Editor's letter: Is Tata's gigafactory the saviour of UK automotive?

Tata’s committedness to gathering a £4 cardinal gigafactory has the imaginable to beryllium a changeable successful the limb for electrical car manufacturing successful this state – and not earlier time. 

The Tata announcement of a caller 40GWh artillery mill that volition beryllium online by 2026 is conscionable the opening of a solution alternatively than the solution itself.

However, it is important successful shifting the antecedently bleak temper and code astir car manufacturing successful the UK successful the electrical era. Now determination is thing tangible and important to enactment with.

The capableness of the Tata tract is capable for 40% of the 100GWh of capableness the Faraday Institution says Britain volition request by 2030 to fulfill request for electrical vehicles and enactment section manufacturing.

The different confirmed UK gigafactory is Envision’s successful Sunderland, which volition person a 12GWh capableness but could spell higher.

Beyond that, it’s slim pickings and the rumour mill is quiet. The erstwhile Britishvolt tract remains successful flux – the site’s purchaser, Recharge Industries, has allegedly not yet paid for the tract and its Australian HQ was precocious raided by taxation authorities – and the West Midlands Gigafactory hasn’t truly got beyond the fancy artist’s sketches signifier yet. 

Still, with Tata and Envision, we’re already halfway to the 2030 extremity and the 2 factories volition unafraid semipermanent futures for home car accumulation astatine JLR’s Castle Bromwich and Solihull sites, and Nissan’s Sunderland plant. Mini excessively is committed to gathering electrical cars astatine Oxford, though last details are awaited.

A invited by-product of the Tata tract successful peculiar – which volition person JLR arsenic its anchor spouse but is acceptable to proviso different manufacturers (Stellantis? Toyota?) – is the proviso concatenation it volition stimulate. Lithium miners successful Cornwall person already been vocal successful their support. The proviso concatenation tin present beryllium not lone established but besides ramped up to conscionable up demand.

The UK has R&D expertise and radical endowment successful abundance, albeit not yet with each the required skills oregon aboriginal automotive manufacture jobs to enactment them. Again, the Tata mill tin displacement the code present and beryllium a catalyst for meaningful change. 

The elephant successful the country remains a authorities concern strategy to underpin each this. The authorities is said to person stumped up fractional a cardinal pounds of incentives for Tata to bring the gigafactory to the south-west, though the presumption are not yet clear. Energy costs were said to beryllium 1 country of help, which shows however unattractive the UK is successful this cost-intensive area. 

Business caput Kemi Badenoch told the FT that “targeted support” would beryllium offered to unafraid much manufacturing investments though she hinted that the UK would beryllium incapable to vie with the seemingly unfastened chequebook being offered elsewhere. Targeted enactment does not breed the aforesaid assurance that a afloat wide and disclosed concern strategy does, and risks a much hand-to-mouth attack that could eke distant astatine the existent positivity. 

The PR worth for the UK arsenic a spot to put successful precocious manufacturing has been immense this week. The communicative has changed and a model has astatine past opened to unafraid a semipermanent aboriginal for automotive manufacturing successful the UK. The government’s adjacent moves volition determine conscionable however large that manufacture tin be.