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RIP, the British battery factory that never was

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64303149

I fear the ship has sailed on that front, start ups trying to get into this market face severe competition. Competition with years of experience and future years of raw material supply.

Look at Tesla, not content to wait on refineries to supply them they are building their own. Vertical integration in action.

I have lost count the number of battery variations Tesla can put into the Model Y for example.

And then there are the Chinese.......

And don't even dare mention Brexit

Time to tempt tesla with an incentivised euro facility up north maybe?

You could tell from the factory renders, who makes 100+ renders of a factory.

I was hopeful that a uk facility getting in early was on the cards, ..however it looked sonky as hell ages ago, was hoping for a uk bail out & some properly capable management brougt in... but no seems like a uk p155 filled river of ignored opportunity unless you are in the leather tanning / urea market

There isn't a snowball's chance in hell of Tesla building a factory in the UK.

We're outside the EU single market, logistically we're on the edge of the EU with really poor transport links, we have a relatively small local market with the limiting factor of being Right Hand Drive and far away from other RHD markets, local labour, land and energy costs are high, productivity rates are low, planning laws labyrinthine, and the UK car industry as a whole is shrinking like a dried up prune.

Sorry, bit grumpy this morning and had to get that off my chest!

Mr Gus wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 6:30 pm Time to tempt tesla with an incentivised euro facility up north maybe?

Batteries, not cars / vehicles Dan.
RHD being a massive.factor, whereas batteries import / export as components as well as finished product for home batt / other use markets.

Mr Gus wrote: ↑Wed Jan 18, 2023 9:48 amBatteries, not cars / vehicles Dan.
RHD being a massive.factor, whereas batteries import / export as components as well as finished product for home batt / other use markets.

Not really - the target market was cars, and the proposed factory was nowhere near either a car factory interested in buying from them or their source of raw materials. That puts them in a position where they need to compete against Chinese suppliers on price - pipe dream territory at best.

They're intrinsically linked though. Why would Tesla build a battery factory in the UK when it wasn't also making cars in the UK? For all the same reasons it wouldn't make sense to build batteries in northern England only to put them on a train to Germany? And as I mentioned, native UK car manufacturing as a whole is on a rapid decline, so no real local market for batteries for other car manufacturers either?

Mr Gus wrote: ↑Wed Jan 18, 2023 9:48 am Batteries, not cars / vehicles Dan.
RHD being a massive.factor, whereas batteries import / export as components as well as finished product for home batt / other use markets.