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#961
UK total trade with the EU drop by about a quarter (23%, that's exports + imports), whereas non-EU barely budged.

"Total trade in goods with EU countries decreased by 23.1% and with non-EU countries decreased by 0.8% comparing Quarter 1 2021 with Quarter 1 2018. "

It looks to be about the same for exports (18.1% fall) and imports (21.7% fall), and so there must be some precious metals stuff to add in to get to the 23.1% figure.

When you look at some of the detail you can see that this period included significant slowdowns in German car production (Covid, chip shortages) and is also of course pre-Berlin opening. Add that sort of stuff back in and it seems likely that balance of trade is going to shift against UK, much as was predicted. This is of course one of the main motivations for the UK to get large scale BEV-manufacture and cell-manufacture within the UK, rather than imported.

The impacts of EU exit and the coronavirus on UK trade in goods - Office for National Statistics

An analysis of UK trade in goods in the context of the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the end of the EU transition period on 31 December 2020.
www.ons.gov.uk

or if you like the easy-read, try

www.theguardian.com

China replaces Germany as UK’s biggest import market

Trade with EU falls 23% from 2018 as Brexit and Covid disrupt exports from Britain
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
#964
"The UK lost out to France as the most popular European destination for foreign investors for the second year in a row, amid disruption from Brexit and the coronavirus pandemic.

During 2020 the UK secured 975 inward investment projects compared with France’s 985 projects, according to accountancy firm EY.

The UK had dominated foreign direct investments (FDIs) into Europe for the first 18 years of the annual survey of foreign investments. However, the UK lost its crown for the first time to France in 2019 as businesses grappled with uncertain prospects for a trade agreement between the UK and the EU................

Academics at Aston University in Birmingham last month published research suggesting that Brexit caused services exports to fall by £114bn between 2016 and 2019........

" Office for National Statistics figures showed that the value of foreign direct investment into the UK was £36bn in 2019, down from £66bn in 2018 and below the 10-year average of £54bn.

www.theguardian.com

UK second to France again for attracting foreign investment in Europe

Britain loses out for second year in row as Brexit and Covid-19 disrupt 2020
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

For TSLA this means the UK is desperate to pony up the $$$ to get a TSLA factory. That gives TSLA a useful frightener to force more $$$ onto the table when talking to any other potential location in Europe.
 
#969
1625082482744.png
 
#970
Manufacturers will not invest in UK after Brexit.

www.reuters.com

Nissan bets on UK 'renaissance' with battery plant and new vehicle

Nissan Motor Co (7201.T) bet on Britain to supercharge its European electric future on Thursday, pledging $1.4 billion with its Chinese partner to build a giant battery plant that will power 100,000 vehicles a year including a new crossover model.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
 
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#971
RobStark said:
Manufacturers will not invest in UK after Brexit.

www.reuters.com

Nissan bets on UK 'renaissance' with battery plant and new vehicle

Nissan Motor Co (7201.T) bet on Britain to supercharge its European electric future on Thursday, pledging $1.4 billion with its Chinese partner to build a giant battery plant that will power 100,000 vehicles a year including a new crossover model.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
Click to expand...
www.theguardian.com

Nissan sets out plans for £1bn electric car hub in Sunderland

Increase in production at plant will result in 1,650 new jobs and support thousands more in UK supply chain
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

"The plans, which are being underpinned by an estimated £100m in taxpayer funding, include an electric battery plant built by Nissan’s partner Envision, a battery recycling facility, and production of a new all-electric car model. .................Ministers and executives declined to confirm the level of government support. However, of the £1bn cost, Nissan is contributing £423m, which will go towards producing a new-generation all-electric crossover vehicle and creating 900 new jobs.Envision, which is jointly owned by Nissan and built Europe’s first car battery plant in Sunderland in 2012, will invest £450m in a new 9GWh-capacity gigafactory to deliver electric power packs to Nissan, creating another 750 roles. The government [taxpayer] is understood to have contributed the rest of the money [£100m]. "

So a £100m taxpayer bribe gets only 9GWh, surely they can do better than that, or are they desperate.
 
#972
It is beginning to look as if the going rate for a bung from the UK taxpayer to keep a automotive plant in the UK is 10%:


"The Vauxhall owner Stellantis is poised to announce plans to build a new electric van at its Ellesmere Port plant, securing the immediate future of the site.

The company has been in talks with the UK government over financial support for further investment in the factory on the Wirral in north-west England, which has been considered in jeopardy since the Brexit vote.

Stellantis, formed this year by the merger of Peugeot and Chrysler, has decided to invest in switching the plant from producing the Astra to a new model of electric van. ......The exact government support is unlikely to be disclosed, but could run to around 10% of the total investment, which is believed to be between £300m and £400m. The Stellantis announcement will follow news this week that Nissan is to build a £1bn battery gigafactory in Sunderland, believed to be with a subsidy package from the UK taxpayer of around £100m.

Stellantis executives indicated earlier this year that they were prepared to close the plant, with the loss of around 1,000 remaining jobs, should the government not step in with support. Disappointing sales of the Astra had combined with the uncertainty of Brexit negotiations, with a deal on tariffs between the EU and the UK only unveiled at the end of the transition period. That deal gives a further grace period for electric vehicle exports and would also allow Stellantis to source its batteries from the continent."

www.theguardian.com

Vauxhall owner in plan to produce new electric van at Ellesmere Port

Stellantis poised to announce move after talks with UK government over financial support for Wirral factory
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

edit : and this gets further discussed by Chris Grey at Still stuck on the Mobius Strip

"Then there was the news of Nissan’s investment in electric car and battery production. That is good in itself, though we do not know how much government support was involved, but again it reflects the proximity of the EU market (few, if any, UK-built Nissans will be sold anywhere else, no matter how many trade deals the UK makes on the other side of the world). Bringing battery production to the UK (via a Chinese partner) is part of ensuring that Nissan’s cars will continue to meet the rules of origin requirements of the TCA so that they can be sold tariff-free in the EU. It’s an accommodation to Brexit, rather than a benefit of Brexit. From this point of view it is possible to argue (but impossible to prove) that it wouldn’t have happened but for Brexit, although it’s also bound up with the move to electric vehicles in both the EU and the UK.

Naturally, despite normally being so insistent on proof of causality, Brexiters are crowing that this discredits the warnings of Nissan and remainers, conveniently forgetting that those warnings related mainly to the no-deal Brexit so many of them advocated. In fact, car makers are an important case where the TCA has considerable value, although it has by no means been a panacea for them or for Japanese companies in the UK. "
 
Last edited:
#973
petit_bateau said:
It is beginning to look as if the going rate for a bung from the UK taxpayer to keep a automotive plant in the UK is 10%:


"The Vauxhall owner Stellantis is poised to announce plans to build a new electric van at its Ellesmere Port plant, securing the immediate future of the site.

The company has been in talks with the UK government over financial support for further investment in the factory on the Wirral in north-west England, which has been considered in jeopardy since the Brexit vote.

Stellantis, formed this year by the merger of Peugeot and Chrysler, has decided to invest in switching the plant from producing the Astra to a new model of electric van. ......The exact government support is unlikely to be disclosed, but could run to around 10% of the total investment, which is believed to be between £300m and £400m. The Stellantis announcement will follow news this week that Nissan is to build a £1bn battery gigafactory in Sunderland, believed to be with a subsidy package from the UK taxpayer of around £100m.

Stellantis executives indicated earlier this year that they were prepared to close the plant, with the loss of around 1,000 remaining jobs, should the government not step in with support. Disappointing sales of the Astra had combined with the uncertainty of Brexit negotiations, with a deal on tariffs between the EU and the UK only unveiled at the end of the transition period. That deal gives a further grace period for electric vehicle exports and would also allow Stellantis to source its batteries from the continent."

www.theguardian.com

Vauxhall owner in plan to produce new electric van at Ellesmere Port

Stellantis poised to announce move after talks with UK government over financial support for Wirral factory
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

edit : and this gets further discussed by Chris Grey at Still stuck on the Mobius Strip

"Then there was the news of Nissan’s investment in electric car and battery production. That is good in itself, though we do not know how much government support was involved, but again it reflects the proximity of the EU market (few, if any, UK-built Nissans will be sold anywhere else, no matter how many trade deals the UK makes on the other side of the world). Bringing battery production to the UK (via a Chinese partner) is part of ensuring that Nissan’s cars will continue to meet the rules of origin requirements of the TCA so that they can be sold tariff-free in the EU. It’s an accommodation to Brexit, rather than a benefit of Brexit. From this point of view it is possible to argue (but impossible to prove) that it wouldn’t have happened but for Brexit, although it’s also bound up with the move to electric vehicles in both the EU and the UK.

Naturally, despite normally being so insistent on proof of causality, Brexiters are crowing that this discredits the warnings of Nissan and remainers, conveniently forgetting that those warnings related mainly to the no-deal Brexit so many of them advocated. In fact, car makers are an important case where the TCA has considerable value, although it has by no means been a panacea for them or for Japanese companies in the UK. "
Click to expand...
Brexit has happened. Moaners need to make their arguments simpler for the new world - we can't all think in multiple "what if" universes simultaneously to make a pointless point. Given where we are, do you want a factory making zero emission cars or not?
 
#974
Someone gets it, specifically David Bailey, professor of business economics at Birmingham Business School,

"“The real danger is that unless we make batteries in the UK we will probably lose our mass car industry,” warns Bailey. “We’ve really got some catching up to do.”

"By 2025, the SMMT forecasts the UK will have only a fraction of the production of other countries: 12 gigawatt hours of lithium-ion battery capacity. That compares with 91 GWh in the US, including the giant Tesla facility in Nevada, 32 GWh in France, and 164 GWh in Germany."

www.theguardian.com

Only batteries have the power to save British carmaking

Nissan’s ‘gigafactory’ in Sunderland must be the first of many sites if the UK is to compete in the electric vehicle era
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
#976
RobStark said:
www.reuters.com

UK Vauxhall factory gets new lease of life with electric vans

The Vauxhall car factory in northwest England will get a 100-million pound ($140 million) investment to produce electric vans, owner Stellantis (STLA.MI) said on Tuesday, the second positive announcement for British vehicle output in recent days.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
Click to expand...
There are some things interesting about this,

1. £30m taxpayer support to get £100m co-invest, so now up to 30%. The Nissan one was £100m for £1bn, so 10%. Makes sense that UK signs on for the cheapest deals it can negotiate first. This suggests future deals may be more expensive. By the time Tesla ever build in the UK maybe it will be 100% taxpayer funding and 0% Tesla funding. I wonder how much Tata-JLR will be able to extort from UK.
2. Stellantis are not moving cell production into UK, so it seems Stellantis are not prepared to move the most important bit into Britain. Without UK-based cell manufacture the omens are not good for balance-of-payments.
3. Stellantis are having to do this because a) the Luton plant is maxed out at 100,000 vans/year and cannot make any more, b) the new Astra (hatchback) is a dud and not selling well, meaning that Ellesmere Port would likely otherwise have closed, and c) the demand for vans in UK + EU is huge. So both a problem and an opportunity for Stellantis. (The US-ians need to pay attention to the global van market, it is in many ways at least as important as the US pick-up truck market.)

"Vauxhall owner Stellantis has announced that it will invest £100m to build electric cars and vans at Ellesmere Port, in Cheshire, in a move that will make it the first large plant in the UK dedicated exclusively to electric vehicles.

It will build four electric vans and their passenger car equivalents at the UK factory under Stellantis’s Vauxhall, Opel, Peugeot and Citroën brands, replacing the Astra family car which will be built in Germany instead. The decision, backed by a reported £30m in taxpayer subsidies, will secure the jobs of 1,000 workers at Ellesmere Port as well as an estimated 3,000 in the supply chain.

The investment will be welcomed across the UK car industry, which has suffered from years of uncertainty over foreign owners’ investment plans since the Brexit vote in 2016. It is the second significant investment into the UK car industry in a week, after Nissan said it would pour £1bn into electric car and battery production in Sunderland.
....Stellantis will install new equipment to assemble battery packs at Ellesmere Port. However, the plant will source the cells that make up batteries from EU plants owned by ACC, a joint venture between Stellantis and French oil company Total."

www.theguardian.com

Vauxhall owner to invest £100m to build electric vehicles at Ellesmere Port

Stellantis plan will secure jobs of 1,000 workers as well as 3,000 in supply chain
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
#977
The big problem with battery manufacture in the UK is that the battery will be deemed to be a UK product. As such, through WTO country of origin rules, it will likely only be installed into a British manufactured EV, as otherwise the EV would have tariffs if installed into a "foreign" car and then exported elsewhere out of that market (e.g. EU made car with British battery pack being exported to Japan).

So in post Brexit UK, EV battery manufacture will likely be relatively niche here, as unless it is attached to a UK made EV there will be very little by way of an export market. Although, it must be said, that for the same reasons the reverse is also true, with all UK made EVs being exported needing UK made batteries - hence the investments we are now seeing (although ironically they could have EU made packs without tariffs if exporting only to the EU).

Of course, the problem here is that there are not many large scale UK car manufacturers, which is why the UK Government has had to splash millions of tax money just to get the ones that are still here to stay - it has put the car manufacturers in a terrific negotiating position where they can demand government cash just to keep the lights on.

There will be other battery markets of course (e.g. home storage), but again likely to be predominantly domestic only for the same reasons. For this market it will not be the "going global" tag line as sold unfortunately. rules is rules.
 
#978
Honda workers in Swindon [UK] to face 'reality check' after it closes
The loss of Honda in Swindon is not just bad news for the 3,000 people who work there, but will send ripples out through the local economy, with about 1,800 jobs ending at two local firms that supply the plant. As 35 years of manufacturing history comes to an end,................. Professor Andrew Graves from the University of Bath has worked in the car industry for decades, from mass-production firms to Formula One. "Honda came because Britain was in the European market," he said. "When they arrived, standards were terrible in the British car industry, but they improved fast." By 2019 Honda Swindon was one of the company's most productive plants.................. In Tokyo, Honda executives denied the decision had anything to with Brexit but it came as the British government was in deadlock over whether to stay in the European Single Market or leave, and risk 10% export tariffs on sales to the EU. Prof Graves is convinced Brexit played a crucial part. He said: "The Swindon factory was world-class but because we chose to pull out of Europe, which was the most important market to Honda, they chose to stick with America and Japan. "Brexit was the straw that broke the camel's back."

www.bbc.co.uk

Honda workers in Swindon to face 'reality check' after it closes

Swindon car plant prepares to stop production on July 30 after 35 years of production.
www.bbc.co.uk

(before anyone suggests that Tesla buy the site, it appears to already have sold for warehousing)
 
#979
Probably not sensible to run just-in-time manufacturing depending on complex supply chains in post-Brexit UK if one can avoid it.

"Driver shortage crisis threatens UK milk deliveries in wake of Brexit and Covid

The latest problems with deliveries comes amid frenzied competition for specialist HGV drivers caused by a mix of Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and tax changes that have prompted some drivers to leave the trade. A surge in demand for home delivery has also provided alternative employment opportunities.

Logistics UK, which represents freight owners including supermarkets, has estimated a shortage of 90,000 HGV drivers, including about 25,000 from the EU who have gone home since Brexit. There is also a backlog of 45,000 lorry driving tests, which are expected to lead to about 25,000 drivers becoming available.
"

www.theguardian.com

Driver shortage crisis threatens UK milk deliveries in wake of Brexit and Covid

Dairy industry giant Arla calls on UK government to address driving test backlog, visa issues and self-isolation rules
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

This is the best blog on the subject
orynski.eu

20 reasons why there is shortage of drivers in the UK - orynski.eu

Thousands of people who shop in the UK probably noticed shortages of products in British supermarkets. The supply problems are blamed on the shortage of HGV drivers and the government is taking steps to tackle it: the driving hours have been extended and there is a talk about bringing the army...
orynski.eu orynski.eu
 
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