Obviously… Since the original announcement for the ban, they would have been planning for that… only for the wank stain of a government to do a uturn and delay it. I bet Ford have pissed a load of money up the wall trying to get inline with the timelines only for them to be slackened.
This goverment is fucking useless.
The statement is nothing but a dead cat to deflect from the heat pump scam that is coming. The UK has no buying power, so cannot dictate standards anymore. They can control standards within their own market, but for international products like cars they have very little say. The EU will be the ones to decide this one. If the EU pulls the plugs on petrol engines in 2030, then no one will build petrol engine for the European market. Building for just the UK will become very expensive.
This is aside from the fact that the Tories have very little time left in office. The Express posted this. Being a Tory mouthpiece, the Express sees this as something to whip Labour with. It is just a clown show.
Heat pump scam?
The EU is big enough and rich enough that someone will build cars for them.
Being the first to introduce the ban by 5 years has driven a lot of zero carbon transport investment to the UK. If it changes to the same as the EU, then why not set up there. Can totally understand why Ford UK is pissed, it wont be around much longer now as Ford focus investment in Germany.
Is this gonna be like when oil companies were saying they should be regulated, knowing full well the government isn’t going to do anything about their record profits? Like, the government is saving face for businesses and they’re taking an opportunity for free PR.
“No! Don’t do that! Don’t let us make so much profit!”
No, I think this is genuine (from the perspective of self-motivation). Designing and building vehicles is a long and expensive process, and up until now companies like Ford have been told that they don’t need any ICE vehicles for sale in the UK market for 2030. Now they’re told that they can either hurriedly reverse course and spin up new ICE vehicle lines for that period, or they can lose out to those companies (like, say, Toyota) who have not managed to make as much progress on the BEV lines and are still likely to have an oversupply of ICEVs.
What they want more than anything else is to know the rules of the game that they’re expected to be playing. Being told at what is, in corporate terms, basically the last minute that the rules have changed is going to be very frustrating.
And it’s not like they can even start making plans based on the new deadline. Why plan for 2035 when there’s a possibility that the Tories will get booted out at the next general election, and the incoming Labour government may move it back to 2030 (you know, assuming Starmer doesn’t go along with Sunak’s U-turn out of fear of losing votes).
This is the real problem with the UK’s stagnating economy and low productivity: it is impossible for businesses to make any plans for the future (which is necessary to commit to investment) when an unstable and incompetent government insists on changing the goalposts every couple of years.
The hard part is the supply chain. It doesn’t cost Ford money to keep an old ICE assembly line going. However they need to tell their suppliers years in advance how much material they will be buying. Those suppliers then use those plans to buy land for mines, buy equipment for the mines, build ore processing plants - all of this financed at good rates because the bank sees they have a contract to deliver.
I’m not an insider at Ford, but I’m confident they have agreements with suppliers to deliver the materials for the electric cars they expect to sell in 2030. They have to because the world today cannot build enough batteries for what they need. If Ford decides to sell 0 electric cars in 2030, they are still under contract to buy enough batteries for most of their cars and trucks to be electric - which is then batteries they will dump for whatever they can sell them for. (I don’t know what most is - they likely have complex contracts and probably have not secured supply for everything they need yet)
Until recently, I worked for an auto parts supplier. I’m not sure it works this way. The orders we would get would be for a few days later. We would get long term forecasts but demand could unexpectedly drop and we wouldn’t make the parts. I don’t think an auto maker was ever contractually obligated to buy our parts.
Different suppliers get different deals. And what deals you get can change from time to time. Today I expect if Ford wants to have batteries they will have to sign long term contracts - there are no enough batteries in the world and so someone needs to make a factory and that in turns means they want assurance they will sell enough batteries to make the factory worth the cost. I expect in 2040 plenty of battery capacity will exist in the world and so Ford will change to just ordering batteries from whoever can make them. For now though they need to sign long term contracts of some sort to ensure they get enough batteries.
I hate to be that guy, but do you have a source on this type of activity in the auto industry? I worked in new program launches. In my experience, the auto maker would require us to have certain production capacity. If there was a long-term change in demand, we would re-negotiate deals and take back some of that capacity for future programs or spread production from over-loaded lines. If a whole plant is being built just to supply one automaker, I would expect them to provide some capital. Granted, my experience is only in a few types of automotive components. It might be a radically different structure for other types of components.
No source that I can talk about publicly.
I’ve long though ice sales should be limited to 2% of all sales. That gives an easy out for any niches where ICE actually is compellingly better, but still forces everything else to switch. (travel to the north pole for example)
Then only rich people would have them
Not likely. Well in 2031 the rich might buy them, but by 2040 it will be obvious to the rich that regular gas stations are going out of business. 2% of all cars is not enough to support a nationwide gas station network, so the rich will buy expensive electric cars to ensure they can drive. By 2040 the only people buying gas/diesel cars are doing something that cannot be done with an electric car - trips to the north pole is the only example i can think of - but the beauty of saying 2% can be ICE means if there is something I can’t think of it can still be covered in that 2%. 2% is also small enough to ensure gas/diesel will become hard to find and so people who resist will still switch to something else.
Gas will still be available, but it will be something collectors buy, and those cars are not driven daily. We know how to make renewable gas and diesel. It costs 4-5x as much $ vs a simple oil well, but it is also a better fuel (it is synthetic molecules so engineers can choose the properties) so those left using petrol will probably prefer it.