Two years before this loss, Stellantis posted a €18.6 billion profit — its best ever. The swing was not caused by a market no one could see coming. The question is not what went wrong. The question is whether it was preventable.
Was Any of This Actually Governable?
Start with the numbers, because they give the answer. The underlying adjusted operating loss was just −€0.842B on revenues of €153.5B — a margin problem, not a catastrophe. The remaining €21+ billion of the net loss was a discrete stack of management-classified adjustments, each traceable to a specific decision, a specific commitment, or a specific failure to act when the evidence changed.
These were not market losses. They were the deferred cost of execution risk that was never quantified, prioritised, mitigated, or predicted.
€9.07B — Program cancellations & supplier claims: contracts entered without modelled exit costs, cancelled after commitments were fully incurred
€6.58B — Platform impairments: €30B+ committed against a single EV base case; no scenario triggers to resize when demand data diverged
€4.13B — Warranty estimate change: "deterioration in quality as a result of operational choices" — a known operational signal never converted to financial risk
€2.05B — Battery JV resizing: gigafactory capacity committed ahead of demand certainty; one plant sold to LG Energy Solution for $100
€1.09B — Fuel cell program discontinuation: technology investment continued past the point readiness data justified it
€2.46B — Restructuring and other charges including €1.3B workforce reduction in Europe
€25.4B total. Net revenues: €153.5B (−2% YoY). Industrial free cash flow: −€4.5B.
Every charge had precursors. The warranty problem had leading quality indicators. The supplier claims had contract exposure that could have been mapped. The platform impairments had EV adoption data — publicly available — diverging from plan for multiple consecutive quarters. The workforce restructuring had hiring that was tracking a strategy narrative rather than validated market signals.
So: yes. The majority of this was governable. Not all — you cannot instrument away a macro EV demand slowdown or tariff regime change. But the €25.4B in adjustments was not the market. It was the cost of making €30B+ in irreversible commitments without a system to know when to stop.
"The underlying operating loss was −€0.842B. The other €21+ billion was adjustments. Those were not market losses. They were the deferred cost of execution risk that was never quantified, prioritised, mitigated, or predicted."
But Is Trust Really the Root Cause?
Worth answering directly. The Stellantis loss has four competing root cause explanations, each legitimate. Pinning it on "trust" alone would be intellectually lazy — and would weaken the case for what NAVETRA™ actually does.
All four are valid. And all four produce the same observable symptom: bad news doesn't travel fast enough to matter. Quality deterioration was known internally. The board and CEO held divergent views never resolved into a decision. Seven consecutive years of US sales decline were processed as variance, never escalated as pattern.
Trust is not the root cause. Trust is the operating condition that determines whether any governance architecture actually functions. Stellantis had ERM frameworks, board committees, quarterly reviews, and KRIs. What it lacked was the instrumentation to verify whether those structures were working — whether bad news was travelling, whether decisions reflected the information that actually existed.
NAVETRA™ is not another governance layer. It is the system that tells you whether your governance is real or performative — and converts the answer into financial terms your board can act on.
The NAVETRA™ Domains That Were Failing at Stellantis
NAVETRA™ measures the organisational and human conditions that determine whether governance actually functions — the ten domains that sit underneath every board framework, ERM process, and quarterly review. At Stellantis, five of those domains were failing simultaneously. That is what €25.4B in adjustments looks like from the inside.
Are the CEO, board, and executive team operating from the same shared understanding of risk — or is divergence being processed silently rather than resolved into decisions?
At Stellantis: the board and CEO held divergent views on strategy that were never resolved into a decision. Seven consecutive years of US sales decline were processed as variance rather than escalated as a pattern requiring leadership-level alignment and action. When leadership is misaligned, bad news stops travelling upward — and €25.4B accumulates in the gap.
Is the organisation structurally capable of translating strategic decisions into coordinated execution — or are structure, incentives, and decision rights pulling in different directions?
At Stellantis: 14 brands across two continents, merged in 2021, operating under a structure too centralised to respond to regional market divergence. The post-loss reset language — "empowering regional teams to accelerate decision-making" — is a direct admission that organisational alignment had failed. The €9.07B in supplier commitments and the €6.58B in platform impairments both reflect strategy committed without aligned execution architecture underneath it.
Is the organisation equipped — in people, process, and decision speed — to respond to shifts in the external environment before they become balance sheet events?
At Stellantis: EV adoption slowdown was visible in public market data for multiple consecutive quarters. Tariff headwinds were signalled by regulatory movement across the EU and US. Neither became an internal decision trigger. External Risk Readiness is not about predicting the market — it is about whether the organisation has the alignment, capacity, and speed to respond when the market moves. At Stellantis, it did not.
Are strategy, commercial, supply chain, and finance operating from shared priorities and shared risk visibility — or are functions optimising locally while the whole underperforms?
At Stellantis: €30B+ in EV platform commitments were made with strategy, supply chain, and battery JV partners moving in sequence — but without cross-functional alignment on exit conditions. When adoption slowed, no function had a shared framework for deciding which commitments to unwind and in what order. The €2.05B battery JV resizing — including selling a plant for $100 — is what cross-functional misalignment costs when it reaches the point of forced resolution.
Is the organisation hiring against validated signals — or against a strategy narrative? Are workforce decisions traceable to evidence, or to conviction?
At Stellantis: the €1.3B workforce restructuring charge reflects a hiring posture that tracked the transformation narrative rather than the market signals that were diverging from it. Hiring Friction does not only measure the cost of recruiting — it measures whether the people decisions an organisation is making are aligned with where the business actually is, not where the strategy assumed it would be.
The EBITDA Case
NAVETRA™ does not track warranty curves, model EV demand, or predict impairment triggers. What it measures is the organisational condition that determines whether those signals reach the people who can act on them — and whether those people are aligned enough to act in time.
Stellantis had ERM frameworks, board committees, quarterly reviews, and KRIs. What it lacked was visibility into whether those structures were working — whether leadership was aligned, whether the organisation could execute the strategy it had committed to, whether the external environment was being read through a shared lens or through siloed functions with different priorities.
The €24.6 billion gap between what the market caused and what the adjustments totalled is not a market number. It is an organisational alignment number. And organisational alignment is exactly what NAVETRA™ measures.
The question was never whether Stellantis faced hard conditions. It did. The question is whether €25.4B in adjustments was the inevitable cost of those conditions — or the accumulated cost of five NAVETRA™ domains failing without detection. The evidence strongly suggests the latter.
The Question for Your Organisation
Every organisation running a transformation carries some version of this exposure. The ten NAVETRA™ domains are not abstract governance concepts — they are the specific human and organisational conditions that determine whether your governance architecture is real or performative. Whether your leadership is actually aligned or just nominally so. Whether your organisation can execute what the strategy requires, or whether it is structured to do something else.
The Stellantis case is unusually large and unusually well-documented. But the pattern — leadership misalignment compounding into organisational misalignment compounding into cross-functional fragmentation compounding into a balance sheet event — is not unusual at all.
Execution risk that isn't measured doesn't disappear. It accumulates — until the accounting forces you to see it.