"I'm an old car guy."

That is how Yann Vincent introduces himself, and it is roughly how other people in the industry describe him too. Twenty-seven years at Renault across engineering, production, manufacturing and quality. Chief operating officer of AvtoVAZ in Russia when Renault took its stake in 2008. Head of manufacturing and supply chain at PSA from 2014 to 2020.

He took the ACC job at 63 for reasons he lays out without any varnish. He had run PSA's manufacturing for six years and was not going to run it for the merged company, because you do not appoint a 63-year-old to that role in a new organisation. He had discussions with Carlos Tavares about what came next. The ACC proposal arrived, he thought about it briefly, and concluded it was a one-in-a-life project. So he jumped.

Five years on, that project is the clearest test case in Europe of whether a continent can build its own cell industry, and Vincent is unusually willing to put numbers on how it is going.

What five years builds

ACC was created in August 2020, after eighteen months of negotiation between Saft and Total on one side and PSA on the other, and further negotiation with Europe over subsidy. Mercedes joined in 2022 with the same objective: a European champion for engineering and manufacturing automotive cells.

It started with twenty people, the ones who had been part of the pre-project. What exists now:

An R&D centre at Bruges near Bordeaux, around 800 people. A pilot plant at Nersac near Angoulême, running since early 2022, around 250 people. A gigafactory in northern France, under construction from early 2022, first samples in early 2024, delivering serial batteries for serial cars from September 2024, around 1,100 people and moving to five shifts after the summer. A second block alongside it, process being installed, production starting at the end of this year.

Around 2,200 people in total. Vincent's aside when this is put to him, having gone from twenty: scale is not always an asset.

The number he will give you

He declines to quote a cell cost, on the reasonable grounds that it depends on raw material prices and chemistry and you can tell any story you like with it. He will give you the gap.

ACC is 20 to 25% more expensive than Chinese cell manufacturers. He lists the reasons in order. They started this industry fifteen or twenty years ago and have gone down the learning curve. They were significantly subsidised on capex. Their energy is highly competitive. They work a lot. And they currently have overcapacity, which is pushing prices down further.

Labour cost, he notes, is a minor part of it. That single observation dispatches a great deal of loose commentary about European competitiveness.

Two questions, in the right order

Vincent separates the question people usually run together. Can we catch up, and do we need to?

He takes the second one first, and his answer is not about batteries. If 100% of European battery supply were Chinese, the bargaining power would sit entirely on one side, and anyone who believes that would leave the European car industry unaffected is making a large mistake. European citizens are attached to individual mobility. If you want to keep the industry that provides it, you need a supplier base here. Not exclusively European supply, but a reasonable mix.

Then the first question. Under five years, he thinks, provided ACC does its own homework and Europe helps on two specific fronts.

Energy, where he quotes numbers. The European average is around EUR 190 per megawatt hour. France is better at about 100. The United States and China are around 50. Electricity is a major cost driver in a cell.

And raw materials. Chinese cell makers are often vertically integrated back to the mines, or they buy under contracts signed between China and Indonesia, the Congo, Argentina, Chile. When a state signs directly with a state, the price is generally cost plus. When you buy on the market, you get market minus a discount, which is a worse deal than it sounds. Europe could do the same thing, and Vincent thinks it would be a major asset.

Now we are the students

His third condition is the one that lands least comfortably, and he says it anyway.

Europe should partner with Chinese cell manufacturers to accelerate its own learning. Joint ventures with IP transfer into Europe, majority held by the European company. His justification is a straight reversal of an old relationship: at one point we were the teachers and they were the students, and we have to acknowledge that now we are the students and they are the teachers. Pretending to catch up without their support would, in his word, be arrogant.

He extends the same logic to Chinese plants in Europe. What matters is having the industry here, creating jobs and strengthening society. If those plants are Chinese-owned, that is fine. And he notes that every Chinese cell maker he talks to tells him building a factory in Europe is not easy, and sees European companies as a way to navigate regulation, public authorities and labour practice. There is an interest in pulling them in, provided it is done through partnership.

Bridge the gap, do not raise the price

On support, Vincent is unambiguous.

There are two ways to close a competitiveness gap. Set tariffs, which raises the price of Chinese products, or provide production support, which lowers the cost of yours. The first option makes life harder for European carmakers who will keep buying Chinese and Korean cells for years yet, at exactly the moment they are under pressure to cut EV costs. He is much more in favour of production support, and acknowledges this is not the same thing at all for public finance.

His benchmark is the IRA: USD 35 per kilowatt hour at cell level plus USD 10 at module level. Forty-five dollars per kilowatt hour, which he says is close to 50% of the cost.

ACC has asked the European Commission for two things. Help with capex and launch costs that exceeded forecast, which he is disarming about: we were building something that did not exist in Europe, we did not know, we made mistakes in our forecast, and I am much more knowledgeable about the cost of a gigafactory now than I was five years ago. That has had a positive answer through the Innovation Fund. The second request, production support, is moving very slowly, against a doctrine that Europe subsidises innovation and not production.

His argument back to Brussels is the sharpest thing he says. A great deal of money has already gone into building this industry. We are in the Death Valley now, still competing with companies much older than we are. If you will not help the existing industry and would rather fund new projects, you will have wasted the money of the European citizens.

The line about PowerPoint

Asked how he balances manufacturing against R&D and next-generation chemistry, Vincent gives the answer that has stayed with me longest.

After five years in this industry he has a strong conviction that to innovate, you first have to master your production. As long as you are not mastering it, everything related to innovation is PowerPoint.

That is why ACC is focused on NMC, to strengthen its bedrock in engineering and manufacturing, and will widen the portfolio later rather than now.

He is not dismissive of LFP. It is about 20% cheaper and about 20% less energy dense, and a share of the market will trade range for price while a significant share will keep paying for range. Public forecasts put 2030 at 70% NMC and 30% LFP. He thinks those forecasts are wrong and it may be closer to 50-50, while being clear it will be neither 0 nor 100.

What he wants people to notice is LFP's liabilities. There is no European supply chain for it. Zero. Perhaps eventually in Morocco. And recycling it does not work economically, not because it is technically infeasible but because iron phosphate is too cheap for the economics to close. Which would leave Europe producing black mass and shipping it to China for refining. He lets the question sit rather than answering it.

On sodium-ion: interesting, and not at all interesting at today's lithium price. If lithium goes up, it becomes very interesting.

On the regulation

Vincent supports the purpose of the European battery regulation. Pushing recycling and recycled content is consistent with reducing resource consumption, and that is fine.

He is sceptical about using CO2 content rules as a barrier to Chinese products. His concern is that it becomes a burden for European producers while being a paper tiger against everyone else, because demonstrating compliance by buying green electricity certificates will not be difficult.

Why bigger is not cheaper

The last thing worth taking from the conversation is the least intuitive.

Vincent does not believe there are meaningful economies of scale in cell manufacturing. The process is, in his words, completely inflexible, and the more you invest the higher the risk. You get better equipment prices when you buy more capacity, and you amortise engineering across more product. Beyond that, from pure manufacturing, not much. Sizing follows the size of the equipment.

This matters because it inverts the reasoning behind the largest announcements in the sector. His observation, delivered mildly: people were so excited about building the biggest factories ever.

ACC's own capacity is 30 GWh against European demand for 2030 of roughly 600 GWh, itself revised down from forecasts of 1,000 GWh two years earlier. Both blocks in northern France are full with orders from Stellantis and Mercedes. Expansion in Germany and Italy is paused until the ramp is proven, which he treats as the only thing that matters right now.

On the United States, he is direct in a way that few executives would be: he is really happy not to have invested there, because he would be sitting on idle assets. Then he adds the counterweight. We will have to go to EV sooner or later, more slowly than was forecast a few months ago, but we will have to go to it, even in the States.

What transfers, and what does not

Asked what a car person should expect when moving into batteries, Vincent describes an industry that is a mix of mass production and craftsmanship.

The chemistry side is craftsmanship. You are implementing recipes, and when you change something you wait months to know whether the product is still good. Nothing in the car industry works like that.

The mechanical parts of the process are different machines, but the way you drive them and maintain them is familiar. Some of it transfers directly. Some of it does not transfer at all.

This piece draws on the full conversation, which is available with a complete transcript on the episode page.