“It has been a very good year for us, in Italy I felt at home from the first day thanks to our team and our customers. Professionally it has been an important and changing year. The results are improving even though in my opinion we can aim even higher”. Speaking is Sebastien Guigues, CEO of Renault Italy, who outlined the results of the first half of the year in our country: “In the first six months of 2026 we made excellent numbers, and in July we will have a significant market share. Clio is doing very well, it is a perfect car for the Italian market. As well as the electric Twingo, which is enjoying great success”.
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Guigues and the future of Renault in Italy
Speaking at the Viva! Festival in Locorotondo, of which Renault has been a sponsor for the fifth consecutive year, he asked to keep feet on the ground: “I don’t want to say that everything is perfect and beautiful. We know that the competition is fierce and I’m not just referring to the Chinese. LPG, and it’s strange that so few brands focus on it, and full hybrid are two great advantages for us”. A comment then on the role of institutions in the path to decarbonizing mobility: “Politics listens to us a lot, but in the end it never follows up. I don’t know if it’s a matter of priorities or because there is no money. Electric cars have a cost, for customers but also for us. But if politics doesn’t help us, it’s difficult for this technology to spread“.
Incentives: something is not working
And then he lashes out against incentives: “Doing ‘black friday’ with incentives does not mean helping the BEV segment. It means selling something that nobody wants and doing it in a short time. Today Italy is not electric, but one day it will be. And we will have to be ready to sell our cars. Now the priority is scrapping old cars rather than selling electric ones. It is a social issue more than one for us producers. I don’t know who decided that in Europe the ecological future of the car should be in the hands of politics. There will come a time when we will look each other in the face and ask where we want to go. Scrapping electric cars is the first thing to do in my opinion. And this is what incentives should be for: helping people change cars to get a better and less polluting one. Diversifying by focusing on technologies better than those we have today is the solution”.
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Regardless of electric
Guigues does not make it a matter of pure electric: “Not everyone can afford electric. Since we started the electrification process of our range we have never abandoned thermal engines, since the world is diverse and not all markets are the same. I think this has been a real strength for us and for our growth, the economic results we have presented prove it. For example, we managed to halve the development time of Twingo from 4 to 2 years, and also for this the car costs less. We focused on private customers and on what is not superfluous, although we can always do better. Residual value is the core of successful business, that’s why I say we don’t really know how competitive Chinese rivals are. They may be in the short term, but in the long term we don’t know”. Final joke about a possible merger with BYD: “To date we as Renault do not need to team up with anyone in Europe“.
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