It's EV News briefly for Saturday 23rd of November. Everything EV in less than five minutes.

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Volkswagen have had a difficult 24 hours facing possible strikes in December.

Amidst a deadlock in their restructuring, negotiations began at the Walsberg headquarters,

with union representatives asking for a 5.5% pay increase and a guarantee of no factories being closed.

Volkswagen are countering that with a 10% wage reduction, and they will not guarantee they won't close up to three plants

in Germany.

Those two sides seem a long way apart at the moment.

We'll follow how that goes and how it impacts the EV industry.

Ford is pulling out of a major Quebec EV battery project alongside SK On and a company

called EcoPro to make cathode active material.

Of course, 45,000 tons of that every year will not be needed by Ford if they are winding back a little bit.

Their EV programs canceling their three-row program.

And so it would make sense that they don't need anything as much as that.

And also, there's like three or four different main types of cathode, active material.

And if you want to make plug-in hybrids or hybrid cars, you need different materials,

even though it's all cathodes.

And so that probably makes sense.

Italy is following the model of the UK, of Norway, famously, I should

say, and Denmark as well, which is don't give people free money to buy an EV, but make it a lot more

expensive to drive a carbon-intensive polluting vehicle because you've then got to dissuade people from those vehicles and also,

...