Johnson Matthey has decided to pull out of that so very important battery design business:

Johnson Matthey is to abandon years of research and development and hundreds of millions of pounds spent trying to find the key that will unlock the full potential of electric cars: being able to travel hundreds of miles on a single battery charge, without the weight and cost of batteries that make the vehicle undriveable or commercially unviable.

What joy. For our task is to have a system which explores the technologically available space for manners of sating consumer demands. To sort through what can be done and match that up with what people want to be done. That being what capitalist free marketry does better than any other system we’ve tried as yet.

That this isn’t working out in this instance is a pain for those who funded it, certainly. But the reason for the abandonment?

With the demand for electric car batteries escalating, MacLeod had to admit that Johnson Matthey had lost the technological battery race with producers in low-cost economies such as LG Chem, of South Korea, and CATL, of China.

“While the testing of our eLNO battery materials with customers is going well, the marketplace is rapidly evolving, with increasing commoditisation and lower returns,” he said. “We have concluded that we will not achieve the returns necessary to justify further investment.”

Someone else got there faster, better, cheaper. So, in order not to run out of their money - or their investors’ money - Johnson Matthey stopped. That’s the grand joy, the manner in which the system stops mistakes. It is not just that the envelope is explored, but that when the corners are found it stops.

Just think it through for a moment. The only alternative to folks risking their own money is that government does it for us all. Which is where the big problem arises - government never does stop such things until they run out of other peoples’ money.