The electric shock behind Europe’s stuttering EV future – and how China has leapfrogged major car-exporting nations
Across Europe, car companies are cutting jobs and shutting factories – to the extent that some question their very existence. So it’s worth asking the question: what’s gone wrong with Europe (and for that matter America’s) car industry?
While some will reach for their own pet conclusions (Brexit! Electric vehicle deadlines! Government regulations!) in practice there’s something bigger, deeper and less parochial going on here. As the world shifts from petrol and diesel cars to their electric counterparts, a seismic shift is taking place in the global motor industry.
It is a shift which threatens to cause even more pain and disruption at carmakers in developed economies. And given most of these countries’ high-skilled and highly-paid manufacturing jobs are to be found in or around the car-making sector, this is no trivial matter.
A Chinese-made BYD Seagull electric car on display in Bangkok. Pic: Anusak Laowilas/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Look at a chart of global car exports and you see a very striking sight indeed.
The lines for the traditional car-making countries – Japan, Germany, South Korea – are more or less flat, save for the period around the pandemic. But now look at the line for China. This country which, only a few years ago, was one of the minnows of the global car trade with barely 250,000 car exports each year, has suddenly launched into the stratosphere. In the space of barely two years, it has leapfrogged all the other major car-exporting nations to become the world’s biggest car exporter – in terms of the sheer number of cars.
This arresting chart might give you the impression that Chinese dominance is a very recent thing – a sudden and unexpected spurt. Except that that’s somewhat misleading, because this shift has been a long time coming. To see why, it helps (strange as this will sound) to ponder the innards of a typical car.
A conventional petrol or diesel car is an assembly of lots of different components. There’s the radiator, the exhaust pipe, the wheels and the brakes, but most of all, there is the engine. An internal combustion engine is – even in 2024 – an extraordinary piece of machinery. We take these things for granted (and, given their carbon emissions, some sneer at them). But the ability to take fuel and explode it in a controlled way that turns wheels remains a great mechanical achievement.
To be able to make these engines – contraptions of many different parts, each of which undergoes enormous stresses – at a low cost and in a way that ensures their long-term reliability is all the more impressing an achievement.
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Indeed, making reliable engines was such an enormous industrial challenge that it defied China for most of the past century. Part of the reason Chinese car exports were so low for so long was because China struggled to make decent engines.
So it won’t surprise you to learn that the engine is comfortably the most expensive component in a typical car – accounting for more than a fifth of the total value of a car. Much of Britain and Europe’s car industry is focused on this 21% of the car value – because that’s where our expertise has been built up over decades.
Taking bits of steel and combining them into this complex contraption is part of the industrial story of Europe (and America). Millions of people are employed across Europe working either at carmakers or their suppliers making these engines. This is where some of the best-paid, highest-skilled manufacturing jobs are to be found, even today in 2024.
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But here’s the critical thing. In an electric car there is no engine. Instead, the vast majority of the value lies in something else: the battery.
Making a battery is very, very different to making an engine. It’s chemical engineering – not mechanical engineering. The skills built up by European carmakers over decades are simply not directly transferrable. Even if Europe was the only continent in the world making cars, it would still be an almighty challenge to shift from one industrial model to a very different one, without having a rollercoaster ride along the way.
But Europe’s problem (and America’s and South Korea and Japan’s too) is that it’s not alone in making cars. China, which struggled to compete on those car engines decades ago, has been investing in electric carmaking for some time.
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In doing so, it has been helped by subsidies far more generous than those their Western competitors tend to receive (nearly all carmakers get subsidies – one way or another). Beijing has long been determined both to dominate this next phase of car production and reduce its reliance on Middle Eastern oil imports – both of which point towards mass electrification of road transport.
And those subsidies – alongside cheap energy costs helped by China’s relaxed attitude towards coal-fired power – are one part of the explanation for why China has been able to produce cars with far cheaper costs than their Western competitors. Analysts from Swiss bank UBS recently tried to break down the costs of a German-produced VW ID3 compared with the component costs of a Chinese car, the BYD Seal.
They found that the BYD was cheaper to produce – not just overall, but for every single component part. And since it was far cheaper to produce, that meant it could be sold at far cheaper rates.
Some of that is explained by state aid but, even more so, it’s a consequence of something else. China’s interest in batteries is not a recent trend. It has been investing in their production for many, many years. It has been attempting to dominate not just the production of cells but also of the cathodes and anodes that go inside them – not to mention the chemicals used to make those electrodes. It has been firming up the entire supply chain – all the way down to the mines. And while you can find only so much lithium and cobalt in China, Chinese firms have been buying up mines in Africa and elsewhere for years.
The upshot is that China is the dominant country not just in the production of EVs and the cells inside them but in nearly every component that goes inside those cells. If you want to make a battery today you will be hard pressed not to use at least some Chinese technology or products. It’s that dominant.
The late business writer Clay Christensen coined the term “disruptive innovation” to describe moments like this. When a new technology comes along that completely changes the industrial structure in a sector, it’s incredibly difficult for the incumbent businesses to respond and adapt. They simply aren’t set up for it. Think about how digital photography displaced traditional film, or how smartphones have displaced traditional computers.
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What makes this moment so tricky for European carmakers is that they are trying to compete with a disruptive innovation which has been supercharged by Chinese industrial strategy. The upshot is that China is so far ahead on battery production – particularly of low-cost batteries – that it’s hard to see how Europe and America – and, to some extent, South Korea and Japan, can catch up.
All of which is why so many countries are reaching for the most drastic of all economic remedies: large, expensive tariffs on imports of Chinese EVs. The US and Canada have imposed 100% tariffs, India is following suit with similar rates. Europe has introduced a sliding range of extra tariffs. Japan has yet to do so, but is protected to some extent by the fact that their consumers habitually typically buy Japanese.
The main outlier here is the UK. This country has not yet imposed any extra tariffs on Chinese imports. The upshot is that this is one of the most attractive places in the world for Chinese producers to market their cars right now – and one of the cheapest places to buy a Chinese car. But that has profound consequences for domestic car producers.
With energy costs having risen so much, it is getting harder, rather than easier, to compete with Chinese production domestically. It raises profound questions about the ability of this country’s car industry to survive or compete.
The logic of these transitions is that they often move in slow motion but become quite self-fulfilling. Britain and Europe had opportunities to invest in batteries in years gone by; they have been spectacularly slow-moving in setting up new supply chains. But the cards were always stacked against them. The coming years will probably get tougher, as the 2035 EV deadline approaches, pushing consumers towards a market which is becoming ever more dominated by one country.
You’ve doubtless heard of the National Grid, the network of pylons and electricity infrastructure ensuring the country is supplied with power. You’re probably aware that there is a similar national network of gas pipelines sending methane into millions of our boilers.
But far fewer people, even among the infrastructure cognoscenti, are even faintly familiar with the UK Ethylene Pipeline System. Yet this pipeline network, obscure as it might be, is one of the critical parts of Britain’s industrial infrastructure. And it’s also a useful clue to help explain why the government has just announced it’s spending more than £120m to bail out the chemical plant at Grangemouth in Scotland.
Ethylene is one of those precursor chemicals essential for the manufacture of all sorts of everyday products. React it with terephthalic acid and you end up with polyester. Combine it with chlorine and you end up with PVC. And when you polymerise ethylene itself you end up with polyethylene – the most important plastic in the world.
Why Grangemouth matters
Ethylene is, in short, a very big deal. Hence, why, many years ago, a pipeline was built to ensure Britain’s various chemical plants would have a reliable supply of the stuff. The pipes connected the key nodes in Britain’s chemicals infrastructure: the plants in the north of Cheshire, which derived chemicals from salt, the vast Wilton petrochemical plant in Teesside and, up in Scotland, the most important point in the network – Grangemouth.
The refinery would suck in oil and gas from the North Sea and turn it into ethane, which it would then “crack”, an energy-hungry process that involves heating it up to phenomenally high temperatures. Some of that ethylene would be used on site, but large volumes would also be sent down the pipeline. It would be pumped down to Runcorn, where the old ICI chlor-alkali plant, now owned by INEOS, would use it to make PVC. It would be sent to Wilton, where it would be turned into polyethylene and polyester.
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That’s the first important thing to grasp about this network – it is essential for the operation of a whole series of plants, many of them run by entirely different companies.
The second key thing to note is that, after the closure of the cracker at Wilton (now owned by Saudi company Sabic) and the ExxonMobil plant at Mossmorran in Fife, Grangemouth is the last plant standing. While the refinery no longer uses North Sea oil and gas, instead shipping in ethane from the US, it still makes its own ethylene.
So when INEOS began consulting on plans to close that ethylene cracker, officials down south in Westminster began to panic. The problem wasn’t just the 500 or so jobs that might have been lost in Grangemouth. It was the domino effect that would feed throughout the sector. All of a sudden, all those plants at the other ends of the pipeline would be affected too. In practice, the closure might have eventuated in more than a thousand job losses – maybe more.
What’s happening now?
All of which helps explain the news today – that the Department for Business and Trade is putting more than £120m of taxpayer money into the site. The bailout (it’s hard to see it as anything but) is not the first. The government has also put hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer money into British Steel, which it quasi-nationalised earlier this year, not to mention extra cash into Tata Steel at Port Talbot and loan guarantees to help Jaguar Land Rover after it faced an unprecedented cyber attack.
Work ground to a halt at JLR’s Wolverhampton factory after a cyber attack. Pic: PA
But while this package will undoubtedly provide Christmas cheer here in Grangemouth today, the government is left facing two distinct problems.
Reactive rather than strategic
The first is that for all that the chancellor and business secretary (who are themselves planning to visit Grangemouth today) are keen to pitch this latest move as a coherent part of their industrial strategy, it’s hard not to see it as something else. Far from appearing strategic, instead they seem reactive. To the extent that they have a coherent industrial strategy, it mostly seems to involve forking out public money when a given plant is close to closure. If they weren’t already, Britain’s industrialists will today be wondering to themselves: what would it take to get ourselves some of this money in future?
The crisis continues
The second issue is that the Grangemouth bailout is very unlikely to end the crisis spreading across Britain’s chemicals sector. A series of plants – some prominent, others less so – have closed in the past few years. The chemicals sector – once one of the most important in the economy – has seen its economic output drop by more than 20% in the past three years alone.
This is not just a UK-specific story. Something similar is happening across much of Europe. But for many chemicals companies, it simply doesn’t add up to invest and build in the UK any more – a product in part of regulations and in part of high energy costs. In short, this story isn’t over yet. There will be more twists and turns to come.
Britain loves chocolate.
We’re estimated to consume 8.2kg each every year, a good chunk of it at Christmas, but the cost of that everyday luxury habit has been rising fast.
Whitakers have been making chocolate in Skipton in north Yorkshire for 135 years, but they have never experienced price pressures as extreme as those in the last five.
“We buy liquid chocolate and since 2023, the price of our chocolate has doubled,” explains William Whitaker, the real-life Willy Wonka and the fourth generation of the family to run the business.
William Whitaker, managing director of the company
“It could have been worse. If we hadn’t been contracted [with a supplier], it would have trebled.
“That represents a £5,000 per-tonne increase, and we use a thousand tonnes a year. And we only sell £12-£13m of product, so it’s a massive effect.”
Whitakers makes 10 million pieces of chocolate a week in a factory on the much-expanded site of the original bakery where the business began.
Automated production lines snake through the site moulding, cutting, cooling, coating and wrapping a relentless procession of fondants, cremes, crisps and pure chocolate products for customers, including own-brand retail, supermarkets, and the catering trade.
Mmmmm….
Steepest inflation in the business
All of them have faced price increases as Whitakers has grappled with some of the steepest inflation in the food business.
Cocoa prices have soared in the last two years, largely because of a succession of poor cocoa harvests in West Africa, where Ghana and the Ivory Coast produce around two-thirds of global supply.
A combination of drought and crop disease cut global output by around 14% last year, pushing consumer prices in the other direction, with chocolate inflation passing 17% in the UK in October.
…chocolate….
Skimpflation and shrinkflation
Some major brands have responded by cutting the chocolate content of products – “skimpflation” – or charging more for less – “shrinkflation”.
Household-name brands including Penguin and Club have cut the cocoa and milk solid content so far they can no longer be classified as chocolate, and are marketed instead as “chocolate-flavour”.
Whitakers have stuck to their recipes and product sizes, choosing to pass price increases on to customers while adapting products to the new market conditions.
“Not only are major brands putting up prices over 20%, sometimes 40%, they’ve also reduced the size of their pieces and sometimes the ingredients,” says William Whitaker.
“We haven’t done any of that. We knew that long-term, the market will fall again, and that happier days will return.
“We’ve introduced new products where we’ve used chocolate as a coating rather than a solid chocolate because the centre, which is sugar-based, is cheaper than the chocolate.
“We’ve got a big product range of fondant creams, and others like gingers and Brazil nuts, where we’re using that chocolate as a coating.”
The costs are adding up
A deluge of price rises
Brazil nuts have enjoyed their own spike in price, more than doubling to £15,000 a tonne at one stage.
On top of commodity prices determined by markets beyond their control, Whitakers face the same inflationary pressures as other UK businesses.
“We’ve had the minimum wage increasing every year, we had the national insurance rise last year, and sort of hidden a little bit in this budget is a business rate increase.
“This is a small business, we turn over £12m, but our rates will go up nearly £100,000 next year before any other costs.
“If you add up all the cocoa and all the other cost increases in 2024 and 2025, it’s nearly £3m of cost increases we’ve had to bear. Some of that is returning to a little normality. It does test the relevance of what you do.”
Warner Bros is reportedly set to reject a hostile $108bn (£81bn) takeover bid from Paramount, with one of the prospective buyer’s financing partners confirming it’s pulled out of the offer.
A spokesman for investment firm Affinity, owned by Donald Trump‘s son-in-law Jared Kushner, told Sky News’ US partner network NBC News “the dynamics of investment have changed significantly”.
It had backed Paramount’s bid, along with funds from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries.
Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal report the Warner Bros Discovery board are set to advise shareholders to reject Paramount‘s bid – paving the way for Netflix, which had struck a $72bn (£54bn) deal.
If the takeover goes through, it would give the streaming giant the rights to hit Warner franchises like Harry Potter, Batman, and Game Of Thrones, as well an extensive back catalogue of classic films.
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Pic: iStock
It is the latest twist in a takeover saga where the winner will acquire a huge advantage in the streaming wars.
In June, Warner announced its plan to split into two companies – one for its TV, film studios and HBO Max streaming services, and one for the Discovery element of the business, which primarily comprises legacy TV channels that show cartoons, news, and sports.
Netflix agreed a $27.75 per-share price with the firm, which equates to the $72bn purchase figure deal to secure its film and TV studios, with the deal giving the assets a total value of $82.7bn.
However, Paramount said its offer would pay $30 (£22.50) cash per share, representing $18bn (£13.5bn) more in cash than its rival offered. The offer was made directly to shareholders, asking them to reject Netflix’s deal, in what is known as a hostile takeover.
The Paramount deal would involve rival US news channels CBS and CNN being brought under the same parent company.
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The US government will have a big say on the final deal, with the winning company likely facing the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division, a federal agency which scrutinises business deals to ensure fair competition.
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