www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chinas-byd-closes-in-on-deal-to-build-all-electric-london-buses-6qtdrv8z6
China’s BYD closes in on deal to build all-electric London buses
"make the capital greener and fairer" while outsourcing jobs to BYD which has err, iffy practices according to human rights watch and others, yet alone the environmental carelessness often seen too.
Theres complaints about the UK not having enough EV/battery building experience/infrastructure/mechanics to reduce costs in the long term, but every time we get a chance of these things happening the government (both local and national) just outsources to foreign countries/companies. How do they expect things to happen within the UK if they dont help support it during the still arguably opening stages?
When all this green energy things was starting to gain more talk and traction some 10, 15 years ago, I immediately said this was something the UK should be investing in immediately. We even had a chance not so long ago with the subsidies we were giving this companies but then the UK pulled the plug. The UK could have been at the forefront ...with vehicles, solar panels and batteries.
Alas the government of the UK, no matter what party ... But still mostly the Tories ... Have such short term thinking.
Yep, this is on the government - even the US subsidised their low carbon industries. I fear Labour are about to make the same mistake the Tories did.
Maybe if we hadn't decided to push every 6th former into Uni for expensive degrees we'd have more going to Technical College getting actual useful qualifications that we can use
Everything is for sale in the UK now it seems.....everything
In Germany they manage to have a of higher education but also educate people in trades.
This is more that we gave always looked down on trades.
Besides which, during those years btec and hnd existed, in the last few years the tories talked about removing BTEC which is precisely a technical / practical course.
The attacks on universities are just to leave university for the elites, and not for the rest of us.
Which of course is how it used to be in Victorian times so that would please Jacob Reece Mogg, just bring back the poor house and kids up chimneys and we'll have gone full circle.....sigh
Still some "red tape" in the way of that sort of thing, but we are getting there :(
Don't think that would matter. Us Aussies all got pushed to do trades over Uni and we no longer have a car industry to make EV's with.
If the government doesn't want to invest in certain industries then you'll have no chance even if the people are trained to do it
We outsourced our industry to other countries quite a while ago.
With the pompous approach, like naming a company BritishVolt, we will never get the electric things right here.
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14d
Nice whataboutism bro. Very tankie.
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13d
Because that stuff has nothing to do with this, common tankie L moment.
I have condemned both labour and tories for not doing enough to help stop Israels abuses of the Palestine peoples in both Gaza and the West bank and think that Blair should face war crime charges/tribunal for his actions helping the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
So er, go fish somewhere else with your tankie attempts to muddy waters. I ignored nothing, it isnt part of this discussion here, it isnt relevent and it is unreasonable to require someone to have to write an essay every time they talk badly of Chinas modern slavery issues.
In a phrase, "grow up tankie".
Why oh why oh why can't we build them in this country?
China are years ahead of everyone in terms of ev production research and facilities, by the time we caught up it would be too late. We dropped the ball on this one, 20 years too late to the game and not enough money or expertise to catch up. Ironic considering Thomas Parker, an English inventor who was responsible for electrifying the London Underground, built the first production electric car in Wolverhampton in 1884.
Asking China to supply isn't going to help local industry to catch up.
Procurement rock and a hard place. You can contract a Chinese company and get criticised for not encouraging British trade, or contract a British company at greater cost due to not having all the expertise, tooling and economy of scale (plus slave labour), and get criticised for wasting public money, even if the project doesn’t overrun in cost and time.
The small group of people at TfL who would have been tasked with making this decision are not responsible for re-building the UK's failing industries. They are just tasked with getting some busses on the streets before a certain deadline.
They would look around the world and find out who could pull off that order. Looking around the UK who has the production capability to do that exactly?
You can't say, well we can do it but here but it will take 4 years to build the factory and 3 more to train enough people to operate it.
Agreed it is a shame we don't have that capability now, but this is a symptom rather than cause.
The government should be setting strategy and planning, part of that would be procurement rules
Could happen in a different country. In this country it would probably be pushed out to one of the major consultancies who will advise on and manage the whole tender process.
I'd place restrictions on the use of consultancies. Just hire people that know what they are doing rather than paying highly expensive consultants with MY money!!!
Maybe. You're advocating the approach that places like China take. Which admittedly works pretty well for most of the time.
There's really a lot in that phrase of "just hire people who know what they're doing."
You actually need to build an entire organisation around any area of expertise you want and you need to give those people at least as good benefits as they would get in the private sector.
Now we do have such an organisation. It is call the civil service, but they are regularly defunded and their expertise lost to the big consultancies. Even then nobody can know everything and it is probably sometimes better to hire a specialist company who has entire research teams looking into different options.
Believe me, consultants are not experts at anything except fluff and regurgitation. I know, I've worked with them.
Yeah but it's wonderfully plausible fluff, that helps you shift the blame and cover your arse.
Actually I've read some consultancy reports that were really useful and almost every sentence had some value in it.
If you do it locally without the expertise/infrastructure youd end up with people complaining more like what's happening with the ferries in Scotland. They wanted to start increasing lpg tech in Port Glasgow but it just led to delays and overcosting.
I would argue that cheap , efficient buses are a huge benefit to the economy.
I guess we can make free bus passes part of the unemployment benefit
You need to look long term
I am , cheap transport is essential to a thriving economy. We cannot produce our own for that cost , it would be daft to spend billions creating an industry that would never compete in a market already dominated by Asia.
The trouble is once all markets are dominated by Asia, we will have nothing
That's not how trade works - countries with a comparative advantage in producing X export X and countries with a comparative advantage in Y export Y. One country may have an absolute advantage in everything (unlikely China ever will) but it's impossible to have a comparative advantage in everything because it's based on opportunity cost.
But that's not what I was suggesting
What do you mean we have nothing then?
And that’s what it always comes down to. These won’t be cheap or efficient, more like ticking time bombs.
Imagine thinking EVs are more dangerous than literally igniting petrol to move a car
You're the type that gets scared at the idea of drinking dihydrogen monoxide
Water good joke there
These won’t be cheap or efficient, more like ticking time bombs.
Apart from they wont but okay. The reason you think that EVs have a fire danger rate is because when a car sets on fire, everyone drives by, when an EV goes up, its national news. (also ofc oil interests pushing the narrative)
Like, theres actual studies on this stuff, EVs are 25 times less likely to catch fire vs a petrol or diesel car as an example, yet alone your woefully wrong claim they are not efficient.
I never made any of the claims you are accusing me of. I am saying that these buses from this Chinese company are going to be a sub par disaster.
BYD has a history of making very good, high quality vehicles and have a lot of them in the UK and EU. If there was a problem, it would have been pretty chunky news by this point, 1500 in the UK working with a UK company last august alone.
It really isnt something new, its just a shame that local business is being cut out.
also you kind of did by calling them time bombs, thats pretty commonly used as a phrase relating to EVs being a fire hazard.
They have a history of making cheap crap vehicles that spontaneously combust
The only thing that China could be said to be ahead in any real significant manner is scale and by quite a bit, as for money we have it (we being just the UK and the west in general) as for expertise we have it too, the UK has plenty of bleeding edge scientific r&d and tech companies, the ability to automate much of this process to stave off any of the genuine cheap labour concerns, this doubly goes for 'the west' too.
sure we collectively made a massive mistake not too long ago turning the majority of our industry over to China and relying on them, we are also currently making another mistake by thinking we can't do it again, we are probably in the best position we have ever been to take it back and keep it up, we have the chance for massive amounts of cheap green energy, robotics and automation and a tech and finance sector to hold it all up.
I don't think it's going to be easy and it will absolutely have an upfront cost but it's something that we NEED to do, we cannot kick the can down the road any longer for both economic and political reasons. And for those of you still thinking it's over do you think that anyone in 1910 thought China would be where it is now, 1920? 1930? 1960? 1980? Massive amounts of progress can be made easily within our lifetimes and much of that investment (Green energy, Robotic manufacturing) is going to pay off in so many ways.
"the only thing china is ahead in is scale"
You are delusional. China is ahead of the UK in EVERY facet of manufacturing.
Scale is the single biggest factor in industrial production lines. Bigger scale drives down the cost per unit incredibly quickly, and cost is everything in a capitalist economy.
We are so concerned with the monetary cost of providing public services that we fail to consider the externalities.
Scale is obviously important but that is why we need automation and more robust supply chains both within the UK and in the west and I defo didn't say it would be easy.
It doesn't really have much to do with capitalism at the moment in time everything has a cost, be that money, labour or something else, and 'capitalism' is just a system within many systems and plenty of countries use sanctions and tarrifs to make their own economy stronger or to harm other countries, just look at the sanctions the west has put on Russia
The Dyson Lecture warned of this, over ten years ago. Result? The Tories.
I remember this. They also went onto to design and build a car with a base price of 150k and then realised there was zero market for it. I mean who in their right mind would spend 150k on a dyson !!! Could have been the best car in the world and people would still associate it with a hoover..
Didn’t Dyson leave the country cos it was cheaper to manufacture elsewhere ?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/12_december/09/dyson.shtml
We were well aware of the capabilities and shift of engineering skills & infrastructure abroad, being systematically chipped away from the UK
The shift in manufacturing power to Britain was done by destroying the industry in China and India.Not something that can be done today.The idea was that Brexit was going to force a return to this without taking into account competition was silly but one he pushed.Fact they left so quickly says a lot about his belief is his own words.
It seems like we dropped the ball on many many things
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14d
That's £50m leaving our country. To our literal enemy.
This is a fucking travesty.
I hope the government intervenes.
Wait. Why are they our enemy?
Since when.
Well the recent cyber attack wasn't something a friend would do
There's an ongoing "Welcome Programme" to let people essentially get away from China and have given people refugee status over political issues.
China allegedly hacked an MoD supplier just this month. It has been sanctioned for trying to hack the Electoral Commission. Huawei was banned.
It is helping Russia in its war in Ukraine.
HMS Queen Elizabeth has been sent through the South China Sea more than once.
UK was one of few countries to publicly oppose the national security law in Hong Kong.
Doesn't sound like a good relationship. But we rely on it too much economically, plus its already too powerful, to be any more hostile towards it.
The US and Israel spy on us as well.
You can't be serious about the Korean war?
Short term gains.
Long term gains. China will actually deliver and on time. UK companies will charge more, deliver less functionality and you won't get a penny back when they deliver late as they comprehensively and vehemently reject liquidated damages. I'd rather have a cheap reliable bus than British built.
You are still not thinking big enough
We do austerity and “balance budgets” in this country, large scale investment in infrastructure and technology or long term planning isn’t our thing.
This is more of a market failure. Western car companies were too busy selling big gas guzzlers while China produced cost effective EVs. All car companies are private/non state controlled.
Look at our wind power. Government can do renewables well. Overnight renewables at 50% a lot of the time in the UK. We even built interconnects to other countries to export and balance our grid.
We can, and do.
Alexander Dennis supply a lot of councils with Electric and Hydrogen fuelled buses.
Nearly all their electric buses are BYD buses with an alexander dennis body.
But not all of them.
Well councils should not have to go to China!
We could, but there's no support for a UK company. We prefer buying in and selling off. Example: Arrival.
Investors decided Arrival was shit and it tanked accordingly. It's in administration now and still nobody has picked it up, which hardly sounds like a strong endorsement of its potential.
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10d
And for people that say it's too late. It's nonsense. Just look how some countries have come on in 10/20 years, from third world countries to modern powerhouses. Look at the growth rate in countries like Vietnam. Even Rwanda is growing faster than us.
The trouble is we are too concerned with party political infighting, political points scoring, and in many cases spending far too much resources on stupid vanity projects that only benefit foreign countries rather than actually developing our own country.
Both UK and rest of Europe are left behind in the EV industry just like the tech industry, most probably in AI too. Simply because US and China are both more ambitious, more innovative and also have cheap labour.
Many countries have been behind in things and have caught up. Cheap labour? What about all these migrants coming over in boats. If we can't stop them we might as well put them to work.
What and pay them less than minimum wage? Else the labour isn't that cheap.
Your competing with countries which can pay alot less
Which European country has caught up? Ambition and innovation are both dead in all these countries.
Bribes to Labour made by China.
We really need some new clean parties that put the well-being of the people of this country first.
Do we know if BYD is manufacturing these busses in the Uk?
If it’s being imported, bloody makes no sense to spend UK taxpayer money to prop up a subsidized Chinese company
You'll almost certainly find it's the other way around - Chinese state planning has ploughed a fuck tonne of money into EVs because they think it's strategically important. The result is an explosion in supply and the domestic Chinese market is already seeing struggling demand. So it's more likely the opposite is happening - BYD is desparately selling what it can cheap, we're probably not paying a premium. We're probably getting a good deal on this particular contract (the downside being they're undermining UK competitors by selling below cost price).
Interesting to see this mentioned:
It is the first time that BYD has won a contract to provide EV double-deckers in the UK, pipping local competitors such as Alexander Dennis.
Since BYD have had a pretty successful partnership with Alexander Dennis already - they delivered their 1500th electric bus last year: https://bydeurope.com/article/458
You'd think it'd make a lot of sense to continue that. Shame if not.
Yea this is complete nonsense. I worked in the London bus industry a few years ago and every single EV used at both my company and our competitors were BYD. Alexander Dennis just did the final bits at the end to make it look as though it was British
A lot of auto manufacturing is like that though - an engine / motor made elsewhere fitted to a chassis made somewhere else.
Chassis was BYD too
Yanks just slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. EU may have to respond as well as China is very likely subsidising the exports to try to drive domestic growth and kill the opponents.
Hell of a time for London to go big on Chinese electric vehicles.
Bit long for this subreddit, but Noah Smith goes over the current theories about Chinas push for export in these fields
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/why-is-china-producing-so-many-export
I kind of feel this will fly under the radar for the moment then blow up as a political hot potato in a year or so.
EU may have to respond as well
Guess our brexit benefit is replacing UK car manufacturers with Chinese ones
Just another kick in the balls for UK Manufacturers.
Why the fuck do we do this. Is there no company that can do this in this country. China is a major threat to this country. We are told, yet we still give them buissiness. And what about the human rights problems.
We have a local british manufacturer of electric buses. They have recently celebrated their 1500 vehicle made. However BYD was 100,000 pounds cheaper so he decided to sell out our manufacturing to other countries.
Those 1500 buses were also made in conjunction with BYD
A threat in which way? Please give tangible examples which are not based on anti-china propaganda.
"Human rights".... Hahahahaha
What kind of threat it is?
We don’t give them the business just because. We give them business because they’re vastly cheaper and often because they’re the only ones that can do it…
And no there is not a single company even in the whole of Europe or the USA that can build EVs at scale without Chinese battery and component manufacturing
92% of all EV batteries are made in 3 East Asian countries, the vast majority of that being done by 2 Chinese companies (BYD and CATL)
And why is there no manufacturing in this country because the tories back in the 70's and 80's decided we didn't need to make anything and the eu subsided firms to move manufacturing abroad. It's our own fault because now we are reliant on other countries.
Believe in Britain. One of many bastard tory lies.
Ha, just got re-elected and already selling London out to Chinese
This is complete nonsense. I worked for a London bus company a few years ago and every single electric bus was made by BYD. Both for us and our competitors. Every single one.
All components came from BYD in China and then they were shipped here to be assembled. So technically I suppose whichever company assembled them may have been seen as the manufacturer (Alexander Dennis from memory), but that doesn’t hide the fact they were BYD buses.
So basically in the past they just did it secretly but are now happy to be more open about it. A journalist properly researching their story should know this.
It infuriates me how opaque this all is. It shouldn’t matter that in the past some local company did the final touches if everything else was done by BYD. That shouldn’t have been enough for everyone to pretend they were British buses, because they weren’t. It’s that simple. Nothing is changing with this aside from maybe the finishing touches right at the end. It’s like Scottish salmon that actually turns out to be from Norway but is processed in Scotland right at the end of the process
It's only 100 buses, not a hugee bit of national news imo. It's 100 buses out of around 9,000 and London has already swapped about 1,200 of those to electric and this will just be 100 more.
TfL wants all 9,000 to be electric within 9 years so out of the deals coming in the next few years this is only a small sliver and it's expected that BYD will account for a load of them like they already do. I think the last contract I read was much bigger than this and was split between BYD and Alexandra Dennis(UK company, makes loads of our buses). AD for sure wont have the capacity to build so many so quick so it has to be split with other companies. At least BYD is proven now.
I'm still annoyed that the UK Arrival EV company had its bus plans cancelled tbh. They actually had a couple final versions fully built, it's not like they just had plans. Their electric buses looked so sleek and were clearly designed from scratch without anything from old diesel designs holding it back. I guess they struggled to get deals though. The government should have offered to give a 25% subsidy to the companies buying the first 100 buses just to give Arrival a few years of orders to get going and become trusted and then get orders by itself. But nope the government prefers to give massive subsidies to already huge international companies instead of helping actually get the UK its own new sucessful EV company.
Personally would like to see more BYD cars in the UK. Would certainly open up the lower price EV market.
I can just see this becoing a total mess as the tories hone in on it. I'm sure the mayor will catch shit for this, but as Mayor Khan should be getting us good value for money, that's what this does. Now, should the UK allow China to do this kind of deal? Probably not, we should probably have pretty chunky tarrifs on industries like this where China is picking domestic winners. But that's totally down to Sunak & central government, not Khan.
We’re genuinely crazy making decisions like this. It’s always the cheapest option and never the one that’s actually good for Britain. We say it’s about having a ‘free’ market, but the market isn’t free when companies like Byd are stuffed with state subsidies and support.
I thought the west was supposed to be decreasing its dependency on China, not increasing.
Surprised Pikachu when there’s a 100% tariff imposed on Chinese electric vehicles like the US recently announced.
so should we be investing in the fire services now or later ?
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