Symbio, the equally owned joint venture between French automotive supplier Forvia Group (Faurecia and Hella), French tire giant Michelin, and car manufacturing group Stellantis, has inaugurated its SymphonHy gigafactory on Tuesday in Saint-Fons, in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in France.

It’s Europe’s largest factory, with 700 employees to produce 16 000 hydrogen fuel cells initially, to be expanded to 50 000 by 2026. SymphonHy is part of HyMotive, a strategic industrial and technological one-billion project supported by the EU and France planning to build a second gigafactory to double production by 2028.

Cheap hydrogen by 2030

French Minister for Energy Transition Agnès Pannier-Runacher said at the inauguration that this hydrogen fuel cell factory is “good for employment, good for the planet, and good for France’s independence”.

She said a nine-billion support plan should ensure that by 2030, ‘green’ hydrogen made with renewable sources would become as cheap as ‘grey’ hydrogen produced today from gas for 5 to 6 euros/kg compared to 10 today.

World-class innovation center

At the existing surface of 40 000 square meters, 7 000 are dedicated to what Symbio calls ‘a single world-class innovation center’, with more than 450 engineers, including 100 dedicated to innovation and around 20 PhDs covering a wide range of disciplines like electrochemical engineering, chemistry, materials science, etc.

SYMBIOFCell was created as a start-up within the CEA research center in Grenoble by founder Fabio Ferrari in 2010. Initially, it worked with Renault in 2012 to equip a fleet of 300 Renault Kangoos with a fuel cell that adapts to standard electric vehicles to increase its range by about 180 kilometers.

In 2019, Renault announced it was equipping its electric vans – Kangoo ZE and Master ZE – with a Symbio fuel cell range extender on hydrogen, boosting their range from 230 to 370 km and the Master from 120 to 350 km (WLTP).

Stellantis stepping in

Michelin was one of the initial minority shareholders as early as 2014 and took over Symbio entirely in 2018. A year later, Symbio became a 50/50 joint venture between Faurecia and Michelin, making a deal with Stellantis to become its innovation partner to develop its hydrogen light commercial vehicles on hydrogen.

In March 2020, Michelin and Faurecia laid the first stone of what would become today ‘Europe’s most prominent fuel cell factory in Saint-Fons near Lyon’.

In August 2023, Stellantis stepped into the joint venture with an equal 33% share like the two others. “Symbio‘s technology roadmap fits perfectly with Stellantis‘ plans to deploy hydrogen solutions in Europe and the United States, complementing traditional electric vehicles,” said Carlos Tavares, CEO of Stellantis at that time.

Symbio upgraded StackPack 40 product (T5) will be mass production ready by the end of 2023, in alignment with the plans of its crucial client Stellantis to ramp up the use of hydrogen fuel cell technology on different platforms.

Renault pulling out

Today, the Symbio fuel cells are already used in the Peugeot e-Expert, Citroën e-Jumpy, and Opel e-Vivaro. They are assembled at Opel’s Russelsheim site in Germany, which has become Stellantis’ competence center for hydrogen. In the US, where Symbio plans to build a third fuel cell factory, the fuel cells may be used as an alternative for the diesel Ram pickups today.

Meanwhile, under its new CEO Luca de Meo, Renault finalized a 50/50 joint venture with American fuel cell developer Plug Power to capture a 30% share of the EU market of hydrogen-driven light commercial vehicles (LCVs).