Horse Powertrain: the quiet empire of the engine
There’s an industrial empire that controls how half the planet moves around, and you’ve probably never heard its name. It doesn’t put a badge on any car. It runs no television ads. It doesn’t have a LinkedIn fanclub. But the engine in your Renault, your Dacia, your Nissan, your neighbour’s Volvo and the upcoming third-generation Mercedes CLA all come from exactly the same set of factories. One company. Headquartered in London, with 18 plants, 19,000 employees, and a single industrial plan that’s about to decide whether you’ll still be pouring petrol into a fuel tank in 2050.
It’s called Horse Powertrain. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but you’ve been driving its work for years. And the most interesting part isn’t what they make. It’s what their global CEO, an Argentinian called Matias Giannini, has been saying out loud in front of the entire global industry.
If you’ve come from our piece on Aramco’s DHE, welcome. This is the other half of the same book.
What Horse Powertrain actually is
To the bones, then. In May 2024, Renault Group and Geely formalise a 50-50 joint venture that consolidates every internal combustion engine and transmission across both groups under one industrial roof. Renault brings in its former Horse division, headquartered in Madrid. Geely contributes Aurobay, its engine division based in Hangzhou Bay. The two subsidiaries keep running as separate operating entities, but the new parent company — Horse Powertrain Limited — lands as the world’s third-largest powertrain manufacturer from day one.
A few months later, in December 2024, Saudi Aramco joins the table with a 10% stake at an enterprise valuation of €7.4 billion. The planet’s largest oil producer becomes a co-owner of the planet’s largest combustion-engine supplier. If that sentence doesn’t make you stop and reread it, do it now.
The numbers are brutal. More than eight million engines and transmissions a year, for over fifteen carmakers. Over 19,000 employees. 18 operating plants. Five R&D centres. Presence in 130 countries. Expected annual revenue around €15 billion. One single plant — Mioveni in Romania, in operation since 1971 — has built 10 million engines over its lifetime and currently produces 450,000 units a year.
What do they actually make? The publicly declared customer list — drawn from Horse Powertrain’s own foundation paperwork and corporate communications between 2024 and 2026 — covers Renault Group with all its brands (Renault, Dacia, Alpine, Mobilize), Geely Auto with its associated brands (Lynk & Co, Polestar and others), Nissan, Mitsubishi Motors, Volvo Cars, Proton, and Mercedes-Benz (Horse hardware sits inside the third-generation CLA). Add to that confirmed niche customers like Caterham Academy, which is running the HORSE H13 engine in its 2026 entry-level race cars, and the Brazilian brand Lecar, which is using the HR10 turbo three-cylinder as the range extender for its 459 Híbrido. That’s what’s public. The figure Horse itself disclosed in its official Auto China 2026 release is that the company now has twenty active customers, so the names above are the most visible ones, not the complete roster. The other eight or nine are private agreements, regional brands or lower-volume contracts that haven’t been announced. In other words: if you’re driving any mainstream European car that isn’t pure premium German or pure American, there’s a high chance the engine under the bonnet was made by Horse Powertrain. And that list is only going to grow.
And here’s where the first oddity hits: nobody knows Horse exists. For a very specific reason. It’s a Tier 1 supplier, not a car brand. It lives in the industrial shadow, exactly where it wants to live.
The Argentinian who said the quiet part out loud
Matias Giannini has spent 25 years in the parts industry. Continental, Vitesco Technologies, and in May 2024 he was appointed CEO of Horse Powertrain. He’s an engineer by background, not a marketing man.
In April, during the opening media day of Auto China 2026 in Beijing, Giannini did something no carmaker CEO has dared to say in public yet. He opened his presentation with a figure: by 2040, more than one billion vehicles equipped with internal combustion engines will still be rolling on the world’s roads. Not “we estimate”. Not “could be”. Over a billion.
And then he said this: “Pure electric is not the only low-carbon solution. Hybrid technology is a core solution for achieving net-zero emissions, not merely a transitional technology.”
Reread that calmly. A core solution, not a transition. That’s the thesis. And it’s said by the CEO of the company that builds the engines that will burn the fuel sold by Aramco, which owns a stake in Horse, in cars designed by Renault and Geely, who are the other two shareholders. Nothing is hidden. It’s all on the record. The reason nobody has noticed is that nobody has joined the dots.
Days later, Giannini went further: he publicly called for hybrid engines to be standardised across manufacturers as a way to cut development costs by a factor of five to ten. Translated into pub English: stop spending millions each developing your own hybrid system, come buy mine, I already built it, and I’ll sell it to you cheaper than you can make it. A chess move so transparent it borders on shameless.
The hardware on the table
A thesis without product is a university lecture. But Horse has product. A lot of it. And that’s what makes Giannini a real problem for the rest of the sector.
The H12 Concept with Repsol. Probably the most relevant piece in the catalogue, and the most Spanish. It’s a 1.2-litre three-cylinder hybrid engine, an evolution of the HR12 that already sits in the Dacia Duster, the Bigster and the Renault Clio. Co-developed by Horse Technologies in Valladolid and the Repsol Technology Lab in Madrid. Designed in Spain, validated by AVL in Austria, two prototypes already built.
The numbers hit hard. 44.2% peak brake thermal efficiency. For context: typical modern petrol road cars sit somewhere between 35 and 40%. Toyota’s most efficient hybrid engine is just above 41%. The H12 beats all of them. Stated WLTP fuel consumption: below 3.3 litres per 100 kilometres, around 40% less than the European new-registration average for 2023.
How? A 17:1 compression ratio, exceptionally high for petrol. The joint Horse-Repsol statement describes an “innovative combustion system” engineered around that ratio, without going any further. They haven’t confirmed whether it’s assisted compression ignition or something else. On top of that: a new-generation EGR system, an optimised turbocharger, a high-energy ignition system, reduced internal friction thanks to bespoke lubricants developed by Repsol, and an improved hybrid gearbox with optimised energy management. And the whole package is designed to run on Repsol’s Nexa 100% renewable petrol, produced at industrial scale at the Tarragona facility since October 2025.
A mid-size car covering 12,500 kilometres a year on this engine and this fuel emits 1.77 tonnes less CO₂ than a conventional equivalent. The first demonstrator vehicle is due this year.
The X-Range family. This is the punch on the table almost nobody is talking about. Horse has developed a set of modules called X-Range built around one simple, brutal idea: what if you could take a platform originally designed as a pure electric vehicle and turn it into a hybrid without scrapping the factory tooling?
That’s what the X-Range C15 Direct Drive does. Unveiled at Auto China 2026, it integrates a 1.5-litre four-cylinder engine, a transmission, two electric motors in a P1+P3 layout (one on the crankshaft, the other at the transmission output) and the full power electronics suite into a single flat housing. That housing is engineered to bolt onto the rear subframe as a direct replacement for the rear electric drive unit of an existing BEV. The naturally aspirated version delivers 70 kW for B- and C-segment cars. The turbocharged version delivers 120 kW for D-segment cars and light commercial vehicles.
Think about what that means. A carmaker that has burned a billion euros on a BEV platform that isn’t selling as expected can turn that same platform into a hybrid one by swapping a single module. No vehicle redesign. No new assembly line. No write-off. Horse is selling them the emergency exit.
And the C15 Direct Drive isn’t alone. It’s the fourth piece of the X-Range puzzle. Before it came the C15 (the pure range extender, generator only, shown at IAA Munich 2025), the F15 Direct Drive (which replaces the front electric drive unit, shown at Auto China 2025) and the G10. Horse already has a complete kit for reverse-engineering electric platforms back into hybrids. Let that land.
The HORSE W30. This is the piece almost nobody has reported yet, and it definitively kills the lazy idea that combustion is now a budget-car-only affair. It’s Horse Powertrain’s first V6. Three litres. 160 kilos. Capable of transverse or longitudinal mounting. Power output between 350 and 400 kilowatts — that’s 476 to 544 horsepower — and torque between 600 and 700 newton-metres. Maximum engine speed 8,000 rpm.
To make that weight figure land properly: at 160 kilos, Horse claims it’s the lightest V6 on the market. Maserati’s Nettuno, the other notable modern 3.0 twin-turbo V6, weighs around 220 kilos dry. Nissan’s VR30DDTT — the lump under the bonnet of the Infiniti Q60 Red Sport and the Nissan Z — comes in at 194.8 kilos dry. The W30 sits roughly 35 kilos below the Nissan and 60 kilos below the Maserati. And the genuinely provocative part is that it weighs only a touch more than many current 2-litre four-cylinder turbo units. In other words, Horse has just dropped a 500-horsepower V6 into the weight class that until now belonged exclusively to fours.
There’s a historical nod worth making here because it points straight at Renault’s own DNA. French press is already drawing parallels with the legendary PRV V6 — the engine shared between Peugeot, Renault and Volvo from 1974 to 1998, which ended up in everything from the Renault Alpine A310 to the DeLorean DMC-12. The PRV was a 90-degree V6 designed to be cheap, modular and useful to multiple carmakers at once. Familiar formula? Fifty years on, Renault is once again behind a modular V6 trying to do precisely the same thing: serve multiple OEMs from a single architecture. Only this time the cheque isn’t from Volvo. It’s from Geely. And a slice, from Aramco.
What’s it for? Mild and full hybrids in the premium segment. If you’re a premium carmaker who needs a light, modern V6 to hybridise, you no longer have to design one. It’s already built. Horse will sell it to you.
Why this is a brilliant move
To understand what Horse is building, you have to understand the problem every carmaker currently has on the table — the one keeping CFOs awake from Wolfsburg to Detroit.
The problem is double investment. Regulation forces you to develop electric platforms. But the electric market is not growing at the rate you promised investors. Charging infrastructure is rolling out slowly. Battery raw materials are getting harder. Retail prices aren’t dropping enough. And meanwhile, the actual customer — the one walking into a dealership in Munich or Madrid or Bangkok — is still buying hybrids or asking for them.
The result: you have to keep two platforms running in parallel. The electric one that regulation demands, and the hybrid one the market wants. Double R&D. Double assembly lines. Double engineering teams. Double capital expenditure. And in the current industrial cycle, that’s enough to drown a carmaker.
Horse’s proposition is to defuse exactly that problem. You, the carmaker, stop building your own powertrain. Buy it from Horse. We deliver it modular, in a single block, ready to bolt in. You spend your capital on what actually differentiates your brand: design, software, user experience, autonomous driving. That’s what the customer perceives. Nobody perceives the engine block. I save you five to ten times what it would cost you to develop it yourself.
And here’s the genius of the move: Horse isn’t selling you an engine. It’s selling you a way out of the maze. A way out that keeps combustion alive for another 20 years, guarantees demand for petrol (synthetic or fossil, but demand), and consolidates Horse as the player who decides the pace at which global transport actually decarbonises.
Put it bluntly. Every hybrid car sold in 2030 with a Horse engine inside is a car that ISN’T fully electric. A car that still needs fuel. And fuel is sold, conveniently, by oil companies. One of which owns 10% of Horse.
What nobody is connecting: the Aramco link
If you’ve read our DHE piece on Aramco, you have half the picture. Here’s the other half: the industrial plan Aramco is building isn’t being executed solely from Detroit with a single clever engine designed in a research centre. It’s being executed mainly through its 10% in Horse Powertrain.
Look at the full board.
Aramco extracts crude. Aramco independently designs the DHE as a catalogue piece. Aramco owns a slice of Horse, which has the actual industrial backbone — the 18 plants, the 19,000 employees, the supply contracts with 15 carmakers. Aramco’s DHE is going to be offered to anyone who wants to license it. The obvious first candidate to manufacture it at scale is Horse, where Aramco already has a board seat. The engine inside any Horse hybrid burns petrol. The petrol is refined and sold by Aramco.
It’s the cleanest chess move the oil industry has made in 50 years. And it doesn’t run on political lobbying. It runs on buying the right industrial assets and letting the market do the rest.
What about Renault? What about Geely? Are they victims here? No. They’re willing accomplices. What they’ve gained in return is turning a massive cost into a dividend-paying asset. Before, engines were a continuous R&D headache, with emissions fines and shrinking margins. Now, they’re an external business that sells to third parties and pays back. Renault and Geely have moved engines off their balance sheets and turned them into a cash register.
And now the hard question
Here’s where NEC has to say what nobody else will.
Is this a scam? No. It’s legal, declared, and technically very well done. The H12 with 44.2% peak BTE is a bloody marvellous engine. The X-Range platform is a clean idea. The W30 is probably the best lightweight V6 anyone will build this decade. Repsol’s renewable petrol is real, it’s been leaving the Tarragona plant at industrial scale since last October. Nothing here is a lie.
But ask yourself this. Why is nobody talking about Horse Powertrain the way they talk about Toyota, Tesla, BYD? Why hasn’t the mainstream press front-paged what Giannini said in Beijing? Why is an industrial move that will define the engines of half the world’s cars in 2040 happening in near-total silence?
Because nobody benefits from telling it. Not Brussels, which sold the ICE ban as a triumph and now watches it dilute month by month. Not the major battery-electric players, who staked everything on a single bet. Not climate activism, because a narrative of “hybrid as permanent solution” defuses the pressure for full electrification. And not, obviously, Aramco, which needs this to cook on the back burner while everyone argues loudly about BEVs.
The story of Horse Powertrain is the story of how an industrial future gets built without anyone watching it being built. When we wake up in 2035, half the new cars on Earth will carry an engine designed between Valladolid, Madrid, Hangzhou and Detroit, financed with Saudi money, lubricated with Repsol oils, and fed with a fuel we’ll call renewable but which comes from the same industrial cluster. And Horse Powertrain will have won.
The straight call
Should you be for or against this? Wrong question.
The right question is: are you fine with the future of the automobile being decided in London, Madrid, Hangzhou and Riyadh while you argue on Twitter about whether EVs will ever go mainstream?
Horse Powertrain is neither the villain nor the hero of this film. It’s something far more useful. It’s the mirror. The mirror the global auto industry is currently looking into and seeing, for the first time in 30 years, someone who understands its real problem better than it does — and who has a coherent industrial offer on the table. Coherent for shareholders, of course. Renault, Geely and Aramco. Three names that in any other era would have spelled trouble, and that here are simply the owners of the next engine in your car.
Whoever controls the engine controls the car. Whoever controls the car controls how half the planet moves. And while you weren’t watching, that already has a new owner.
Check you’re still alive.