Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.
If you work the line at a Big Three automaker, late February is usually a time to celebrate. The annual profit-sharing checks get announced, and for the last few years, they’ve been absolute blockbusters.
This year? The mood in Detroit depends entirely on whose badge is on your polo shirt.
Over at General Motors, workers are looking at checks north of $10,500. Ford workers aren’t far behind, netting nearly $6,780. But if you clock in at a Stellantis plant, management just handed you a fat, depressing zero. It’s the ultimate Clark Griswold moment. You work hard all year, you build the products that generate the revenue, and you expect that end-of-year bonus to reflect your sweat equity. Instead of a check, you get enrolled in the Jelly of the Month Club.
Actually, no. The Jelly of the Month Club is the gift that keeps on giving the whole year (even if it doesn’t cover a swimming pool). What Stellantis management just handed its UAW workers is much worse. They handed them Cousin Eddie’s sewer hose.
And true to form, instead of taking accountability for dropping a historic financial disaster on their employees’ lawns, Stellantis executives are trying to point the finger at the transition to electric vehicles.
The “Shitter Was Full” Defense
In a blistering internal letter released yesterday, UAW Vice President Rich Boyer called out Stellantis management for a catastrophic 2025 that saw the company post a staggering $26.4 billion global loss and completely wipe out its North American profit margins. Boyer rightly pointed out that the company “prioritized shareholder payouts instead of investing in the future, and cut the heart and soul out of the plants to cover up the results.”
Stellantis, meanwhile, has been crying to anyone who will listen that the “shift away from electric vehicles” and a “cooling market” forced their hand. They want to give EV advocates the same Cousin Eddie Merry Christmas they just gave the UAW.
But we all know the truth: It’s Stellantis’s shitter that’s full, not the EV movement.
Let’s get real for a second. While there are some cool people at Stellantis who care about electrification, Stellantis HQ didn’t even try to half-ass the EV transition. While Ford and GM were pouring billions into dedicated platforms, battery plants, and actual metal-on-the-road, Stellantis dragged its feet. It starved its product lines, jacked up the prices on its aging internal combustion Jeeps and Rams to eye-watering levels, and watched its North American market share evaporate. The company made decisions to slash engineering, software development, and supplier budgets long before any “EV slowdown” materialized.
You know I love the Wrangler 4xe, but that should have been step 1, not the whole game!
Now, after investing a fraction of what its domestic rivals did into electrification, it wants to use EVs as the scapegoat for its own executive boardroom failures.
The Big Lie Doesn’t Work For Automakers
What we are witnessing is an attempt to pass off rank incompetence as victimhood. That’s a bold strategy, Cotton.
But here’s the thing: There is only one Donald Trump. Trying to weaponize victimhood to cover up a trail of massive, undeniable failures in a “Big Lie” is a reality-distortion field that Trump can get away with (at least before he blundered his way into Iran and endangered the whole oil economy). He has a monopoly on that specific brand of Teflon.
Nobody else can pull it off like he can, and certainly not a multinational conglomerate bleeding tens of billions of dollars. You can’t gaslight a balance sheet, and you sure as hell can’t gaslight a UAW worker who is staring at a $0 profit-sharing statement while their neighbor at the Chevy plant is putting a down payment on a new Silverado EV LT to tow their travel trailer.
The UAW sees right through the corporate greed. EV advocates see right through the scapegoating. Stellantis made its own bed, and now it’s trying to make the workers and the clean energy transition sleep in it.
Featured image: A screenshot from a Jeep commercial years ago flaunting a future electric Wrangler that can operate underwater (likely tongue firmly in cheek). Fair Use.
Sign up for CleanTechnica’s Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott’s in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Advertisement
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica’s Comment Policy
