Will EV’s help UK’s car industry return to its former glory?

The UK once had one of the worlds biggest car industries.  I grew up in the shadow of the Ford factory in Dagenham (East London) where boat loads of iron would turn up to be smashed into cars in the sprawling 474-acre site. But now a Japanese manufacturer is backing the British industry and opening a brand-new EV plant in Sunderland.

The British automotive landscape has changed massively in the past 5 decades.  Most of the famous brands now being ‘foreign’ entities and heck some like MG not even being manufactured in the UK.  Since 2017 the volume of cars manufactured in the UK has fallen from 1.7 million per year to just under a million. 

The future looked bleak for the industry. Despite the history and the engineering prowess and flexible labour laws and plentiful supplies of clean energy the big foreign owned car companies remained to be convinced that the UK was a sensible place to invests as the rapid ascent of electrification continues un-abated.

The stupid grins on the faces of British PM Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt the Chancellor of the exchequer told their own story as they stood next to Uchida Makoto, the boss of Nissan in Sunderland.  The two senior British politicians were there as Nissan announced their plans to manufacture three EV models, AND, build a new battery plant in the city. Nissans plans come along with a swag of other good news for the UK’s automotive sector which now accounts for almost 12% of exports from the country.  But at what cost to the British tax payer.

Go to Here if you want to know the full details. 

Nissan are committed to building another ‘Gigafactory’ amounting to approximately 3 billion pounds in investments, the factory will actually be owned by China’s Envision who already have a factory in the UK. Gigafactories are crucial to the new EV industry, this is where the batteries come together. This is good news of sorts after the only British battery manufacturer went belly-up in January.  This was probably the news that jolted British politicians into action with a belated realisation that without battery manufacturing British car manufacturing would be dead.

This has resulted in a 2-billion-pound pledge to support the industry.  It is sad to realise that the only way that the EV switch can be achieved is by the granting of large-scale handouts of the magnitude that the Chinese and American governments have been doing. So, for EV’s to work they need massive influxes of tax payers’ money, is this really a sustainable industry?  Never the less the UK Gov. approach has been laid out in a far-reaching plan called the UK Battery Strategy, and let us not forget as Industry Minister Nusrat Ghani laid out in the forward to the report, the Li-ion battery was originally a British Invention.