The auto industry gathers for its annual summit on Tuesday, hosted by trade group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). But for some, the industry isn’t waving, but drowning. [emphasis, links added]
“I don’t see a way back,” reckons Nick Molden, chief executive of Emissions Analytics and an honorary senior research fellow at Imperial College. “It’s now about the funeral and the wake.”
The Government has made its mind up, he thinks – it’s not going to protect the UK auto industry from cheap Chinese auto imports, or abandon the all-electric dogma, and so the industry must deal with it.
Around the country, the names of car dealerships are changing, as the Chinese wave begins to crash onto our shores.
Chery’s Omoda only opened here in September last year, but will have 130 dealerships by the end of 2025, including the flagship Hogarth Roundabout site in Chiswick, formerly a Tesla showroom.
Jaecoo, another Chery brand, only launched in January, and claims to have contracts for 80 showrooms by the end of the year, with plans to eventually have 130 in total. Get used to names like GMW (Great Wall Motors), which has 46, and more.
The state has decreed what technology the consumer must use, and punishes producers for making anything else.
It so happens to be a technology in which China has unbeatable cost advantages. The SMMT thinks the UK can compete in this new field.
Mike Hawes, chief executive of the trade body, is optimistic. He tells me that billions of pounds of inward investment is evidence of confidence that the UK can compete.
“The sector has fundamental strengths including a highly skilled and productive workforce, engineering excellence and world-class R&D capabilities,” he says. …
But underneath the surface, you can detect much anxiety. Energy costs make the UK uncompetitive, Nissan told MPs recently. Two weeks ago, Hawes accompanied the SMMT’s monthly sales bulletin on new car purchases with a side note.
The current market situation was “unsustainable”, he wrote. The 20.9pc BEV share is some way behind the proportion that Whitehall has mandated in its zero-emission vehicle mandate, despite “significant” discounting. …
“The damage has been done – it devalued the car companies we had”, says Emissions Analytics’ Molden. “Governments have forced on the marketplace a technology where only non-European countries can succeed in a competitive market.”
China’s advantages are deep and broad. It enjoys much lower energy costs, thanks to coal and gas, a stranglehold on key materials and the refining of them, and its firms enjoy very long subsidy programs.
All these advantages were known when EU and Whitehall bureaucrats set the CO2 emission targets, hoping European industry would spring to life in response.
But it can’t.
To this day, the EU and Whitehall officials stubbornly refuse to help and permit technologies like synthetic e-fuels and plug-in hybrids after 2030 to dilute their all-electric dogma.
Another piece on the geopolitical chessboard will have been captured, without a shot being fired.
Those would at least have allowed us to retain our competitive advantages in IP and engineering.
Now China is coming after those lifeboats, too. For the first time, last month, Chinese cars topped the best-seller hybrid charts in the UK – the BYD Seal U and Jaecoo 7 taking two spots on the plug-in hybrid vehicle charts.
So what happens next?
“We’ll end up in the end game with a European version of British Leyland,” thinks Molden, referring to Tony Benn’s monster merger of Triumph, Rover, Mini, and Austin Morris in 1968. …
More realistically, Autogeddon will see local jobs in Europe manufacturing lines retained, but the real profits will be returned to China.
And another piece on the geopolitical chessboard will have been captured, without a shot being fired.
The great delusion of the globalization era was that the West could retain global influence without manufacturing anything itself. What a way to find out this was false.
Read full post at The Telegraph
Once again, we have the same problem here in Australia. China is selling all of their brands and stupid Australians are buying them and therein lies to problem.
Just because they are cheap, they sell, however when the other brands disappear, the CCP will increase prices. What will the fools who buy these cars do then??
Going totally EV over this Global Warming, Climate Change has its Consequences and the UK is feeling it