Manager/ From Tesla to the birth of Northvolt: who is Paolo Cerruti, the Turin engineer who challenged China on batteries (and lost)

Game over in Skellefteå. The Northvolt gigafactory, a symbol of Europe’s industrial rebirth and a bulwark against Asian dominance in electric car batteries, is shutting down. The Swedish startup founded by Turin native Paolo Cerruti and former Tesla CEO Peter Carlsson officially went bankrupt in March, with a €7.5 billion hole and a €15 billion dream shattered.

Now, the pieces are being sold: Lyten, a young Californian supermaterials company, has bought the plant in Poland and promises to restart everything in record time. But the European page is closed. And the echo of a failure that weighs and of a green promise that never came true remains.

Northvolt was born in 2016 with the huge ambition of building European batteries for electric cars, breaking the industrial dependence on China. In a few years it attracted investors of a certain caliber such as BMW, Volkswagen (with a 21% stake), Goldman Sachs and even the Fondazione San Paolo through Fondaco. The real test, however, was the industrial scale. And there Northvolt lost the game.

The plant in Skellefteå, in the far north of Sweden, has always been a symbol of the company and perhaps also the first mistake. Building a gigafactory three hours from the Arctic Circle might have seemed consistent with a certain green rhetoric, but it created enormous logistical problems. Then came the delays, the canceled orders (BMW blew a 2 billion contract), exasperated customers and the collapse of EV demand.

And so while the auto giants were looking for support in China to support the transition, Northvolt was left alone. Not even the pedigree of the founders saved the project: on one side Peter Carlsson , a close collaborator of Elon Musk, on the other Paolo Cerruti , an engineer from Turin with a very solid resume: Renault-Nissan, then Tesla between 2011 and 2015, where he dealt with supply chain and quality.

But who is Cerruti? The classic example of the European engineer-manager. Degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin, a start at Fiat in the late 90s, when the company was trying to reinvent itself after the Agnelli era. Then abroad: France, Japan, United States. First at Renault, then at Nissan, in the alliance led by Carlos Ghosn. And finally Tesla.

In 2011, Elon Musk called him to build the Fremont, California supply chain from scratch. Cerruti accepted, got his hands on the processes, managed the crises, discovered the speed and operational brutality of Silicon Valley startups applied to industry. He is not a visionary or a frontman, he stays behind the scenes, but he does it with strategy and logic.

In 2016 he returned to Europe. Not out of nostalgia, but perhaps to try to replicate the Tesla model in the Old Continent. Northvolt was born in 2015. Together with Carlsson (his former colleague at Tesla), the Turin engineer raised tens of millions to study feasibility, engage partners and investors, start the Västerås laboratory and plan expansion in Poland and the United States. The idea was simple: if Europe wanted electric, it must have its own batteries. And if there was no one to produce them, it would have to be built from scratch. "A project too interesting to let slip away," he himself would say. But Northvolt's story shows that even solid resumes can crash against the obstacles of the European industrial transition.

Cerruti, who became CEO of the American subsidiary, had the global project in his hands: from Poland to the United States. But the company soon lost operational control. He stayed until the end, he tried to keep everything afloat, but it wasn't enough. He tried to build in Europe what he had seen born in California, but good will is not always enough. You need solid supply chains, investors who don't give up at the first obstacle, and a serious industrial policy. All things that Europe, today, doesn't have yet.