Stellantis pushes AI into engineering as its profits and EV plans falter
At its Michigan technology center, Stellantis engineers say AI has cut development projects from months to weeks, even as the automaker struggles with losses in Europe and a sharp retreat from electric vehicles.
Stellantis engineers are using artificial intelligence to compress projects that once took a year or more into a matter of weeks, but they say every machine-generated result still has to be checked by people. That tension sits at the center of the automaker's push into AI at its Chrysler Technology Center in Auburn Hills, Michigan, where engineers described the technology as a way to speed up development while keeping human accountability in place.
Joydip Saha, the global engineering manager who owns Stellantis' L2+ hands-free highway assist system, said his team built the hands-free system for the Jeep Grand Cherokee in six weeks with the help of AI tools. A similar project would once have taken a year or as long as 18 months. Saha still test-drives every new software build himself, sometimes twice a week, because he considers any problem a customer faces to be his responsibility. He also set a firm rule for his team. "I will not let people use AI to architect stuff because they will forget how to debug stuff," he said, adding that in a safety-critical business, engineers have to be able to answer every question.
Across two days of interviews at the campus, engineers told Fortune that AI has turned yearlong projects into weeks and overnight simulations into minutes. The company wants that speed to cut development time for its new computing and cockpit software, STLA Brain and STLA SmartCockpit, from four years to 24 months, starting with two models in 2027. Nearly everyone who described a speed-up also described checking the machine's work, and the testing vehicles on the campus still rely on human safety drivers and a physical kill switch that cuts power to the driver-assist system.
The push comes at a difficult moment for the company. Stellantis operates 14 brands, and its European business is losing money. Its second-quarter adjusted operating margin was 1.8%, while CEO Antonio Filosa has set a target of 7% for 2030. Europe accounted for about 38% of the company's 2025 revenue, making Stellantis the member of Detroit's Big Three most exposed to that market, and the European market leans far more heavily toward electric vehicles than the United States. Battery-electric cars made up 17.4% of new EU registrations last year, according to ACEA, compared with 7.8% of U.S. sales, according to Cox Automotive.
Stellantis had bet heavily on EVs in North America, and it took the hardest hit in Detroit after the $7,500 federal EV tax credit ended on September 30, 2025. In February, the company wrote down roughly €22.2 billion, about $26.5 billion, a larger charge than Ford's $19.5 billion writedown in December or the $7.6 billion General Motors took across two charges. Stellantis shares fell 25% that day and are down nearly 60% so far this year. Mel Roberts, director of North American infotainment, who plans features for vehicles five to eight years ahead, said the collapse of electrification ambitions was more disruptive to her work than AI. "What I couldn't anticipate is just the complete collapse of the electrification ambitions and how that really did affect all of our future plans," she said. "It trickled into everything."
Stellantis is also the only member of the Big Three legally headquartered abroad, in the Netherlands. The company was formed in 2021 through a merger between Fiat Chrysler and the PSA Group, which brought together European brands such as Peugeot and Citroën with Fiat, Jeep and Ram. Its international character is visible on the campus, where executives born in France, Mexico and Bangladesh work within minutes of one another, alongside Michigan-born staff. For the company, the AI effort is now part of a larger effort to rebuild margins and recover credibility with investors after one of the steepest reversals in the auto industry.
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