The British royal family is certainly not the most powerful among the royal families in the world, but it has received the highest attention. Every move, every word and deed of the British royal family is often exposed in public opinion and the media.
As one of the oldest surviving royal families in the world. Their food, clothing, shelter and transportation are also often able to lead the trend. Recently, BYD has served as a car for the British royal family. The reason is that Prince William and Princess Kate arrived in the Bahamas during their trip. The Bahamas used the BYD Han EV as the royal family's reception car.
In fact, in the daily life of the British royal family, the requirements for travel are very high. We all know that the Bentley and land rover are the exclusive vehicles of the British royal family. They even custom-made certain vehicles for the British Royal Family. Sometimes when we hear about the British royal car, we can't help but feel that these cars are very advanced.
But the British royal family apparently did not drive their Land Rovers and Bentleys when they visited. Instead, they will take the reception vehicle provided by the local government. BYD is currently the no. 1 seller of new energy vehicles in the Bahamas and has also been widely used in various occasions.
This time, Prince William and Princess Kate made a week-long visit to the Caribbean. to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Queen's accession to the throne. It was originally intended to strengthen Britain's relations with Commonwealth countries. But what I didn't expect was that several Commonwealth countries expressed their desire to break away from the British royal family.
These countries want to break away from the British Royal Family, on the one hand, because the national strength of the United Kingdom is indeed not as good as before, and it does not help much for the economic development of these countries and the improvement of people's living standards. The second aspect is these countries, which were originally British colonies, and after the gradual democratization of these countries, they also wanted to take the road of independent development. The british royal family has little influence on them.
The influence is becoming less than only the British royal family, but also the British automobile industry.
I think there are three events that have affected the development of the UK car industry.
The first is that Ford Motor in the United States invented assembly line production at that time, which greatly reduced the production cost of The Ford Model T. But the British at that time were not impressed, they felt that the assembly line production of the car has no soul, the car should be built by hand by engineers and craftsmen. Such a car has a soul and a temperature. But such a car is unaffordable for ordinary people. So this makes the British car industry slowly lag behind the world in scale.
The second time node was after the Second World War, when the British government first raised tariffs to protect local brands. This has led to the blind arrogance of british local brands, and the speed of product updates has slowed down. In the 1980s, the British government began to cut taxes to stimulate consumption, hoping to revitalize the local automobile industry. The result, instead of achieving the desired effect, many foreign car brands have entered the British market.
When the competitiveness of British local brands is getting weaker and weaker, then being acquired can only be the ultimate fate. So by the 1990s or so, we saw a lot of British brands being sold. Rolls-Royce, MINI was acquired by BMW, Bentley was acquired by Volkswagen, jaguar Land Rover was acquired by India's Tata Motors. MG was acquired by China SAIC and Lotus was acquired by Geely Automobile. Therefore, at present, the main player in the British auto market is foreign capital.
The third milestone is Brexit. Since there are no tariffs on the trade of cars between EU member states. Then the UK will no longer enjoy such preferential conditions after Brexit. Therefore, the cars produced in the UK are imported cars for the markets of other eu countries. So surely the price competitiveness has declined.
Cars produced in factories in the UK also have to pay tariffs if they import some parts from other EU countries. That is to say, both the cost of production and the cost of export have been greatly aggravated.
So now that the new energy era has arrived, can the UK still actively transform? It's actually very difficult. Because as I just said, the local brands in the UK have been controlled by foreign capital, so in the research and development of the underlying technology, it is actually not the UK that has the final say, but Germany, Japan, and China.
For a simple example, after BMW acquired Rolls-Royce, Rolls-Royce's new energy vehicles must have used BMW's technology. Bentley's new energy vehicles use Volkswagen's technology, and Lotus's future new energy vehicles use Geely's technology.