8 ms·

So what is the learning here, why did it fail? From the timeline it looks like it spread out too much and didn‘t create a great product first.

by myspy 2y ago

shinryuu 2y ago
It says in the article, they expanded too fast and i agree. Your other point also seems to hold.
christkv 2y ago
I think i read that they could not deliver the quality and quantity expected for automobile production. Bad product, overextension and I won’t be surprised if some graft will show up once they start digging. Norway has another such venture where the executive suite pays themselves handily and delivered nothing.
- cess11 2y ago
  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.
buckle8017 2y ago
Nothing to learn here, they were just scamming various governments. That's why they promised to expand to so many places, each government subsidized them separately.
- leviliebvin 2y ago
  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.
  - rob74 2y ago
    The difference is that Airbus didn't as much build new factories (and certainly not several at the same time) as it is a consortium (and later a unified company) of formerly independent European aerospace companies. E. g. their current German plants, Hamburg (commercial aircraft) and Donauwörth (helicopters) used to belong to MBB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt-B%C3%B6lkow-Blohm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt-B%C3%B6lkow-Bloh...) and then DASA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASA). That's a consolidation similar to what happened in the US, albeit maybe with more "state interference".
    - moomin 2y ago
      I read something once about the question of Airbus and Boeing subsidies. The short answer was “It’s complicated.” Of course, that particular question seems to have been rendered irrelevant by Boeing’s quality crisis.
  - dukeyukey 2y ago
    And also kinda required from an economies-of-scale point of view. The US is spoilt by havbing a massive, culturally-and-language homogenous country. Despite their wealth, If you want to hit those scales in Europe you need many countries on your customer list. And since each country (usually) has it's own language, laws, norms, sometimes currency, it gets way complicated, way fast.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
This is somewhat true, but I don’t think it is necessarily fair to them. Their strategy was to try to do everything themselves (except raw material mining). By having vertical integration across the battery space, they would be able to hopefully compete on price with the battery giants in China like CATL, while still working out of Europe, which is a lot more expensive in terms of labor costs, and regulation, and everything else. But they didn’t get that far and their biggest customers like BMW started abandoning them while waiting for deliveries to begin. This began the doom spiral. But it is possible that with more money and time this would’ve been the right strategy for the long term competitiveness of the company. Otherwise, if it’s going to be permanently uncompetitive what’s the point? Maybe this was indeed, some kind of scam for government subsidies. But I think it’s more about the difficulty of finding funding to do big things, and to do them properly.
- pas 2y ago
  Doing anything in the EU is hard, and since CABM is not even live yet it was unnecessarily extra-hard. And then it seems they were completely incompetent. (Custom middling quality machines ordered from Asia, they then weren't able to scale up the process and/or quality.) Of course, if it had worked it would have made a lot of money to a lot of people. https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustment-mechanism_en https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustme...
em500 2y ago
Comments from insiders in Swedish[1] and Dutch[2]. Some snippets: ... In the end, they are just in a situation that is almost impossible to save. You have a factory full of machines that are substandard in quality, reliability and documentation. A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB. ... ... A gigantic factory full of mediocre Chinese equipment, what can you do with that? They are not standard things, they are things custom made for Northvolt but unfortunately with incomplete specifications. ... ...The whole market is not doing well in Europe. We don't really have the raw materials here (Northvolt's came mostly from China), we don't have the knowledge (that's in Asia) and we don't have the machinery for production. ... [1] https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/sweden/comments/1g1xkmx/jag_%C3%A4r_ingenj%C3%B6r_p%C3%A5_northvolt_ama/?_x_tr_sl=sv&_x_tr_tl=en https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/sweden/comments/1g1x... [2] https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/228816/faillissement-dreigt-voor-zweedse-ev-accufabrikant-northvolt.html?showReaction=20506392&_x_tr_sl=nl&_x_tr_tl=en https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/228816/faillissem...
- leviliebvin 2y ago
  Pfft. Sure blame the Chinese equipment and not the corrupt and incompetent European management. The Chinese manage to produce batteries just fine.
  - em500 2y ago
    Main equipment manufacture was Wuxi Lead, where naturally everyone speaks almost exclusively Chinese and all docs are in Chinese. Not a problem of course when most customers are also Chinese, much more so when they're European.
    - panta 2y ago
      If you are spending billions, surely you can bring in some people that speak both Chinese and the local language. Heck, there are even real-time translation services now. No, the problem is not technical, it's that it was a scam from the get go.
johanneskanybal 2y ago
You can’t outsource something for decades then think throwing money at something will be enough to pick it up yourself on a tight timeline. Nor be surprised if your interests don’t align with a chineese actor you’re trying to replace.
markus_zhang 2y ago
I found a post supposedly written by a Chinese supplier of Northvolt. Not sure how true it is though so you will have to find some insiders to validate the story. You will need some software to translate the picture into English/other languages. https://imgur.com/AyQYtFj https://imgur.com/AyQYtFj

So what is the learning here, why did it fail? From the timeline it looks like it spread out too much and didn‘t create a great product first.

by myspy 2y ago

So what is the learning here, why did it fail? From the timeline it looks like it spread out too much and didn‘t create a great product first.

shinryuu 2y ago

It says in the article, they expanded too fast and i agree. Your other point also seems to hold.

christkv 2y ago

I think i read that they could not deliver the quality and quantity expected for automobile production. Bad product, overextension and I won’t be surprised if some graft will show up once they start digging. Norway has another such venture where the executive suite pays themselves handily and delivered nothing.

cess11 2y ago
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.

buckle8017 2y ago

Nothing to learn here, they were just scamming various governments. That's why they promised to expand to so many places, each government subsidized them separately.

leviliebvin 2y ago
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.
- rob74 2y ago
  The difference is that Airbus didn't as much build new factories (and certainly not several at the same time) as it is a consortium (and later a unified company) of formerly independent European aerospace companies. E. g. their current German plants, Hamburg (commercial aircraft) and Donauwörth (helicopters) used to belong to MBB (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt-B%C3%B6lkow-Blohm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt-B%C3%B6lkow-Bloh...) and then DASA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASA). That's a consolidation similar to what happened in the US, albeit maybe with more "state interference".
  - moomin 2y ago
    I read something once about the question of Airbus and Boeing subsidies. The short answer was “It’s complicated.” Of course, that particular question seems to have been rendered irrelevant by Boeing’s quality crisis.
- dukeyukey 2y ago
  And also kinda required from an economies-of-scale point of view. The US is spoilt by havbing a massive, culturally-and-language homogenous country. Despite their wealth, If you want to hit those scales in Europe you need many countries on your customer list. And since each country (usually) has it's own language, laws, norms, sometimes currency, it gets way complicated, way fast.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

This is somewhat true, but I don’t think it is necessarily fair to them. Their strategy was to try to do everything themselves (except raw material mining). By having vertical integration across the battery space, they would be able to hopefully compete on price with the battery giants in China like CATL, while still working out of Europe, which is a lot more expensive in terms of labor costs, and regulation, and everything else. But they didn’t get that far and their biggest customers like BMW started abandoning them while waiting for deliveries to begin. This began the doom spiral. But it is possible that with more money and time this would’ve been the right strategy for the long term competitiveness of the company. Otherwise, if it’s going to be permanently uncompetitive what’s the point? Maybe this was indeed, some kind of scam for government subsidies. But I think it’s more about the difficulty of finding funding to do big things, and to do them properly.

pas 2y ago
Doing anything in the EU is hard, and since CABM is not even live yet it was unnecessarily extra-hard. And then it seems they were completely incompetent. (Custom middling quality machines ordered from Asia, they then weren't able to scale up the process and/or quality.) Of course, if it had worked it would have made a lot of money to a lot of people. https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustment-mechanism_en https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/carbon-border-adjustme...

em500 2y ago

Comments from insiders in Swedish[1] and Dutch[2]. Some snippets: ... In the end, they are just in a situation that is almost impossible to save. You have a factory full of machines that are substandard in quality, reliability and documentation. A huge 100% in-house tech stack that largely consists of Go pieces on Lambdas writing to DynamoDB. ... ... A gigantic factory full of mediocre Chinese equipment, what can you do with that? They are not standard things, they are things custom made for Northvolt but unfortunately with incomplete specifications. ... ...The whole market is not doing well in Europe. We don't really have the raw materials here (Northvolt's came mostly from China), we don't have the knowledge (that's in Asia) and we don't have the machinery for production. ... [1] https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/sweden/comments/1g1xkmx/jag_%C3%A4r_ingenj%C3%B6r_p%C3%A5_northvolt_ama/?_x_tr_sl=sv&_x_tr_tl=en https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/sweden/comments/1g1x... [2] https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/228816/faillissement-dreigt-voor-zweedse-ev-accufabrikant-northvolt.html?showReaction=20506392&_x_tr_sl=nl&_x_tr_tl=en https://tweakers-net.translate.goog/nieuws/228816/faillissem...

leviliebvin 2y ago
Pfft. Sure blame the Chinese equipment and not the corrupt and incompetent European management. The Chinese manage to produce batteries just fine.
- em500 2y ago
  Main equipment manufacture was Wuxi Lead, where naturally everyone speaks almost exclusively Chinese and all docs are in Chinese. Not a problem of course when most customers are also Chinese, much more so when they're European.
  - panta 2y ago
    If you are spending billions, surely you can bring in some people that speak both Chinese and the local language. Heck, there are even real-time translation services now. No, the problem is not technical, it's that it was a scam from the get go.

johanneskanybal 2y ago

You can’t outsource something for decades then think throwing money at something will be enough to pick it up yourself on a tight timeline. Nor be surprised if your interests don’t align with a chineese actor you’re trying to replace.

markus_zhang 2y ago

I found a post supposedly written by a Chinese supplier of Northvolt. Not sure how true it is though so you will have to find some insiders to validate the story. You will need some software to translate the picture into English/other languages. https://imgur.com/AyQYtFj https://imgur.com/AyQYtFj