Less than a mile from the M5 near Bridgwater in Somerset, another piece of the UK’s electric car industry is being prepared.
Groundworks close to the village of Puriton have begun, people in hard hats are measuring up and notices are being pinned to signposts warning of changes to rights of way.
One month after it was first announced, Tata Group’s £4 billion gigafactory, projected to be one of the largest in Europe when EV batteries begin rolling off the production lines in 2026, looks like it might actually happen.
It’s on a 620-acre site called Gravity: a smart technology campus itself on the site of a former Royal Ordnance factory, which, during the Second World War, made an explosive called RDX for use in bombs such as the 12,000lb Tallboy. It was a huge operation that relied on millions of gallons of water each day from the surrounding Somerset Levels but which also generated surplus electricity that it sent to local power stations.
Some 80 years later, parallels exist between it and Gravity in terms of the latter’s scale, the infrastructure required to support it and its anticipated contribution to the local economy.
“Gravity will be huge and, like the old ordnance plant, have its own rail extension to the local mainline plus a new exit on the M5,” says Ian Liddell-Grainger, MP for Bridgwater and West Somerset.
“The gigafactory alone will create up to 4000 jobs, plus thousands more in the supply chain. The deal to get the new factory [a location in Spain was also considered] took longer than we thought, but now, with construction of Hinkley Point C power station already creating jobs a few miles from here, Morrisons opening a new food factory in town and logistics firms basing themselves beside the M5, the future for Bridgwater is bright.”
He is delighted, then, but are his constituents as pleased? Will the new battery plant be a blot on their landscape that will merely attract skilled workers from outside the region, deprive local employers of labour and drag up rents and property prices? Or is it an enterprise that will create wider opportunities and raise regional skill and pay levels? To try to find out, Autocar spent a day in the area quizzing locals and businesses.