“BMW’s investment is a huge vote of confidence in this country as a global leader in electric vehicles,” said Jeremy Hunt, as the German car giant backed the production of electric Minis in Oxford. A touch of political hyperbole is understandable since the plant would have been a very bad one for the UK to lose, but the chancellor is overdoing things.
It is obviously welcome news that about 4,000 jobs will be saved in Oxford and Swindon, where the panels are made. And, by recent yardsticks of taxpayer subsidy, the reported £75m contribution to the overall £600m investment almost counts as modest. It’s just the chancellor’s claim that the UK car manufacturing is now “motoring” requires context.
The point about BMW and Oxford is that the UK is playing a defensive game of protecting what we already have. Roughly the same is true about the commitment from Tata to invest in a gigafactory in the UK, thereby securing the largest part by value of the supply chain for Jaguar Land Rover’s switch into electric production in the UK. Stellantis’s production of electric vehicles at its factory in Ellesmere Port, after a £100m investment, falls into the same “saved” bracket.
What’s missing from the story so far is the arrival of new names in UK car manufacturing. The chart above, via the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), shows UK car production since the peak year of 2017, when 1.7m units were made. The decline thereafter came with the Brexit vote, the perhaps related departure of Honda from Swindon, the pandemic and its chip shortages, the rise in the cost of energy and plain old competition. The latest upward tick represents a recovery – but it’s a recovery from the lowest volume output since the 1950s.
The SMMT’s latest forecast foresees 860,000 units this year, a year-on-year rise of 11%, and “the possibility” to get production back to 1m in 2028. That medium-term forecast indeed looks plausible because the main blocks now look reasonably secure: 400,000 cars, say, from Nissan in Sunderland; 200,000 Minis in Oxford; plus JLR reaching a combined 300,000 from Halewood and Solihull. But remember that, as recently as 2015, the SMMT was talking about the possibility of reaching 2m by 2020.
The open question is whether the non-departure of the likes of BMW’s Minis, and Tata’s morale-boosting gigafactory (complete with estimated £500m subsidy), will breed confidence and pull in a few newer players in the electric market. On that score, it’s hard to detect signs of optimism yet. Back in July, BYD, the large Chinese manufacturer hoping to sell 800,000 cars annually in Europe by 2030, said the UK wasn’t even on its longlist of locations for its first European electric plant; it blamed Brexit, much as Tesla did in 2019.
Meanwhile, the post-Brexit “rules of origin” legislation, which dictates the content by value of a vehicle that must be sourced in the UK or EU to avoid 10% tariffs, continues to sit as an uncertainty over the industry. Some form of EU-UK fudge to move next year’s “cliff edge” to 2027 is still the way to bet, but it hasn’t happened yet.
None of which alters the fact that the newsflow from the UK car industry is vastly improved from a year ago, when the losing bet that was Britishvolt was causing general gloom. Subsidies for JLR and BMW look a much better use of public money, even if the Oxford facility will be sourcing its batteries from Germany or China. Just don’t mistake stability for the fast lane.
