‘We’re going all in’: how France raced ahead of UK on electric car batteries

News Snapshot:

Forty miles from the coast of Britain, where the government was again told this week that without urgent action it risks losing the electric vehicle race, “Battery Valley” is taking shape in northern France. Emmanuel Macron’s announcement last week that the Taiwanese battery maker ProLogium had chosen Dunkirk for its first foreign facility brings to four the number of gigafactories planned in a corridor stretching about 60 miles inland from the port. “We’re going all in on this,” said Xavier Bertrand, the head of the Hauts-de-France region, once home to many of France’s coalmines and much of its steel industry,...