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Hello, I'm Matthew Price.

This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4, where we ask one big question about one big story every weekday.

Today why are car companies now tech firms?

What you drive has always said a lot about who you are and for parts of the country

car makings defined the identity of whole towns and cities, Sunderland, Dagenham, Swindon.

Now this is only partly an episode about cars. It's also about what cars tell us

about the massive disruptive movements that are going on at the moment, shifts that are changing

the way things are made, the jobs we can get, the way business

works, the future of this country.

When the news first dropped about people losing their jobs in carmaking here, We started wondering, what's going on? Was

it all about Brexit? We couldn't work it out. Until last week I bumped into Joe Miller

on the third floor here. He's a BBC business correspondent and I asked him what he thought and

he said Brexit is about one-eighth of the reason why Nissan and Honda are going to invest less in the UK.

Joe started to understand these huge shifts in the way the car industry and

everything else works when he was listening to some of the big bosses in carmaking. I really started thinking about this when I spent some time in Germany as a business

reporter in Germany, which means you spend an awful lot of your time talking

about German car companies and going to conference after conference with the CEOs of German carmakers.

And they started to refer to themselves on stage as tech companies.

Deliberately, you know, you'd have BMW CEO, you'd have Daimler CEO, get up and talk about what they're doing in tech, how many coders they've been hiring,

how many software engineers, their new campuses in Lisbon and places like that where they've got

300 young people to come and sit next to each other and code hundreds and

...