Matra built Renault's cars for decades — then bet its plant on a niche van that flopped

Matra Automobile, the French carmaker owned by Lagardère, had built cars at its Romorantin plant for decades — most notably the Renault Espace, the volume model that anchored the factory. In 1996 Renault decided to build the next-generation Espace at its own Sandouville plant. To keep Romorantin running, the two historical partners launched a replacement together: the Renault Avantime, an unusual coupe-minivan.

The Avantime did not replace the Espace's volume. Its launch was plagued by delays and adjustment problems, and demand fell far short of what the plant needed. By December 2002, Matra said, Avantime orders averaged fifteen vehicles a day — about a quarter of the roughly sixty a day required to break even. Matra Automobile was, in its owner's words, in a dramatic situation.

On 26 February 2003 Lagardère announced that Matra would stop building the Avantime and cease manufacturing cars altogether, shifting to an automotive-engineering business. Closing the Romorantin lines meant about 900 layoffs and a job-safeguard plan across the plant. A carmaker that had built the Espace for twenty years was out of the car business.

Matra's mistake was structural. Its capacity had been built around one customer's models, and when that customer moved its volume product in-house and left a niche product behind, the plant had no fallback. The Avantime's flop was the proximate cause; the dependence on a single customer was the underlying one.