Horse Powertrain, the joint venture born from Renault Group and Geely in May 2024, has planted its flag in Detroit with a brand new U.S. office and 32 hires across multiple business functions. The timing is not accidental.
Thomas Lewis will run the American operation as president of Horse Powertrain USA. The company’s pitch to domestic automakers is straightforward: stop building your own powertrains, buy ours, and cut your costs while the market keeps shifting underneath you.
That pitch would have been laughable five years ago. Today it sounds a lot more plausible.
Horse Powertrain builds combustion engines, hybrid systems, transmissions, power electronics and electric motors. It will sell whatever propulsion system customers want, whether that is a turbocharged four-cylinder or an electric drive unit. The company already employs more than 19,000 people across Europe, China and South America.
CEO Matias Giannini called North America “a key strategic market” and said the company aims to become “a major partner for North American OEMs as they continue to offer a diverse range of vehicles to consumers.” Translation: American automakers are hedging their bets between electric and combustion, and Horse wants to be the supplier that profits from the indecision.
The Detroit office launch came alongside a product reveal designed to get attention from the truck and SUV crowd. Horse unveiled the B20, a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder gas engine that the company claims is fully waterproof to IPX8 standards. It can operate submerged in up to 3.6 feet of water while maintaining stable power output.
That is a spec sheet aimed squarely at off-road SUVs and pickup trucks, the most profitable segment in the American market.
The B20 achieves its waterproofing through a sealed structure with torsional vibration dampers and dedicated engine-transmission sealing. When submerged, the control system automatically adjusts power delivery and throttle response based on sensor feedback.
The engine weighs 286 pounds and delivers between 188 and 248 horsepower, with torque ranging from 221 to 280 pound-feet. It is compatible with hybrid, plug-in hybrid and range extender applications.
The real story is not the engine itself. It is what the engine represents: a supplier telling Detroit’s legacy automakers they no longer need to engineer their own hearts.
This model already exists in other industries. Smartphone makers do not build their own chips. Airlines do not build their own jet engines. Horse Powertrain is betting the auto industry is finally ready for the same logic, especially when the cost of developing powertrains for multiple propulsion types at once is crushing margins.
The question is whether Ford, GM and Stellantis will bite. American automakers have historically guarded powertrain development as core intellectual property. Engines and transmissions are not just components. They are brand identity.
The LS V8 means something. The EcoBoost name means something.
But identity gets expensive when you need combustion, hybrid and electric drivetrains simultaneously, and when tariffs and supply chain disruptions keep rewriting the math. A plug-and-play supplier backed by two global automakers with deep manufacturing footprints starts looking less like a threat and more like an escape hatch.
Horse Powertrain is hiring in Detroit. That alone tells you which direction the conversation is moving.
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