Macron plans to offer French motorists a subsidy of up to €7,000 to buy a new car!

President Macron has launched an €8 billion plan designed to rescue the French car industry, while turning France into Europe’s biggest producer of electric and hybrid vehicles.

Motor manufacturers are reeling from the pandemic, which led to an 88 per cent fall in new car sales in France last month compared with a year earlier.

“This is a historic plan to confront the historic and terribly difficult situation that our country will have to face,” Mr Macron said yesterday in a speech at an alternator factory in northern France owned by Valeo, a car parts group.

The move is being touted as an attempt to bolster French independence and to row back on globalisation while ensuring greener policies.

Mr Macron said that the government would put up €8 billion to help the sector, which employs 400,000 people directly and a further 500,000 indirectly. The money was conditional on manufacturers preserving plants and jobs in France under what he called a “plan for national automobile sovereignty”.

Renault said that it would quadruple the number of electric vehicles made in France by 2022 and would scrap a plan to make its new electric motor in China, moving production to Normandy. Peugeot-Citro?n agreed to make its 3008 model in Sochaux in the east of the country.

Mr Macron’s initial aim is to help French manufacturers to sell the almost 500,000 cars that they have in stock by offering households a subsidy of up to €5,000 to exchange an old vehicle for a new one.

In the longer term, he aimed to turn France into “the foremost country of clean cars in Europe”. He said that he wanted an annual total of more than a million electric and hybrid vehicles produced in France by 2025. Households will be offered a subsidy of up to €7,000 to buy an electric or hybrid vehicle.

Mr Macron went on to say that the state would distribute €200 million in subsidies to the sector and would put a further €400 million into an investment fund to finance innovation.