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?

Why oh why oh why can’t we build them in this country?

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.

Personally would like to see more BYD cars in the UK. Would certainly open up the lower price EV market.

Ha, just got re-elected and already selling London out to Chinese

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.

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.

I thought the west was supposed to be decreasing its dependency on China, not increasing.