While Slovakia and Poland slug it out to land a huge new Jaguar Land Rover plant on a much smaller scale countries and regions are competing to welcome a new Aston Martin plant to build the firms' first crossover (that's SUV to you and me) model, the DBX.
It's thought Aston Martin is still reviewing numerous sites in Europe, the US and elsewhere for the new plant.
The specialist magazine Automotive News recently reported an Aston spokesperson saying "evaluation of multiple global locations continues," adding that more than ten locations were still in the running.
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In a speech to the Automotive News Europe Congress here in Birmingham earlier this summer, Aston Martin chief executive Andy Palmer said the firm's expansion plan meant it was growing too big for its Gaydon plant.
But he wouldn't confirm where the new plant would be although he did fuel speculation it could be Alabama.
"We will make the decision in the third quarter. Alabama is a candidate but other states have expressed interest," he stated.
Aston Martin had said it made sense to build a new plant in Alabama (an "obvious choice") for its new DBX because it was near to a Mercedes plant that also made SUVs.
Mercedes' parent Daimler Benz has a five per cent shareholding in Aston Martin and the two have an agreement to co-operate.
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And earlier this month, Prime Minister David Cameron told BBC News he would "make available" a former air force hanger in Wales for production of the crossover.
The Prime Minister said he was extending a "great offer" to Aston by making available the site at St Athan, west of Cardiff airport, for production of the DBX.
St Athan is a former Second World War airbase used for servicing fighter planes.
The Welsh government has been pressing the Ministry of Defence to release land at the site for development use for some years.
There had previously been plans for a defence technical college at the site but these has been shelved.
Bringing in Aston Martin might be seen as a something of a sweetener for the impact of defence cuts.
Meanwhile, Coventry City Council has been having talks with Aston in a bid to bring DBX production to the city.
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The Browns Lane site, which once housed Jaguar, is thought to be a contender and could be ideal in terms of size and location. "It's Coventry's to lose" one industry expert told me.
To be fair to the Prime Minister, he probably didn't mean to favour Wales as a location but was simply responding to a 'What if Aston Martin wanted Wales?' type question.
That didn't stop much media malarkey. As the Coventry Telegraph's Simon Gilbert recently noted, tongue-in-cheek:
"Let's give Mr Cameron the benefit of the doubt and assume he didn't know that the company was also eyeing up a site in Coventry. Either that or his sat-nav must be playing up and he didn't realise St Athan is in Wales and Coventry is in England."
Indeed, the competition between Wales and Coventry for the plant was the focus of a good natured exchange between journalists at the Coventry Telegraph and Wales Online as to the merits of the two locations
Aston plans to launch its first SUV, the DBX, in 2019 as part of a strategy to raise annual sales to around 15,000. The new SUV is urgently needed as the firm needs to expand its range.
Over the last few years, it has been held back by high levels of debt, a lack of investment, ageing models and no crossover models.
Not surprisingly, the firm has missed out on a global boom in luxury car sales that saw the market virtually double in size in five years.
Last year, Aston Martin delivered just 4,200 cars - while 11 per cent up on 2013, it was still well short of a 2007 high of 7,300.
In particular, it has missed out on the global boom in SUV sales that has fuelled huge Porsche SUV sales and led to the likes of Maserati, Lamborghini and Bentley developing new crossover offerings (expect Rolls-Royce to enter the market as well).
Aston Martin is aiming at sales of about 3,000 a year for the DBX as part of a plan to more than triple annual sales to 15,000 (from around 4,000) to end what CEO Andy Palmer has termed the "feast and famine" of ups and downs at the firm.
Palmer also noted that, in the luxury car industry, consumers often paid more than two or three times the base price as they sought to individualize the vehicles.
It's this 'personalisation' and 'servitisation' of the luxury car industry that is in part driving reshoring in the 海角视频 as consumers co-design the end product with the car maker and localised supply chains can be used to shorten delivery times.
A site in Coventry, close to Aston Martin's existing plant and supply chain, would be ideal in that sense.
Mr Cameron's at-best inadvertent foray into this particular 'location tournament' over Aston comes as Sajid Javid, the new business secretary, reviews the Government's industrial policy.
While the new Conservative Government has pledged broad support for the Automotive Council (which delivers the industrial policy for the industry), free-marketeer Javid is reappraising what industrial policy can do in the context of George Osborne's deep cuts to non-protected departments.
The Regional Growth Fund and national Advanced Manufacturing Supply Chain Initiative have both gone.
While other elements of the policy - such as the Automotive Investment Organisation - remain, there is a danger that, as pieces of policy wither due to a lack of funding, the remaining policies don't add up to form an effective strategy.
That's the subject of another blog.
Professor David Bailey works at the Aston Business School