People keep repeating this as if it was true. The Chinese and American battery manufacturers have received enormous subsidies. This factory is mostly financed on the private market, and some bonds from the EU investment bank, but comparably less.

That hasn't helped. Subsidized competitors are hard to compete against.

The German factory have indeed received some government subsidies. But that is not the factory with problems (at least not yet).

Not in that case: https://sifted.eu/articles/northvolt-bankruptcy-investors-cr...

This. The system works just as intended. If the state is throwing free money around why wouldn't you pick it up and pocket it? Your job isn't to create jobs or return on investment, it's to funnel that free state money in the pockets of shareholders.

For those looking for another similar example of European subsidized tech failure check the ST-Ericsson story.

One the advantages of capitalist competition is companies run by bad managers go bust and the resources can be redeployed. You get rid of that and have promotion based on office politics and you get a lot of problems.

The first Google result for “Northvolt bonuses”: https://swedenherald.com/article/northvolt-wants-to-pay-out-...

Since northvolt is private, there is a lot less insight into what goes on there. However, I'm fairly sure that the CEO did sell some of his shares during one or more financing rounds, in order to create a little nest egg for himself.

On top of that I'd imagine that during the 8 years or so, he probably took out at least 200k EUR in salary, if not more, per year. So a few millions of dollars probably went to the CEO.

Because a startup scene needs a fucking scene. Having exactly one darling company in each sector is recipe for the classic yet seemingly every time unavoidable "too precious to fail" failure mode.

It's the same thing that always happens in Europe when we're trying to mimic something from the other side of the pond, we do it too late, too small, too fancy.

Here's a nice, detailed, insightful essay (?) on the Canadian tech scene, but of course blindly replacing Toronto with Berlin (or at least the CN tower with the Fernsehturm) and the results are the same.

https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene...

If they had pivoted to Blockchain in 2017 and then to foundational LLM models in 2022 they would have been fine - its typical European lack of exceptionalism (/s?)

Volkswagen has their own plans with its subsidary PowerCo, and since EV adoption is slower than expected, they may (partly) drop Northvolt in favor of PowerCo. Interestingly they canceled their plan for a second battery plant in Germany due to high energy costs.

Regarding Germany: I still do not understand how you want to electrify everything, reduce CO2 emissions, and then shut down fully working nuclear power plants in the middle of an energy supply crisis. This is completely beyond me. I know there are people defending this decision, but I can only attribute this to malice or idiocy.

The name "Britishvolt" alone should be sufficient to raise all red flags.

The tech stack was a weird quote. This is significant:

> In theory it's microservices, but the reality is that there are so many circular dependencies that it works like a monolith

But lambda/go/dynamodb does not force this situation.

Pfft. Sure blame the Chinese equipment and not the corrupt and incompetent European management. The Chinese manage to produce batteries just fine.

> A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB

Oh, well, that explains everything! Great insight... /s

Expanding to multiple EU states is a requirement to satisfy the various governments if you are getting public EU funding. See Airbus for an example.

Northvolt also counted on cheap materials from Russia, e.g. infamously environment unfriendly nickel from Norilsk, which clearly didn't pan out after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Tesla I think proved it was competent at making stuff before getting much subsidy. Northvolt seems to have got it up from without much battery making.

Tesla is still getting tons of subsidies, directly and indirectly. We'll see if they are successful once that stops.

That's a very good point.

Germany was always brilliant at mechanical engineering, their universities are decent in general, but very good at all forms of mechanical/chemical engineering.

US is mad keen on software and entrepreneurship and its top universities churn out software startup founders like nowhere else. It's just a pity software ain't what it was 10 years ago.

Perhaps the deep cadres of really well educated engineers, and thus available work force, is the determining factor here.

It's a lot better place to live than the US though. And we don't need as much. Quality of life is not measured in terms of the amount of stuff you can buy. We don't have to be afraid of getting shot at school or being bankrupted because of an illness. We don't have to pay off our student loans for decades. Income equality is much higher (leading to more public safety and fairness). To many of us this matters more than money.

The US has different goals than we do. Europe has never been about maximum profit. Capitalism is a tool to support society, not the end goal.

entrepreneurs suck anyway.

Those climate objectives are necessary. Soon we will be spending a lot more on disaster mitigation than we would have on some EV subsidies. If anything the transition is not fast enough. I'm living very close to Valencia with its recent flooding disaster, that it didn't happen here was just a matter of chance. That week alone has cost the country more than 10 billion in damage payments and the actual damage is a lot bigger than that. And that's not even considering the hundreds that were killed.

And cars aren't as important here as in the US. I haven't owned or driven one in 7 years.

I agree that ariane isn't doing well but it's really niche anyway.

Flux (the image generator of xAI) is by Black Forest Labs - a german AI company for example.

Mistral is french

How is AI regulation a laughing stock in the context of emissions reduction?

> The latest issue is that the EC would rather see the auto industry fail than to change its climate objectives.

I don't think climate objectives are the problem. The auto industry wants to see them reduced because they want to keep pumping out diesel engine cars, i.e., making us buy obsolete technology while tariffs prevent us from buying cheaper and better foreign EVs. Do you really think that's the path to keeping our auto industry in the long term?

If climate objectives were more ambitious and weren't being pushed forward all the time due to industry lobbying, we would probably see more innovation in Europe.

Yes. That is very much given. In fact some of it has already happened.

Europe has effectively ceded it's position in Africa to others some time ago.

Aid based approach has led to little tangible benefit for locals, and even less for Europeans. Furthermore, conditions the recipient needed to fulfill were, and still are, often hard to accept for cultural and historical reasons. Add to it the lack of actual power projection and all you have is contempt.

It's pretty visible during any UN vote.

Simply put, investment beats aid, every single time.

The silver lining is that Russia is having it's own issues, not entirely different but similarly horrible. Namely demographic crisis, exacerbated by war and poor public health. There is also demographic crisis in China, however their government has been wise enough to not go to all out war.

>Russian influence will rise and dominate at least major parts of Eastern Europe

Definitely not, given how russophobic Eastern Europe is. They had enough of Russia to last them several lifetimes of misery.

On the other hand, Western Europe, especially "neutral" Austria is a lot more pro-Russian than the East.

Nothing is going to stop China's rise but China's own failings (mostly demographically).

Russia can't even beat a country one third its own size despite petrol dollars and legacy military stock.

Support is expensive getting good support from China is generally not possible, because it destroys margins. That is making me very curious about aftermarket of Chinese cars, because they might be cheapish today, but incredibly expensive when you will need to fix them.