The path to the big electric switchover continues to be a bumpy one. Electric cars are selling well but they are still expensive by most buyers’ standards, whether new or second hand. The high prices seem to be the result of tight supply conditions resulting from chip shortages and other supply chain issues and remind us that availability and pricing in the market depends heavily on what is going on upstream in terms of the development and supply of EVs. There, the electric revolution has put everything up for grabs. Established names like Mercedes-Benz are being challenged by Tesla, and electrification has breathed new life into an old brand, MG, in the most unexpected way with cutting edge electric technology, married, in the case of the MG4, to avant-garde design. And there’s plenty more where that came from, namely China, which hosts a multitude of new players who might steal the European manufacturers’ lunch one day.

And that all shows us that electrification presents a challenge, not just to established automotive brands, but also to established centres of car production – even, or perhaps especially, Germany which has one of the strongest motor industries on the planet, and where Ford’s factory in Saarlouis looks set to close in 2025 because it doesn’t feature in the company’s electric switchover plans. Car plants rarely close in Germany. Even when manufacturers have failed or been taken over – for example, Borgward, NSU and Glas in the sixties – their factories have generally continued to operate under new ownership. The only recent case is the closure of the Opel plant at Bochum in 2014. You only need to look at the large price difference between the Volkswagen ID.3 and the similarly sized and similarly capable, but much cheaper, MG4 to sense the sort of fear that must, or at least should, be stalking the corridors of the headquarters at the major German car manufacturers these days.

So what about the UK? A restructuring of operations in preparation for electrification was implicated in the closure of Honda’s factory in Swindon in 2021, and October alone saw three worrying developments that cast further doubt on the ability of the UK’s automotive sector to make the transition.

The first blow was the news that Britishvolt, one of the UK’s most promising EV-related initiatives was in trouble. The company, which was planning to make a multi-billion-pound investment to establish a battery gigafactory in Northumberland is currently in a state of limbo, relying on interim funding from one of its backers, Glencore, to keep going. Battery gigafactories like the one planned by Britishvolt are vital to the survival of the UK industry. In the long run, British built electric cars probably need British batteries, both from the point of view of the logistics and also to meet local content rules for export, which have been complicated by Brexit.

This was quickly followed by confirmation that BMW would stop making electric Minis in Oxford. In future, a new small electric Mini, the Aceman, will be built in China with a local partner, while electric versions of the larger Countryman are set to be made in Germany. Oxford had been making about 40,000 electric Minis each year. While the assembly of additional petrol Minis will help keep Oxford’s production lines running, it’s still disheartening for the UK to lose, at least for now, one of its most significant footholds in the emerging world of EV production.

The final setback was the decision of the promising UK EV start-up Arrival to shift the focus of its operations to the US. A big order for 10,000 electric vans for the logistics company UPS now looks set to be met from an American production facility rather than from the company’s base in Bicester. One factor in the shift is said to be the introduction of tax breaks for electric vehicle production under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, which contains a huge variety of measures designed to get the US economy going.

Still, all is not lost. Britishvolt’s gigafactory may yet be built, while BMW’s Oxford plant lives to fight another day, albeit without EV production for the time being. Arrival’s decentralised business model foresees production being distributed across several so-called microfactories rather than being consolidated in large plants – perhaps that will still allow the UK to grab a slice of the action in the future. But these warning shots show that the future of the British motor industry cannot be taken for granted.