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RIP British motor manufacturing
Who (or what) killed UK car manufacturing? There are lots of excuses, but the root cause is simple.
Once upon a time, Britain had a thriving motor industry. A combination of incompetent management and truculent unions almost killed it, until Nissan was persuaded that neither was inevitable. Toyota and Honda followed, while the surviving domestic manufacturers - usually foreign-owned - followed the Nissan example. By 2016, 1.6m cars a year rolled off UK production lines.
How long ago it all seems now. Last year the number was 905,233, and this year is expected to be lower again. It is not quite the death knell for the industry, but as a significant producer, the UK is dying. Apart from niche and luxury makers, it is likely that Nissan will be the last plant standing.
So who (or what) killed UK car manufacturing? After all, we are still buying cars, and still selling what we do make to the rest of the world. There are lots of excuses, but the root cause is simple: long-run government policies that forced up the price of energy, along with its associate assassin, the dash for renewables.
Energy first. UK energy is among the most expensive in the world, as you may have noticed this winter, but it’s worse for manufacturers. Thanks to successive governments recycling the subsidies to wind farms onto bills, industrial electricity is more expensive in the UK than in any other developed country - twice as expensive as in Germany, three times the price in France, and nearly four times that in the US.
Over time, such a competitive advantage will drive any manufacturer out of business, or at least out of the country. As for competing with China, its (coal-powered) electricity costs just 17 per cent of the UK price.
For the carmakers, this would be bad enough, but successive government policies have made it much worse. The Gadarene dash to force us into electric cars not only halted development of still-cleaner petrol and diesel engines, but is now punishing the manufacturers if they fail to sell a rising proportion of electric vehicles. The truth, for a variety of reasons, is that we don’t like them.
The vast majority are sold as second-car runabouts or company cars, where the tax breaks are almost irresistible. Those of us buying with our own money mostly buy second-hand, and prices of used electric cars are almost a giveaway when set against the comparable petrol vehicle.
The response from the motor trade body is as predictable as it is repetitious: give us more subsidies, like a cut in VAT, or more taxpayers' cash for charging points. At least spare us the penalty we pay for selling too many of those horrid old petrol cars. The list goes on.
Barring a tyre-screeching U-turn (always politically dangerous) it is probably too late to save the UK’s volume car-making. There are grants and subsidies to make batteries here, as well as contributions towards retooling for electric vehicles and deals for energy costs, but they just postpone the evil day.
The glass will go on falling
The glass will fall forever
You can break the bloody glass
But you can’t hold up the weather.