An employee works on a production line of the car brand Opel, assembling Opel Astra passenger cars at the company’s plant in Ruesselsheim, western Germany, on June 30, 2026. (AFP Photo)
As Germany’s Opel slashes its engineering ranks and partners with China’s Leapmotor, anxiety is running high in Ruesselsheim, the city it has long dominated.
Struggling like many other European automakers, Opel is expanding its partnership with Leapmotor to build a new SUV, tapping the Hangzhou-based company’s expertise on electric vehicles and low-cost production, while leaving Opel’s local engineers to perform more old-fashioned vehicle design work.
Stellantis, Opel’s multinational parent company, said in April that it would cut 650 engineering jobs — from a total workforce of 1,650 — at its Ruesselsheim development center, amid a wave of job cuts across the German auto industry.
Those developments have unleashed concerns in this Rhine River city, where Opel was once the mighty engine of prosperity. For their part, the mass-market carmaker’s executives say they are trying to adapt to the “reality” of stiff global competition.
For Daniel Bremm, a local representative of the IG Metall union, the main risk is technological downgrading, the possibility that the engineering center would be reduced to a mere “adaptation hub” for vehicles designed elsewhere within the Stellantis group or in China.
“In France and Italy, they are hiring, whereas in Germany, we are only cutting jobs,” Bremm lamented, saying that governments in Paris and Rome seemed to be lobbying the parent company more aggressively.
“The arrival of Chinese manufacturers in Europe is a reality,” Opel boss Florian Huettl told AFP. He noted that Chinese carmakers had captured 9 percent of the EU market over the first five months of 2026 — a figure that rose to 10.5 percent in June.
Huettl said the Leapmotor partnership would combine German industrial know-how with the Chinese company’s software expertise “to create the best of both worlds.”
The Ruesselsheim teams would in turn refocus on their core competencies — vehicle parts such as chassis, seats, lighting, steering and driver-assistance systems.
German automakers are ramping up cost-cutting measures in response to a sluggish European market, overcapacity in the EV sector, and the rising strength of Chinese rivals.
Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Porsche have all announced cost-reduction programs.
For Opel, these measures are part of a long-term trend.
Founded in 1862 by Adam Opel, the company produced sewing machines and later bicycles, before venturing into car manufacturing in 1899 at its Ruesselsheim site.
Long a symbol of German industrial might, the brand dominated the West German market and sold well across Europe in the 1970s thanks to successful and affordable models like the Kadett and the Rekord.
It subsequently went into gradual decline under the ownership of the American group General Motors, which long restricted its international expansion to avoid competition with other GM subsidiaries.
Opel was acquired in 2017 by France’s Peugeot Group, which in turn merged with Fiat-Chrysler in 2021 to form Stellantis.
The workforce at Ruesselsheim has shrunk from a 1970s peak of around 42,000 employees to approximately 6,800 by the end of 2025.
