Well over a year ago I started writing about my concerns at how some elements of the automotive industry seem happy – perhaps intentionally – to mislead the motorist in their cynical use of names for car makes and models. I am irritated by the exploitation of the concept of ‘Britishness’ put about especially by those we used to call ‘Leavers’: “British is best, so buy British”… Ironic: so many cherished ‘British’ brands are now foreign-owned: from water and electricity providers, to rail companies, airports, airlines and British Steel… and now virtually every British car brand.
Ford has always been foreign-owned, and Vauxhall likewise for a century (General Motors since 1925, but part of Stellantis since 2021). Every other one of the once-popular brands has disappeared or been swallowed up by larger multinational companies; the acquisition and exploitation of the Mini brand by BMW has been very successful.
However, even the prestige ‘British’ brands are now foreign-owned: Jaguar-Landr Rover has transitioned through various ownership phases, and now the group is owned by the Indian multinational automotive company Tata. Aston Martin has been owned by Ford since 1987, Morgan has been owned by the Italian investment group Investindustrial since 2019.
TVR’s ownership has been very chequered, but for much of the last 20 years a Russian businessman has been at the helm. Then there is Lotus… Geely Holding owns 51 per cent of Lotus: a Chinese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. The company is privately owned by Chinese entrepreneur, Li Shufu, and is mainly engaged in the automotive industry. The other 49 per cent is owned by a Malaysian businessman, Syed Mokhtar Albukhary.
McLaren – known both for its Formula 1 team and very high-end supercars, was for some time owned by Bahrein’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat but has recently been bought by CYVN of Abu Dhabi. Rolls Royce has been owned by BMW for over 20 years, and Bentley has belonged to Volkswagen since 1998. And that’s not all, as we’ll see later. So, the aspiration to ‘buy British’ is rather less ‘patriotic’ than it used to be.
The UK: workshop to the world?
In the mid-80s, when I was teaching at a school in Wolverhampton, I introduced and developed a course for sixth formers who wanted to keep up their foreign language skills but not to study languages to A Level. It was called ‘Foreign Languages at Work’, part of the scheme set up by the British Overseas Trade Board and the London Chamber of Commerce, no less. As well as the language content relevant to the world of work and trade, we visited companies and workplaces in the West Midlands, and received support from the Wolverhampton Chamber of Commerce: its motto was ‘Wolverhampton – workshop of the world’. In fact, this soubriquet used to be applicable to the UK as a whole…
As regards the British car companies mentioned earlier, for the most part the cars are still manufactured in the UK, so at least British jobs are safe – for the moment. However, this is not always the case: the management centre of Lotus has recently been moved to its owner’s base in China. Two relatives of mine, one close, the other a bit more distant, have lost the very well-paid management-level posts they were appointed to only a few months ago, in both cases having given up their previous steady jobs to move to Lotus. We are reminded of Dyson moving its headquarters to Singapore.
It seems that we are witnessing a technology brain-drain. Of course, commercial companies take their decisions for the sake of their own security and that of their shareholders. One doesn’t wish to see a return to the ignominious era of government-subsidised British Leyland in its various guises. However, it seems desirable if not obvious that British manufacturing jobs and research and development need to be preserved as far as possible to maintain skills and research here; this should be a major focus of government policy.
The Chinese take away
It is hardly a novelty to see Chinese-made cars on our roads nowadays, though the flood of Chinese imports has happened staggeringly quickly. I saw a Chinese vehicle for the first time only a few years ago on the Second Severn Crossing: a Great Wall truck which we followed across the Prince of Wales Bridge on the way to South Wales. When we make that same journey from Devon to Pembrokeshire nowadays, we are guaranteed to see thousands of newly-arrived Chinese cars in the sprawling car pounds at Avonmouth. These days various Chinese marques are a common sight on our roads, such as GWM, Ora, Omoda and BYD, all unheard of even five years ago.
Then there are other marques like Polestar, jointly owned by Volvo and Geely Holdings and manufactured by the latter in China; and Leapmotor, in which the European giant Stellantis has a share, which may lead to these small electric cars being made in Fiat factories in Italy or Poland. The reason for this flood of Chinese vehicles is, of course, related to the governmental push to spread the use of electric vehicles in the interests of reducing pollution.
Then there is MG… this was one name we left out intentionally in our ‘survey’ of once entirely British car brands in an earlier paragraph. When I was a student with a fresh driving licence in the late 1960s, I aspired to own an MGB GT (but ended up with a rusty Mini!). On the way to and from lectures I often used to cycle past the garage where in the 1920s Cecil Kimber first modified Morris Oxfords to create the early sporty MGs. For decades this very British brand epitomised the affordable British sportscar, surviving various iterations of the restructuring of what had been Morris > Nuffield > BMC > BLMC > British Leyland > Rover Group.
Notwithstanding all this, the cars have always been instantly recognisable thanks to the iconic octagonal MG logo… A long and distinguished motoring heritage, until the brand was bought in July 2005 by the Nanjing Automobile Group, this, in turn, was acquired by another Chinese company, SAIC, now a major importer to the UK of Chinese-made electric cars bearing that MG logo. So what?
Well, I’m a purist, and very active in the owners’ club of a similar long-established car brand with a distinguished heritage and instantly-recognised logo. One might think that the Chinese have pulled off a very clever marketing coup here, but my view is that they are cynically selling their cars back to the British motorist by exploiting an instantly recognisable (formerly) British brand. MG dealers make the most of the heritage and reputation of the original British MGs to sell their Chinese products; one wonders how many motorists are influenced by brand loyalty to MG.
More surprisingly, to my ‘purist’ way of thinking, the MG Car Club includes these oriental MGs and their owners in their events and gatherings. I have spoken to a number of members of the MG Car Club: some resent the Chinese ‘cuckoos’ in their nest, but others are accepting, believing that this is inevitable in the modern world, and the only way to keep the brand alive.
Build Your Chinese Dreams… or not!
However, whatever one might think of the desirability of the move to electric cars and the inevitability of this automotive flood from China, one has to remember that Chinese imports mean disappearing British and European jobs. Not just cars, of course, and this is not new, not being confined to the automotive industry! Decades ago, the high-end shoe industry in Mallorca expressed its concerns to the EU: cheap imports from China were threatening the very survival of shoe manufacturing in Europe. Manufacturers demanded protective action from the European Union way back then.
Practically every manufactured item I have bought while thinking about this article has the ‘Made in China’ label. In fact, when I bought a pressurised garden pump recently it came as a great surprise to see that it had been manufactured in Spain… and NOT China! China, the workshop of the world.
Some of us have concerns about the reasons behind the ability of Chinese companies to undercut products made elsewhere. One frequently cited fact is the low pay and poor working conditions suffered by Chinese workers compared to those in the Western world.
As well as ignoring any requirement to provide decent working conditions, some suspect Chinese companies of using slavery, or, at the least, of ignoring humanitarian standards, particularly in respect of the Uyghur community. This is not just happening in China: practices in a factory run by the car company BYD (Build Your Dreams) in Brazil have led the Brazilian government to close the BYD factory, citing ‘slavery’ conditions.
EU’ve been warned!
So, if the runaway success of the Chinese car industry results from unfair subsidies, poor working conditions, and riding roughshod over human rights, this constitutes unfair competition, which could ruin the European car industry. Over the last year or so, there have been many statements to this effect from key car industry bosses… One example of the consequences is Vauxhall’s decision to close factories owing to the UK government speeding up the transition to electric vehicles (EVs); another is that Ford are shedding 800 jobs in the UK.
And: guess what? The effects of Brexit are having a huge impact on the viability of much of the British car industry! In a general sense, cooperation among EU countries is the best way for European car industries to survive and prosper. Solidarity in the face of the onslaught from cheap Chinese electric cars will be the only way the European car industry can survive. Professor Andrew Graves of University of Bath, with over 50 years’ experience within the UK car industry, speaking of the long-running problem of Brexit, said: “If you’re not in the EU, you’re at a major disadvantage,” highlighting how leaving the EU has added extra expense and red tape in importing and exporting cars.
Cooperation with near neighbours is logical – not least to reduce the environmental impact of transporting components around the world; the just-in-time methodology of manufacturing cars from components coming from various plants in various countries means speed of supply is crucial to maintain the cross-border production-line.
This is evident in another very successful manufacturing industry related to transport. I was reminded of this recently seeing a huge photograph of Concorde in Terminal 2 Heathrow, the result of Anglo-French cooperation 50 years ago. More recently, the Airbus A380 we boarded for the first leg of our flight to New Zealand is proof of the cooperation between the UK and a wider group of European countries. Airbus is a major supplier of aircraft used by Air New Zealand as in so many countries, not just for international flights, but also internal/regional flights. Indeed, 2024 was the sixth year in a row in which Airbus outsold Boeing by a very large margin. European cooperation in the aerospace industry continues to be a success story.
Tricky tariffs, Mr Trump?
No doubt with all this in mind, in 2024 the EU introduced a tariff policy in the face of Chinese competition in EVs: this EU tariff imposition came after a months-long study of the alleged subsidies provided by the Chinese state, ranging from free land for car factories, cheap borrowing, and tax exemptions for battery manufacturers. Ironically, a certain Elon Musk is not happy about these tariffs because many Teslas sold in Europe are actually made in China: he is taking the EU to court, now that he is president of the US… or so he thinks! No wonder Elon Musk is so anti the EU and its members.
As I was putting the finishing touches to this review of the Chinese invasion of the UK and EU car markets, another factor arose a few days ago: Mr Trump complains that the Europeans don’t buy enough American cars and proposes to introduce crippling tariffs to mitigate what he sees as unfair trade. Err, Mr Trump: hasn’t it occurred to you that massive American gas-guzzlers aren’t an option in the narrow streets of Italian hill-top towns, and British country lanes, nor remotely desirable for countries taking net zero seriously!? And that our fuel prices are three or four times higher than in the US? As it happens, some US cars don’t conform to EU safety standards either. This is yet another example of a certain person’s failure to do his ‘homework’ and of his simplistic knee-jerk reactions to whatever doesn’t fit his views.
At least the EU is attempting to protect its car manufacturer; but not the UK… yet the plight of the UK motor industry seems to demand that our government should be doing more than just seeking a vague ‘reset’ of Brexit. Ironically, the pressure from the torrent of Chinese EVs has spurred the European car industry to accelerate its introduction of small, affordable EVs from Fiat, Citroën, Renault and Dacia. And now a further irony: Trump’s new tariffs aimed at the EU and Chinese automotive industry give China and the EU common cause! Whatever happens, if a global trade war ensues, the UK will be out on a limb. It is glaringly obvious that we will be much safer both from the potential trade war being by being inside the EU, protected by the solidarity provided by membership of a large trading bloc! Come on Mr Starmer, wake up and smell the coffee!
