I’ve passed the site several times recently. My initial thought is that it’s a piss poor government plan to make it look like “levelling up” is a real thing.
Never had the market for the batteries to be produced-all UK car factories had their own suppliers. As suggested by an earlier post, too greatly hyped-up as “Levelling Up”. A great shame for those who’ve lost jobs, and the local area too.
My old borough (where I lived for 40 years) is Thurrock. Have a look and see how much good investing in this type of thing did them. They are in the hole for hundreds of millions.
This says it all really “The founders of Britishvolt were trying to create a £4bn facility, from scratch, without the backing of a major manufacturer. What they did have was a vision which they hoped could surf a wave of political support - and attract the necessary funding.” There’s loads of startups that make huge losses for years - but they have backers with deep pockets to keep them going.\ Look at Tesla - vast investment and share value - but actual profits didn’t cover expenditure for many years. I’m not sure without researching but their whole business model is a real smoke and mirrors show. But Musk managed to get enough investors to back it until it became profitable https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/13/business/tesla-profit-outlook/index.html
Reading livefast comment above and not the article, sounds like how most startups go: have an idea based on filling a market gap that can attract not only private but public money, create growth huge plans, sell the dream over and over and hope someone takes the bite…ALL autonomous driving companies operate like this. Investors know someone will break in to the big market and/who be bought by a bigger company and are investing as much in that as the actual business itself. It’s a numbers game: stick 100k in 100 businesses and hopefully at least one will be the next ‘big thing’
