Gullible Europe has signed the death warrant for its own car industry

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie

Finally some in the media are waking up to the looming death of the European car industry.

Andrew Orlowski writes in the Telegraph:

The auto industry gathers for its annual summit on Tuesday, hosted by trade group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT). But for some, the industry isn’t waving, but drowning.

“I don’t see a way back,” reckons Nick Molden, chief executive of Emissions Analytics and an honorary senior research fellow at Imperial College. “It’ s now about the funeral and the wake”.

The Government has made its mind up, he thinks – it’s not going to protect the UK auto industry from cheap Chinese auto imports, or abandon the all-electric dogma, and so the industry must deal with it.

Around the country, the names of car dealerships are changing, as the Chinese wave begins to crash on to our shores. Chery’s Omoda only opened here in September last year, but will have 130 dealerships by the end of 2025, including the flagship Hogarth Roundabout site in Chiswick, formerly a Tesla showroom.

Jaecoo, another Chery brand, only launched in January, and claims to have contracts for 80 showrooms by the end of the year, with plans to eventually have 130 in total. Get used to names like GMW (Great Wall Motors) which has 46, and more.

The state has decreed what technology the consumer must use, and punishes producers for making anything else. It so happens to be a technology in which China has unbeatable cost advantages. The SMMT thinks the UK can compete in this new field.

We have all underestimated the long game that China is playing. It has convinced the West to dispose of its advantage in internal combustion engines for what one automotive critic calls “glorified golf carts” that only China can make cheaply. Labour will hide behind free trade and consumer welfare arguments as domestic industries suffer.

“The damage has been done – it devalued the car companies we had”, says Emissions Analytics’ Molden. “Governments have forced on the marketplace a technology where only non-European countries can succeed in a competitive market.”

Read the full story here.

It is even worse than Orlowski portrays. The suicidal ZEV mandate is handing hundreds of millions in subsidies to Chinese EV makers, encouraging their invasion of the UK market.

Orlowski sees a future where the European motor industry is merely an assembly line of imported parts:

More realistically, autogeddon will see local jobs in Europe manufacturing lines retained, but the real profits will be returned to China. And another piece on the geopolitical chessboard will have been captured, without a shot being fired.

Quite why successive governments ever thought their obsession with EVs would end up any other way is a mystery. And one of the guilty parties will be the SMMT, who for years have slavishly kowtowed with government policy, instead of sticking up for the interest of the industry.