The European Commision’s stance on this is baffling to me. It seems like both the EU and UK motor industry would be big losers under the current arrangement.
I get the EC may not have the most favourable view of the UK right now, but does it make sense to handicap their own manufacturers for a few political brownie points?
Fuck the manufacturers. They’ve had years to invest in local battery manufacturing and chose not to, betting on the fact that they could pressure the EU to roll it back. Nope, hold them to the flame. This is a step in the direction of reducing our exploitation of the developing world.
I agree with your point on reducing our exploitation of the developing world, but do you think the current measures will actually achieve that? I think it’ll only leave a gap there for other global manufacturers to fill and ultimately net exploitation of the developing world won’t be impacted by this.
Now I don’t want to argue that since there’ll be exploitation regardless so it’s better that “we” do it, but I think it would be better (from both a UK and EU perspective) to have European manufacturers to rely on those supply chains as they are at the moment, capture market share and exert influence on them to make them more ethical and sustainable, rather than let other global manufactures take that market where we’re able to exert less influence on them to clean up their act.
Would it not be better to be slightly more pragmatic about this and positively incentivise the development of local supply chains rather than wash our hands of the exploitation (that will continue to go on) as long as it’s someone else doing it?
The problem with exploitative supply chains is that they’re chains, so even if you make one link less exploitative, the sources and next steps in the chain likely remain exploitative.
Each improvement makes things better. If we let perfect be the enemy of good then we just allow exploitation to continue because we couldn’t fix it all at once.
Companies have already been exerting influence on these supply chains for decades to “improve” them, and they have only gotten worse. No, I don’t think that’s better.
Manufacturers aren’t going to just sit back and say, “oh well I guess we’ll just not compete in the industry anymore, let’s just let our competitors take it.” No way, the people running these firms aren’t going to just throw away business like that. They’ll lose out on some profits for a while and throw all their toys out the pram about that, but they will not just leave the market (or price themselves out of it). That’s just their gaslighting propaganda.
It is a serious problem for European manufacturers. The UK is by far their largest export market, with 1.2 million vehicles arriving at UK ports last year. Likewise more cars built in the UK are transported to the EU than any other region.
One screeching u-turn coming up from the Commission I bet
This is the best summary I could come up with:
New Brexit trade rules covering electric vehicles could cost European manufacturers £3.75bn over the next three years, an industry body has said.
The rules are meant to ensure that EU-produced electric cars are largely made from locally sourced parts.
The European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) also warned the measures could reduce output from EU factories by 480,000 vehicles.
“Driving up consumer prices of European electric vehicles, at the very time when we need to fight for market share in the face of fierce international competition, is not the right move,” said Renault chief executive Luca de Meo, who is also acting as ACEA’s president.
Sigrid de Vries, the secretary general of ACEA, said it was unsurprising that the industry’s appeals were meeting resistance.
Meanwhile the chief executive of the UK’s Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, Mike Hawes, told reporters last week that he thought a deal would be done - but it could be a last-minute affair.
The original article contains 652 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Well we’ve had the CAP, the CFP… time for the CCP? 🤪
It seems like both the EU and UK motor industry would be big losers under the current arrangement.
I mean, that was, if more generally, an issue kind of raised during Brexit campaigning and negotiations. That cross-Channel supply chains were going to be messed up and that this would impact automakers.
