Productive model(s) of the gigafactories in the battery valley, Northern France

Abstract:

Following the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, the European Union (EU) set itself the goal of becoming the first climate-neutral region by 2050. The European Green Deal, presented by the European Commission in December 2019, proposes a regulatory framework and guidelines for certain European funds to finance the decarbonization of European economies. The Green Deal is being implemented through various public policies, including industrial policy, which is designed as a means of bringing about the ‘dual transition’: one energy-related, the other digital. Launched on February 1, 2023, the Green Deal Industrial Plan modifies the European regulatory framework by granting greater latitude to Member States that wish to provide public aid to companies engaged in the decarbonization of economies (Journal Official of the European Union, 2024). According to the EU’s perspective, which is shared by international organizations such as the International Energy Agency, the energy and digital transition will be made possible by the industrial sector. The recent Draghi report (2024) confirms the European strategy of not separating the transition from industry—and competitiveness, according to the report—particularly in the automotive sector.
At the national level, as part of a renewal of industrial policies since the 2008 subprime crisis (Lepont, 2024), with French capitalism sustained by the state (Bürbaumer and Pinsard, 2025), the France 2030 plan is in line with European policies and commits the French economy to the dual transition. This national plan aims to invest €54 billion by 2030 with a view to decarbonizing the French economy, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to develop an ecosystem that will be capable of producing nearly 2 million electric and hybrid vehicles by the end of the plan.
The battery valley, which will be the subject of the presentation, is the concrete translation of French and European policies in Northern France, the Hauts-de-France region. Since the end of the Second World War, the automotive sector has been one of the most important driving forces in European economies, both in terms of technological innovation and forms of work organization. On a theoretical level, Regulation Theory has proposed the concept of productive models to characterize, in a stylized way, a set of features common to companies in a sector around four fundamental pillars: profit strategy, productive organization, wage relations, and institutional registration (Boyer and Freyssenet, 2000). At a time when gigafactories are emerging in the battery valley in the Hauts-de-France region and Industry 5.0 is gaining ground, this presentation will examine the characteristics of these companies to determine whether one or more new production models are succeeding Fordism and Toyotism (Coriat, 1991); or whether, on the contrary, they are an extension of existing approaches (Carbonell, 2025). The results presented will be based on the BATCAR research project, for which I am the principal investigator.
The results that will be presented are based on a combination of semi-structured interviews, non-participant observations (such as factory tours and professional events of the sector), and analysis of the grey literature.  

References
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Bürbaumer, B. and Pinsard, N. 2025. The corporate welfare turn of state capitalism in France: Reassessing state intervention in the French economy, 1945–2022, Economy and Society, vol. 54, no. 2, 283–309
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