PSA Sochaux Plant

Peugeot's PSA Sochaux Plant is one of the principal car plants in France, producing approximately 326,000 cars in 2007, and employing 11,972 permanent staff in May 2011, as well as approximately 2,000 temporary staff: there were also over 800 employees from other companies working on the Peugeot site at this time. The plant was created by Peugeot in 1912, initially as a truck factory, but by the 1930s it had become the company’s principal car manufacturing plant, and the main production site for all principal Peugeot models from then until 1972, when the company established a second major French car assembly plant in Mulhouse.

In December 2010 the plant produced its 20 millionth car and celebrated by donating the car in question, a Peugeot 5008, to the Haiti Protestant Federation (Fédération protestante d'Haïti ), backing the charity’s orphan support work in the wake of a major earthquake.

The plant is located in Sochaux in the department Doubs, at the eastern extremity of the Franche-Comté. During the first decade of the twenty-first century the plant’s principal product was the Peugeot 307, while the company’s smaller cars were produced at the Mulhouse plant, less than two hours by road to the east, and the larger 406s and 407s were produced at the Rennes plant in north-west France. The low volume Peugeot 607 was also produced at Sochaux for most of its life.

Currently (2012) Sochaux production is focused on Peugeot’s 308, 3008 and 5008 models. In addition, a new era dawned in 2011 when, for the first time, a Citroën branded car, the Citroën DS5, joined the Peugeots on the Sochaux production lines.

Peugeot’s origins as an automaker were in the Franche-Comté region, to the west of Belfort and Alsace, and a short distance to the north of the Swiss frontier. The Sochaux plant, opened for the manufacture of trucks in 1912, was therefore located in a region where the Peugeot family were already a significant industrial force, though the town of Sochaux itself had till that point industrialised without the benefit of a Peugeot presence.

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