TheChek News Flow

Another runway will not be part of the project, but it will include a new terminal, taxiways and aircraft stands

Luton airport has received UK government approval for a major expansion, overriding a recommendation from planning inspectors to reject the project on environmental grounds.

The airport to the north of London had sought planning permission to increase its annual passenger capacity from 18mn to 32mn.

The major expansion does not include a new runway, but would involve the construction of new infrastructure, including a new terminal and taxiways and aircraft stands.

Transport secretary Heidi Alexander will on Thursday announce that she has approved the scheme, which will support 4,200 new jobs, according to officials.

The Planning Inspectorate advised refusing the application because of environmental concerns, including the impact on the “relative tranquillity” of the nearby Chiltern Hills. The expansion will mean planes cross the scenic area every 15 minutes instead of the current 30 minutes.

The Labour government has swung behind airport expansion in bid to boost economic growth, including most controversially a potential third runway at Heathrow, Europe’s biggest airport.

Alexander in March also signalled she would approve a second runway at Gatwick if the airport makes changes to its plans, but delayed a final decision until later this year.

All of London’s major airports currently have plans to boost their passenger numbers. Stansted and City airports have had their proposals approved in recent months.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves earlier this year said airport expansion was compatible with the government’s legally binding net zero 2050 target, pointing to “cleaner and greener flying” through so-called sustainable aviation fuels.

But climate groups have argued that major increases in passenger numbers will be incompatible with the 2050 target.

UK supercar brand to widen model range following acquisition by Abu Dhabi’s CYVN

McLaren Automotive is merging with UK luxury electric vehicle start-up Forseven Holdings in a radical makeover of the 62-year-old British supercar manufacturer under its new owner. 

The integration was announced on Thursday after Abu Dhabi investment group CYVN completed its acquisition of McLaren’s auto business from Bahraini sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat. CYVN, which backs Forseven and Chinese EV maker Nio, has also bought a minority stake in McLaren’s Formula 1 team as part of the deal announced last year.

The merger will enable McLaren to widen its model range beyond supercars to potentially include a sport utility vehicle, people with knowledge of the talks said. Forseven, a small company with about 700 employees, in turn wants to leverage McLaren’s heritage and brand strength. Forseven has previously said it wants to launch its own luxury EV by the end of the decade.

McLaren sells supercars that rival Ferrari and Lamborghini but the group has been lossmaking for the past five years. It has been engaged in talks with a number of carmakers for several years to form a partnership and secure new funding in order to develop new models, though no deal has ever materialised.

Negotiations with CYVN started about a year ago. The merged group will be led by Nick Collins, a former Jaguar Land Rover executive, while leadership for the brand’s automotive business will be disclosed later.

“I vehemently believe luxury is what Britain does brilliantly in automotive,” Collins told the Financial Times.

The new group will launch at a time when the UK car industry faces fresh costs from US President Donald Trump’s 25 per cent tariffs on foreign-made cars imported to America, which came into effect on Thursday.

McLaren produces all of its vehicles in the UK although the US is the largest market for the carmaker. People close to the talks said the combined group intended to continue sports car manufacturing in the UK but plans have not been disclosed for where they will produce other vehicles.

There have long been questions about when McLaren would enter the SUV competition. Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley and Aston Martin have all launched SUV-sized models that have helped increase sales and profits but McLaren has historically been cautious about joining the crowded space.

“To unlock the full potential, we think we should extend our line-up without diluting the brand,” McLaren’s chief executive Michael Leiters said in an interview last year.

People close to CYVN said McLaren’s new owner would invest over the long term, adding that its turnaround plan would be more wide-ranging than simply adding an SUV to McLaren’s traditional supercar range. 

“It isn’t just about investing, it is about shaping the future of McLaren as a brand, as a business and its place on the global automotive map,” said CYVN chair Jassem Al Zaabi, who will also become chair of McLaren Group Holdings. 

In addition to new funding, the merger with Forseven will also allow McLaren to tap into Nio’s EV technology, although Leiters has previously been cautious about whether the technology is ready to make supercars fully electric. McLaren currently offers petrol and hybrid vehicles.

Collins said the merged group would be flexible about its models and would “have the ability to adapt our offer to the pace of transition.”

Last month, China’s Byd said it would soon release two electric vehicles capable of charging in five minutes—not much longer than the time it takes to fill a gas tank. The assertion caught rivals uncomfortably off guard, especially companies in the West, where the fastest competing EVs charge to 80% of capacity in roughly 20 minutes.

Byd’s claim is that its new EVs could deliver roughly 150 miles of driving range in five minutes. If that’s true, the company—already on an early pace to surpass Tesla as the world’s leading EV maker globally this year—seems likely to run away with the race. It would dramatically narrow the difference between EVs and gasoline-power vehicles.

Byd has released few details about its charging system and batteries, and it did not respond to emails. But Western battery industry veterans raise doubts about its claim. It’s long been possible to charge so quickly once, twice or perhaps even a handful of times over the 1,000-cycle lifetime of a typical EV battery with the 300-mile driving range most motorists demand, they said. But such a battery would burn up, and possibly catch fire, if subjected to consecutive five-minute charges for many hundreds of cycles, industry hands said.

Batteries are all about trade-offs between range, weight and charging time. Building a battery that can handle a huge jolt of electricity at once would limit the EV’s range to 100 or 150 miles. The reason is the balance between the electrodes. To enable lithium ions to move that fast into the negative electrode—the anode—it must be made ultrathin. But if you make the anode thinner, you have to make the positive electrode—the cathode—thinner, too, which reduces its capacity to hold energy. That decreases the driving range.

In addition, producing that huge jolt would require costly upgrades to charging stations and the power grid, which at the moment can’t meet such a demand. The cost to build a small four-charger station would be well over $1 million, according to Quincy Lee, CEO of Electric Era, a charging station company. Part of that cost is the large batteries the stations would require to buttress grid power.

The already strained power grid would need expensive upgrades to enable such stations. Byd said it will build 4,000 new charging stations capable of 1 megawatt bursts of power, roughly twice as much voltage as the current best transformers can theoretically supply. There currently appear to be no such transformers in the U.S. (or China) for passenger vehicles, though a few have been installed in depots to charge up gigantic batteries that power electric semitrucks.

A truly competitive new battery would charge in five minutes, go at least 300 miles on a charge, cost roughly the same as current batteries to produce and use conventional charging stations. It hardly seems worth the effort to get 150 miles of range, except for the global buzz generated by the announcement. “I think it’s amazing marketing—it’s a bang,” said Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies, a California-based silicon anode developer.

Byd CEO and founder Wang Chuanfu made the fast-charging claim in a public event March 17 at the company’s headquarters in Shenzhen. The company’s new system, he said, would deliver around 150 miles of driving range in five minutes. He said in the presentation that the first two EVs powered by the system, the Han L sedan at $37,400 and the Tang L SUV at $38,500, will be available in April. They will only be sold in China.

Wang did not say the battery would charge in five minutes every time. But his manner suggested the new cars would be comparable to those currently on the road with 250 or 300 miles of range—except that they could charge a lot faster. It was a claimed breakthrough that, if true, would put serious pressure on rival EV makers, since plenty of Chinese buyers would then expect such capability in any EV.

By comparison, Tesla says its EVs can charge to a maximum of 170 miles in 15 minutes; Mercedes-Benz says its new CLA sedan can charge to 200 miles in 10 minutes.

Claims about the Han L in Chinese media in recent months have evolved. In January, prominent Chinese tech website IT Home reported that the Han L could charge from 16% to 80% of its battery capacity—around 144 miles—in 10 minutes. That makes sense because those capacity levels are the sweet spot of charging. Totally draining a battery can damage it, and batteries begin to resist more charge at about 80% of capacity.

Offering another clue, the Beijing-based publication Cars News China reported that the Han L and Tang L use large lithium-iron-phosphate batteries, which allow faster charging than nickel-based batteries. Byd uses LFP in all its cars. No one has reported the type of anode Byd’s new EVs use, but they are likely graphite because the alternative—silicon—doesn’t twin well with LFP cathodes.

Last year, StoreDot, an Israeli battery developer, claimed to have produced a battery that delivered 200 miles of driving range in 10 minutes, and said it would soon deliver a battery that provided 100 miles of charge in five minutes. Its cathodes are nickel based and its anodes are made of costly silicon, which allows much faster charging than graphite.

StoreDot CEO Doron Myersdorf told me that the key to the performance of StoreDot’s batteries is its electrolyte—the liquid that sits between the two electrodes. He said Byd might have improved its electrolyte as well, but that he remained skeptical of its claims.

“What BYD is claiming is really not so feasible, especially not with the infrastructure that we have today. Also, it’s very dangerous to put 1 megawatt into a vehicle,” he said. “This is only a once-in-a-while kind of use case. Otherwise, they would say that this is a use case for consecutive cycling, but they never mentioned this at all.”

Berdichevsky, the Sila Nano CEO, thinks the splash the Byd announcement made, however, shows that ultrafast charging is the future. “Ten years from now, I think this is the standard,” he said. “Maybe it’s eight minutes, maybe it’s five, maybe it’s nine, but it’s single digits because that’s good marketing.”

Executive tells staff it is not ‘commercially viable’ for group to keep unit dedicated to low-emissions vehicles

BP is shutting its low-carbon mobility team in the energy major’s latest retreat from its five-year-old attempt to diversify away from oil and gas.

The unit was responsible for developing electric, hydrogen and other low-emission solutions for vehicles, particularly trucks. It is the most recent casualty of chief executive Murray Auchincloss’s plan to refocus BP on its legacy oil and gas business.

Senior BP executive Martin Thomsen told staff on Wednesday that it was no longer “commercially viable” for BP to justify a dedicated team to the activity. Any remaining activities would be allocated to other parts of the business, he added.

In an effort to increase returns and boost BP’s share price, Auchincloss in February announced he was scrapping a five-year-old plan to become a major renewable energy player and cutting spending on green energy by 70 per cent. The strategy shift followed news that US activist hedge fund Elliott Management had taken a near-5 per cent stake in BP and was pushing for radical changes.

Thomsen wrote in an email to staff on Wednesday: “As you know, and Murray has made very clear, we can see that the energy transition is moving at a slower pace than we had anticipated.”

Projects in low-carbon mobility were developing “more slowly” and required “a lot of investment” at a time when the capital available to the wider division had been reduced, he added.

On a call with staff on the same day, he was more direct. “We had a view of low-carbon that didn’t happen,” he said, according to a person on the call. “We need to revert to the old BP — more oil and gas — and old-fashioned retail — petrol, diesel.”

Thomsen is currently a senior vice-president in charge of emerging markets in BP’s customer and products division, which manages BP’s global network of petrol stations. He was recently promoted to head both BP’s global electric vehicle charging business, BP Pulse, and its retail network in Europe, following the departure of several senior leaders.

Tracey Clements, a former Boots and Tesco executive, stepped down as the head of BP’s European retail network in January after three years with the company. She was replaced by the chief executive of BP Pulse, Richard Bartlett, who was appointed to run both businesses. Bartlett then announced his own resignation last month.

BP confirmed the decision to phase down and close the team.

“As we focus our downstream businesses and activity we don’t believe we need to maintain a separate dedicated team to consider such future options,” it said. “Its activities will be integrated into our businesses.”

BP added that the decision would not affect BP Pulse. The company said it remained focused on expanding its EV charging business in its four key markets of the UK, Germany, the US and China, and on growing through joint ventures in India, Spain and Portugal.