With Northvolt purportedly(!) demonstrating that even EU battery production can apparently be thwarted by a Chinese tooling company sabotaging, there’s probably some reason to panic.
I suspect though that the only way for EU-based car companies to find out how to refine battery materials and to produce battery cells, at scale, is to lure Chinese companies to the EU and learn from them for the next couple years. They should know that strategy very well — it’s exactly the way their Chinese JVs worked out.
Of course there’s reason to panic. Every independent expert has been shouting from the rooftops for the last decade at least, that the EU are falling behind in battery technology. But politics and industry have been in denial and are completely incapable of long term planning. So now they wake up and start panicking.
There is, but it’s a Swedish politics blog and even they threw in that they couldn’t check the claims. So not exactly a good source. See this thread: https://lemmy.world/comment/12445221
With Northvolt purportedly(!) demonstrating that even EU battery production can apparently be thwarted by a Chinese tooling company sabotaging, there’s probably some reason to panic.
I suspect though that the only way for EU-based car companies to find out how to refine battery materials and to produce battery cells, at scale, is to lure Chinese companies to the EU and learn from them for the next couple years. They should know that strategy very well — it’s exactly the way their Chinese JVs worked out.
Of course there’s reason to panic. Every independent expert has been shouting from the rooftops for the last decade at least, that the EU are falling behind in battery technology. But politics and industry have been in denial and are completely incapable of long term planning. So now they wake up and start panicking.
Is there a source for that?
There is, but it’s a Swedish politics blog and even they threw in that they couldn’t check the claims. So not exactly a good source. See this thread: https://lemmy.world/comment/12445221
Nothing direct that I can find:
https://thedeepdive.ca/did-china-sabotage-northvolt-unraveling-the-crisis-behind-swedens-battery-giant/
If I’m not mistaken, BYD is already building factories in the EU. Probably assembly and not battery though.