EU approves 3.2B euro state aid for battery research | Hacker News Reader

EU approves 3.2B euro state aid for battery research

reuters.com

21 pointsga-vu8 comments

So I guess the big 3 Germans are over the "they laugh at you" phase and now they're in full "they fight you" mode.

I think as recent as one year ago there still were German car executives that were touting their hard-won experience of making cars for 50+ years, not realizing that EVs are mostly batteries + accompanying software that happens to have some wheels attached . Making excellent inline-six engines or quite crazy V10 diesel engines has almost no connection to all that.

The use cases for long lasting and energy dense batteries are much more diversified than just cars.

The "coincidence" between VW announcing that they'll go "all in" when it comes to EVs and this EU announcement is too big, of course this is meant to help the German (and partly the French) car manufacturers. When your industrial output suffers the biggest blow since 2009 [1] you have to be seen doing something (as a politician, I mean) in order not to let the bad people from AfD get a hold on the reins of power.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a1a14220-1801-11ea-9ee4-11f260415...

Don't know for others, but Solvay S.A seems to be getting a fair share of the funds while being mostly a financial institution. It's been a few dozen years since they operated actual production plants.

State aid is notoriously hard to distribute in an 'efficient' manner (ie. eventually providing a positive economic return on investment to the state).

The EU is IMO even worse than your average state at it. They throw a lot of money away.

The EU isn't funding it, the seven states involved are.

The EU has quite strict rules around state aid to stop a race to the bottom amongst individual states. This ruling is making an exception to that.

That's a bargain compared to what patented tech costs.

Finally, some hope.

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