Matt Prior

"Emissions targets could collapse the car business"

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How much do we care where our cars come from? Not specifically you and me, I mean; you're reading a British car magazine, and there's a strong chance you're invested, at least emotionally, if not professionally, in the car business.

But what of 'the man on the Clapham omnibus', the legal profession's hypothetical ordinary, reasonable person on the street – someone uninvested, just going about their business? Do they care?

Certainly they'll know about it much more readily than they know where, say, their plastic buckets, clothing, processed food or the hypothetical bus in which they're travelling comes from, because the busyness, or otherwise, of their local factories will be big news.

'UK car making plunges to lowest for over 70 years', ran a BBC headline earlier this summer (partly, but far from exclusively, because US trade tariffs made JLR press pause on sending cars to America). But it's not just a British worry. "There are concerns in Germany, Italy, France and Japan," Prof Peter Wells of Cardiff University's Centre for Automotive Industry Research told the BBC at the time. "It's not purely a UK phenomenon." Traditional car-building countries are struggling to make as many cars as they used to. And you'll know as well as I do what some of the causes of this phenomenon are.