At the beginning of the 20th century, with France producing more automobiles than any other country, automobile construction was heavily dependent on a handful of traditional craft based skills, and the country's auto-industry, along with most heavy industry in France, was heavily concentrated in the Paris region. Having grown prosperous as a munitions producer during the
war, when automobile pioneer
André Citroën was ready to start his own manufacturing business, applying revolutionary
production techniques which he had seen in development at
Ford's Detroit plant, the obvious place to base a new auto-business in France was Paris, which is where Citroën's car factory was established in 1919. Forty years later, the production techniques pioneered by Citroën had permitted the auto-industry to become one of the most important sectors in the industrialising economy, and auto-production had become massively labour-intensive. The artisanal skills of the Paris carriage maker were no longer of much relevance, however. Commercial success for the
2CV and (more recently)
DS models left Citroën desperately short of production capacity in their cramped Paris site, and the decision was taken to build a new
greenfield plant. The
Rennes location was chosen in 1958 on account of its abundant supply of available labour and the low wages in an area where the economy was heavily dependent on the
primary sector. Farming in the 1950s was beginning to shed labour fast as an increasing share of the agricultural workload hitherto reliant on manual labour was mechanised. Citroën's decision to build their new plant on a Greenfield site in an area still dominated by agriculture mirrored auto-industry developments taking place at this time in
Michigan and several adjacent states in the USA. The Rennes-la-Janais plant was opened in 1961 in a ceremony adorned by the dominating presence of the
president. Citroën products featured prominently in the presidential cortege, but the first cars produced at the Rennes plant were small
Ami 6 models rather than the DS favoured for presidential use. The Ami continued in production for ten years, till 1971, having in 1967 been joined on the production line by the
Dyane and in 1970 by the
GS which launched Citroën into the middle market sector. It was the medium-sized cars which would henceforth dominate the production lines at Rennes while almost all of the old 2 CVs continued to be produced at the company's Paris plant until the late 1980s after which that model's final years' production were increasingly concentrated on a small plant in
Portugal. In the 1980s, with Citroën's finances subjected by its new owners to a more rigorous cost control régime, financial stability returned. Investment was applied judiciously, however, and employment at the plant peaked at around 14,000 in the 1980s. This was also a period during which the company's
Vigo plant in north-west Spain was beginning to move away from exclusive concentration on small cars, reflecting rapidly rising incomes in Spain. This meant that during the 1990s the two plants would find themselves in increasingly direct competition to build the same cars, with the costs of France's generous social benefits, funded by employment taxes, leaving the Rennes plant looking in some respects expensive. One response, as in much of France's manufacturing industry, was increased dependence on new industrial robots for many routine assembly-line tasks. By the first decade of 21st century nevertheless Vigo was producing more cars than Rennes, and the Rennes plant's labour force had more than halved, to approximately 6,900 in 2009. In 2004, after 42 years, the plant produced its ten millionth car. 2004 was also the year when, for the first time, the company produced a Peugeot badged vehicle, the
407 at the Rennes plant, joined in 2009 by the slow selling (and soon to be discontinued)
607. The
Peugeot 407 sold very strongly for several years, although demand tailed off quite sharply in 2008 and 2009: both the sales success of this important model, and its more recent decline, have been closely reflected in the level of activity at the plant in recent years. In 2009 production of the
Xsara Picasso, hitherto shared between Spain and France, transferred fully to
Vigo. In 2010 the plant's output is concentrated on the company's Platform 3 models, being currently the
Peugeot 407 and the
Citroën C5, along with the larger
C6. Preparations are well underway to assemble the forthcoming
Peugeot 508 at Rennes, with production commencing on a highly automated production line - eventually at the rate of up to 45 vehicles per hour - after the 2010 summer break. Other reports apparently based on company press releases have suggested a rate of 55 cars per hours for the extensively upgraded new production line. The decision taken at the start of the twenty-first century to focus on C-class cars, at the larger end of the passenger car market, has not served the plant well. The sector has been under attack from luxury automakers such as
Audi and
BMW while more cost conscious buyers have been switching to smaller family cars in the
Golf /
Peugeot 308 class. With annual volumes well below 200,000 cars in recent years the manufacturer has been able to lower the factory's break-even volume, however. The site is a large one, and since February 2014 it has accommodated a substantial workshop for the renovation of
High-speed trains, staffed by employees on assignment the
SNCF from the PSA workforce. ==Site layout==