Field Commissioning Engineer

India could take a cue from Brazil to accelerate battery manufacturing. By Shivangi Gupta September 4, 2026 4 Mins Read Brazil's China strategy could offer a useful model for India, particularly as it has encouraged major Chinese companies to explore local manufacturing partnerships. For India, however, its complex relationship with China, coupled with Beijing's reluctance to share or offshore its battery-manufacturing capabilities, has slowed the country's ambitions to develop a domestic cell-manufacturing ecosystem. Brazil's China strategy could therefore provide India with a potential blueprint for attracting Chinese investment while building local manufacturing capacity. Meanwhile, the contests are scheduled for December 2 and 4, respectively. In both cases, the contracts will run for 15 years, with supply scheduled to begin on August 1, 2028. India's own BESS tenders don't yet make the distinction that Brazil has done, but the rush shows what could happen once one does. Brazil's first dedicated grid-storage auction, the Capacity Reserve Auction for Energy Storage (LRCAP), is still three months away, with bids closing in December, but it has already triggered a scramble among the world's largest battery makers to localise production inside the country. In the past two weeks alone, Jinko ESS signed a cooperation agreement with Brazilian manufacturer UCB Power to assemble BESS locally, potentially scaling UCB's Manaus plant to between 1.5 and 4.5 GWh of annual capacity; CATL struck a parallel tie-up with Brazilian battery maker Moura; and BYD is reportedly preparing to invest up to $98 million in a dedicated BESS production line at its existing Manaus site, creating 300-400 direct jobs. The reason all three moved within days of each other is Brazil's auction design, finalised by the Ministry of Mines and Energy and regulator Aneel. It splits LRCAP into two separate lots: one open to any equipment regardless of origin, and one reserved specifically for storage systems meeting minimum local-content thresholds. That bifurcation is what has manufacturers moving now, months before a single megawatt is contracted - access to the protected lot, and to Brazilian development-bank financing that comes with domestic manufacturing status, is worth securing early. India's BESS tendering pipeline, be it Coal India's 750 MWh Telangana project, NTPC's and SECI's various storage awards, the steady cadence of C&I deployments that IESA tracks has scaled fast, but it has largely done so without Brazil's explicit local-content bifurcation. Solar had ALMM to force exactly this kind of choice on module manufacturers and now cells as well; battery storage in India, so far, has not had an equivalent mechanism written into tender design at the same evolutionary stage the solar market once needed it. That is a policy gap based on perceived technical limitations, and Brazil's experience over the next three months is a useful live experiment for what India's own storage-tendering agencies could consider: a protected-content lot doesn't just reward existing domestic manufacturers, it pulls global cell and pack makers into signing local manufacturing agreements they would not otherwise prioritise, months ahead of the auction itself. CATL and Jinko did not localise in Brazil because Brazilian demand alone justified it - they did it because the auction rules made non-local bids structurally worse off for a defined slice of contracted volume. The combination of technology, local production, and access to financing mechanisms can represent an important step in reducing barriers to BESS adoption. The warning is that local material in Brazil is purposefully limited. It is an auction design decision linked to a particular, one-time procurement event rather than a general import ban, and its ability to produce GWh-scale local assembly by the bid deadline in December has yet to be demonstrated. Similar to Brazil, India's BESS manufacturing base now relies more on pack assembly around imported cells than deep cell fabrication, so a similarly structured tender wouldn't create a cell sector out of thin air either. Based on the data from Brazil over the last two weeks, it would speed the kind of technology-transfer and anchor investment commitments for other essential components that a demand signal alone has so far been unable to provide.

China orders nationwide car checks. Auto Drive September 4, 2026 China has decided that if its car industry is going to keep producing new models at a frankly ridiculous pace, someone ought to check whether they actually work properly. A nationwide vehicle-quality inspection campaign began on August 27 and will run for a year, involving four government ministries, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Around 100 domestic manufacturers are being targeted, following quality and conformity problems identified in vehicles from BYD and Geely. Under the new campaign, manufacturers must submit reports covering product quality, reliability and durability to local authorities by the end of 2026. If they discover defects, they are also required to immediately file and conduct voluntary recalls. And this isn't merely a paperwork exercise. Regulators are conducting surprise inspections at factories and dealerships, taking sample vehicles and components directly from the premises. Those samples are then sealed, with their hardware and software configurations preserved before they are sent away for testing. The testing covers pretty much everything you would rather a car manufacturer had already checked itself, including crash performance, structural integrity, battery packs, cybersecurity and data security. Recent inspections have reportedly already found several conformity problems involving BYD and Geely vehicles. According to CNEVPost, a Geely EX2, known as the Xingyuan in China, was found to have a wheelbase deviation exceeding the permitted 1 percent tolerance. A BYD Qin L DM-i, meanwhile, reportedly recorded fuel consumption above its declared figure while operating in charge-sustaining mode. Other inspected vehicles reportedly turned up without owner's manuals, while some had problems involving emergency window devices and side-impact protection equipment. Not exactly the sort of optional extras you want to discover are missing after buying the car. Chinese regulators are also considering doubling the mandatory road-test distance for new electric vehicles to 30,000 kilometres (18,641 miles). If introduced, that would add another considerable chunk of testing to the development process at a time when Chinese manufacturers are becoming increasingly obsessed with getting cars onto showroom floors as quickly as possible. That development speed is the important bit. A new vehicle in China reportedly takes around two years to reach showrooms, compared with roughly three to five years for many established foreign manufacturers using more traditional development processes. And even two years might soon look leisurely. IAT Automobile Technology and the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers have suggested that artificial intelligence could reduce development time to around 18 months. That raises an obvious question: at what point does development become so fast that there simply isn't enough time to properly test the thing? Regulators are now looking at precisely that problem. The concern isn't necessarily that every quality issue represents some grand systemic failure. Rather, compressed development schedules combined with intense cost pressure could encourage manufacturers to reduce or skip parts of the validation process. There is plenty of pressure to do exactly that. China's automotive market is suffering from huge production overcapacity and savage price competition, with falling margins forcing manufacturers to cut costs while simultaneously developing and launching new models at a remarkable rate. The consequences also won't necessarily stop at China's borders. BYD, Geely and other Chinese manufacturers increasingly depend on overseas markets to compensate for weak margins and fierce competition at home. A vehicle that turns out to have a wheelbase in the wrong place or fuel consumption that doesn't quite match the brochure isn't exactly catastrophic, but repeated problems could become rather more awkward once those cars are being sold all over the world. China's car industry has spent years perfecting the art of launching new cars before everyone else has finished designing theirs. Now the government appears to be asking whether anyone remembered to finish testing them.

BYD opens Rp16 trillion EV factory in west java's Subang. September 3, 2026 | 04:49 pm TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Chinese EV manufacturer BYD has officially inaugurated an Rp16 trillion electric vehicle factory in Cipeundeuy District, Subang Regency, today, September 3. Liu Xueliang, Vice President of BYD Co. Ltd., stated that the company currently employs 5,000 local workers and plans to expand the workforce to 20,000 once full operational capacity is reached. "We have built four major automotive manufacturing divisions here: stamping, welding, painting, and final assembly," he said during the inauguration of the Subang facility on Thursday, September 3, 2026. Spanning 126 hectares, the facility has an annual production capacity of 150,000 vehicles. The entire manufacturing process is fully integrated within a single complex. The factory produces the Atto 1, M6, and M6 DM models, alongside the luxury Denza D9 variant. Assembly relies on computer-controlled robotics, billed as among the world's most advanced systems, while maintaining human workforce deployment across select production stages. Liu emphasized that BYD will continue collaborating across all sectors, from industry stakeholders to end consumers. "Together, we aim to contribute to Indonesia's progress toward a greener, technology-driven future," he said. He mentioned that the occasion also marked BYD's delivery of its 100,000th vehicle to the Indonesian market. The milestone model was the M6 DM, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV). As part of the inauguration, BYD guided stakeholders on a factory tour to show its various manufacturing stages. Photography, however, are restricted in certainareas along the tour route.