A revolutionary range of electric commercial vehicles, designed and produced by Flexis SAS (the jv created last March 22nd which belongs to the Renault Group, Volvo AB and the logistics giant CMA CGM) will be produced in the Group's historic French plant in Sandouville Renault. Ideally located in Normandy, close to numerous transport infrastructures, the Sandouville plant produced, for 50 years from 1964, the majority of Renault's top-of-the-range models.
Since 2014, it has specialized in the production of light commercial vehicles, creating over 1 million Trafics for the Renault brand and its partners (including Fiat Professional in 2017 and 2018). In 2023, the plant built 131,427 vehicles and added Trafic Van E-Tech Electric to production. The plan for the activities of Flexia SAS and the future projects of the company and the plant was presented by Luca de Meo, CEO of the Renault Group and by Thierry Charvet, Director of Industrial and Quality, to Bruno Le Maire, French Minister of Economy and Finance and industrial and digital sovereignty.
To support the new business at the Sandouville site - which is accelerating digital transformation and is committed to achieving a zero carbon footprint by 2030 - a hiring plan for 550 jobs over the next four years has been announced. Volvo AB, it should be noted, is Swedish-owned and one of the largest manufacturers of heavy trucks, construction vehicles and buses in the world. And it has no relationship with automaker Volvo Car Corporation, which was sold to Ford in 1999 and is now under the control of China's Geely.
The Flexis SAS jv instead constitutes a rapprochement between Volvo AB and the Renault Group, because the Renault Truck division was sold by the company of the lozenge to the Swedish Group in 2001 and since then Renault trucks and industrial vehicles have gradually grown to become the second most important brand in the Volvo AB galaxy.
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