A little over a year ago I wrote the obituary for Britishvolt, which was meant to be the UK’s homegrown hero and a competitor to Tesla. Nine months after the company broke ground on its gigafactory in Cambois in Northumberland, it had been run into the ground, resulting in hundreds of redundancies.
The waste and reckless spending – on private jets, pointlessly large computer monitors, and online yoga classes from a Dubai-based fitness instructor– have become the stuff of legend.
But in spite of Britishvolt’s very public failure, and an aborted attempt to resuscitate the plan from Australian battery startup Recharge Industries that went nowhere, there are still reasons to be cheerful about the state of battery tech and electric vehicles… including in the part of the world that suffered most from Britishvolt’s collapse....