Feels like we sort of passed over the massive news of the Northvolt (Europe’s only EV battery producer) collapse a few weeks back, so I’m going to re-up it here to highlight how monumentally fucked the European automobile industry is long term. Not exactly news to anybody here that’s been paying attention, but the staggering mismanagement of what is so obviously a key and strategic piece of European industry is perhaps still baffling. The article’s name is “The Northvolt dilemma: can European EVs avoid relying on Asian batteries?”, and as the Betteridge law of headlines states, the obvious answer to this question is “No.”

Two months before Northvolt filed for bankruptcy in the US, Robin Zeng, known as China’s “battery king”, had a quick but grim answer as to why European battery makers were struggling to make good products. “They have a wrong design . . . they have a wrong process . . . and they have the wrong equipment. How can they scale up?” the chief executive of CATL told Nicolai Tangen, the head of Norway’s $1.8tn oil fund. “So almost all mistakes together.” The bleak assessment from the world’s biggest electric vehicle battery manufacturer captures the scale of the failure for the industries behind the critical technology for Europe’s decarbonisation, leaving governments, companies and investors at a loss as to how to recraft the continent’s strategy to compete with China.

Northvolt’s demise means the battle for dominance of the European market is likely to play out between Asian battery makers. LGES and SK On both have European plants, in Poland and Hungary respectively, while CATL has a factory in Germany and a second site in Hungary due to begin production next year. But Tim Bush, a Seoul-based battery analyst at UBS, said there was little prospect at present that the Asian battery makers would be able to help the EU to meet its target for 90 per cent of the continent’s EV batteries to be produced locally by 2030. Bush noted that Korean battery makers were already paring back their investments in Europe, having invested billions of dollars in plants in North America that have been running at low utilisation rates because of lower than expected consumer demand for EVs. Potential Chinese battery investments on the continent were also likely to be complicated by the ongoing trade dispute between Brussels and Beijing over EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, he added. “The Koreans are not expanding, the Chinese have suspended construction and Europe’s new entrants are dropping like flies,” said Bush.

With European start-ups still behind in their ability to manufacture batteries at scale, industry executives say the only solution may be to continue their reliance on Asian participants until homegrown companies can absorb technology knowhow on battery chemistry, mass production and equipment manufacturing. “We need to find a deal with China because we won’t be able to compete . . . without the support of the Chinese companies that control the mining industry, chemicals, refining and their capacity and competence,” Luca De Meo, Renault’s chief executive, told reporters last month.

So basically, the Europeans destroyed their only chance of domestic battery consumption by epic mismanagement, and their acquiescence to USAmerican empire means they’re fucking up their opportunity to draw Chinese EV investments into Europe proper due to tensions and sanctions, and the US/South Korea can’t even begin to supply the necessary battery supply for the EU, so their car industry is basically fucked. The USAmerican destruction of European industry proceeds apace…

Source: https://archive.is/4Ys7n