bretagne, just beyond the Rennes city limits on a large site at Rennes-la-Janais, across the road from the city's airport. The completion in 2010 of a €50 million investment in new model production facilities will leave the total covered factory area at 500,000 m². By 2008 the area under cover had grown to more than 700,000 m², but this was to be reduced in order "to reduce fixed costs and optimize logistical efficiencies". In practice, the site is a large one: where it was cheaper to build a new dedicated assembly hall than to refit an existing one it is likely that some of the older buildings included in the quoted 2008 figure will have been already unused for many years. Before 1999 the company also owned a plant for the manufacture of rubber components on the city's western (Route de Lorient) Industrial Zone and statistics from that period concerning matters such as employment often aggregate the figures for the two plants together. History At the beginning of the 20th century, with France producing more automobiles than any other country, automobile construction was heavily dependent on a handful of traditional craft based skills, and the country's auto-industry, along with most heavy industry in France, was heavily concentrated in the Paris region. Having grown prosperous as a munitions producer during the war, when automobile pioneer André Citroën was ready to start his own manufacturing business, applying revolutionary production techniques which he had seen in development at Ford's Detroit plant, the obvious place to base a new auto-business in France was Paris, which is where Citroën's car factory was established in 1919. Forty years later, the production techniques pioneered by Citroën had permitted the auto-industry to become one of the most important sectors in the industrialising economy, and auto-production had become massively labour-intensive. The artisanal skills of the Paris carriage maker were no longer of much relevance, however. Commercial success for the 2CV and (more recently) DS models left Citroën desperately short of production capacity in their cramped Paris site, and the decision was taken to build a new greenfield plant. The Rennes location was chosen in 1958 on account of its abundant supply of available labour and the low wages in an area where the economy was heavily dependent on the primary sector. Farming in the 1950s was beginning to shed labour fast as an increasing share of the agricultural workload hitherto reliant on manual labour was mechanised. Citroën's decision