Weeks into his new role as Chief Quality Officer at Stellantis, Sebastien Jacquet has been named a 2025 Eurostar winner in the Cross-Car Line and Product Engineering category—an industry nod to the kind of behind-the-scenes work that decides whether a car launches smoothly or stumbles. The award recognizes his leadership across multi-brand platforms and his push to make advanced engineering practical at scale.
Jacquet stepped into the CQO job on June 2, 2025, succeeding Antonio Filosa, who moved into the chief executive role. It’s a rapid-fire transition at the top, and this recognition lands at a moment when Stellantis is unifying engineering, manufacturing, and quality around a tighter playbook to speed up launches and cut complexity.
Why this Eurostar matters now
Cross-car line engineering doesn’t grab headlines like new model reveals, but it’s the backbone of modern carmaking. It means creating shared platforms, components, and processes that can stretch across dozens of nameplates without sacrificing what makes each brand feel distinct. That’s hard enough with gasoline and hybrid models. Add battery-electric vehicles to the mix, and the technical trade-offs multiply.
Jacquet has spent nearly 25 years navigating that mix—quality management, R&D, program delivery, and technology leadership—all under one roof. Before becoming CQO, he served as Deputy Chief Engineering and Technology Officer and led Cross Car Line and Project Engineering at Stellantis. That role tasked him with harmonizing architectures and accelerating development cycles across brands as different as Peugeot, Jeep, and Alfa Romeo.
The Eurostar judges look for leaders who can move the needle on both engineering ambition and day-to-day execution. That’s where Jacquet’s recent track record stands out: he helped drive the launch of STLA Medium, Stellantis’s first multi-energy platform designed to underpin high-volume models in multiple regions. It’s built to handle pure electric powertrains as well as hybrid or combustion setups where needed—one toolkit serving very different markets and emissions rules.
Why is that a big deal? Because every carmaker is racing to electrify without stranding customers in regions where charging is still patchy or regulations are still shifting. A platform that supports multiple energy types lets Stellantis adjust the mix by market and model cycle, rather than redesigning cars from scratch. Done right, it cuts cost, increases speed to market, and boosts quality because teams are improving one shared base, not juggling a dozen unrelated ones.
Of course, the risk with any platform-first strategy is sameness, or compromises that hurt driving character. That’s where cross-car line leadership earns its keep—setting guardrails so Peugeot still feels like Peugeot and Alfa still feels like Alfa, even when they share a lot of invisible bones under the skin.
Inside Stellantis’s platform push
Stellantis—headquartered in Amsterdam with brands from Abarth and Citro ebn to Maserati and Ram—has been public about its plan to simplify architectures while accelerating EV development. STLA Medium is an early pillar. It’s engineered to be flexible on wheelbase and battery size, to accommodate different body styles, and to scale production across multiple plants. Flexibility sounds bland, but in practice it’s what lets teams localize cars for Europe, North America, and emerging markets without starting from zero each time.
That approach feeds straight into Jacquet’s new quality mandate. As CQO, his scope touches launch quality, supplier performance, warranty costs, safety compliance, and continuous improvement loops that feed back into engineering. With multi-energy platforms, quality isn’t just about panel gaps or squeaks-and-rattles. It includes software reliability, thermal management for batteries, charging robustness, and how electronics behave in different climates and grid conditions. The feedback loops are shorter, the dependencies are tighter, and the tolerance for mistakes is near zero.
If the Eurostar is a spotlight, it’s shining on a broader shift in how Stellantis builds cars. Cross-functional teams—engineering, manufacturing, software, and purchasing—now have to solve problems together, earlier. Supplier relationships change too: fewer variations mean larger volumes per component, which can improve consistency, but the stakes go up if a single part hiccups. That’s why quality leaders with platform experience matter so much right now.
The award also speaks to execution under pressure. Juggling brand portfolios is one thing; doing it while the market and regulations keep changing is another. European emissions rules continue to evolve, cost inflation remains a factor in batteries and semiconductors, and buyers expect EVs to feel as refined and dependable as any long-running gasoline model. Cross-car line engineering is the lever to reconcile all of that—provided the quality system can keep pace.
Stellantis’s brand roster is uniquely diverse, which makes the cross-car line challenge trickier but also more valuable when it works. A common platform can underpin a mass-market Peugeot family car, a Jeep crossover tuned for rougher terrain, and a premium Alfa Romeo with sharper dynamics—each with different calibrations, software maps, and interior materials, but sharing a strong structural and electronic base. That kind of scaling is how margin math improves in an EV-heavy future.
Industry watchers will note the timing. With Filosa stepping in as CEO and Jacquet taking over quality, Stellantis is signaling that platform discipline and launch excellence are central to its next phase. The company says it aims to deliver choice in mobility—combustion, hybrid, and electric—while leaning into software, safety tech, and efficiency to create value for customers and investors. Awards don’t guarantee results, but they’re a marker that peers see real progress under the hood.
What should we look for next? Three things: the cadence of models rolling off STLA Medium and sister platforms, the consistency of early build quality across plants, and software reliability as vehicles take more functions over-the-air. If those pieces line up, the benefits compound: fewer recalls, faster updates, better residual values, and a user experience that feels coherent across brands.
For engineers inside big automakers, the lesson from this Eurostar is simple: integration wins. The old model—handing projects from R&D to manufacturing to quality in sequence—can’t keep up with the speed and complexity of today’s cars. Jacquet’s career path, spanning engineering depth and quality leadership, is the template companies are leaning on to make multi-energy strategies work in the real world.
Stellantis’s scale gives it leverage; its mix of brands gives it character. Bridging those two is the job that earned this award. The next test comes on the road, where customers will judge whether the platform promise translates into quieter cabins, longer-lasting batteries, cleaner software, and vehicles that feel tailored—not templated—no matter which badge sits on the grille.
- Role recognized: Cross-car line and product engineering leadership across Stellantis’s multi-brand portfolio.
- New position: Appointed Chief Quality Officer on June 2, 2025, following Antonio Filosa’s move to CEO.
- Key achievement: Launch of STLA Medium, the first Stellantis multi-energy platform supporting electrified and combustion applications.
- What’s at stake: Faster launches, better quality at scale, and a smoother transition to electrified mobility across regions.
Awards don’t build cars. People and processes do. This one highlights where Stellantis thinks its competitive edge will come from—and who’s expected to keep it sharp.