Talk about an inconvenient truth. The chief executive of Ford last month put a figure on an awkward fact about the shift towards less polluting automotives: electric vehicles need 40 per cent fewer workers to assemble than cars and trucks powered by petrol, said Jim Farley.
In one sense, he was highlighting what the sector already knew: battery vehicles have fewer parts than those propelled by an internal combustion engine and so are easier to make. The decarbonised automotive world is less labour-intensive than the fossil fuel-burning one.
The number, though, was at the higher end of industry estimates. The United Auto Workers union in 2018 said about a tenth of union jobs could go as a result of transition. Ford intends to bring more manufacturing in house, which sounds good for its workers but bad for the supply chain, where smaller companies making exhausts, clutches, gear boxes or radiators already face obsolescence.