UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
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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.
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)