How did a Chinese company that few people have heard of manage to defeat German carmakers at their own game?
Illustration by Sam Ward
In late 2019, residents of the German town of Arnstadt awoke to find diggers breaking ground on a new factory at the site of a defunct solar panel plant. Stretching over 23 hectares (around 100 football fields), the $2 billion plant was Germany’s first large scale battery ‘Gigafactory’ with the capacity to pump out enough batteries for hundreds of thousands of electric cars every year.
Germany invented the internal combustion engine in 1876 and makes the finest luxury cars in the world. The car industry helped power Germany’s post-war Wirtschaftswunder with brands such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi becoming symbols of reliability and engineering expertise.
Aerial view of Contemporary Amperex Technology Thuringia GmbH (CATT), in Arnstadt, Thuringia, Germany. Credit: CATL via LinkedIn
But the Arnstadt factory was not being built by a German carmaker. Instead it was being financed and constructed by a little-known Chinese company founded only eight yea
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