Britishvolt founder Orral Nadjari has stepped down as CEO of the UK battery technology company.
Deputy CEO and president of global operations Graham Hoare – who was previously chairman at Ford of Britain – will take over in the interim.
Nadjari said: “Although it was a difficult decision for me to step away from the operational management of the company, now is the right time for me to pass the reins, after laying the foundations, to our hugely talented, world-leading team, who will drive the business forwards as it enters the execution phase.”
Hoare said: “I’m honoured to take the company forward in the next chapter of our growth and industrialisation.”
Britishvolt filed for administration on 17 January 2023. Click here for the latest updates: Britishvolt collapses with loss of nearly 300 jobs
The move comes after Britishvolt's successful application for a UK government grant through the £850 million Automotive Transformation Fund, which was confirmed in late July.
The funding will support the firm’s plans to build a £3.8 billion battery factory in Blyth, Northumberland, set to begin production in 2024.
The site could create 3000 skilled on-site jobs, plus a further 5000 in the wider supply chain, according to Britishvolt.
It could eventually produce batteries for more than 300,000 EVs per year to manufacturers including Aston Martin and Lotus – the latter of which is set to use Britishvolt cells in its Type 135 sports car, due in 2026.
Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said in July: “The vast site will ensure Britain can fully capture the benefits of the booming global electric vehicle market.”
However, The Guardian recently reported that the project is on “life support” to minimise costs as Britishvolt awaits final designs for the plant, due in October.
Hoare told Autocar in April that the facility would be “the fourth-largest building in the UK” and that the firm felt "reasonably stable until about 2027".
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Well that's a complete mischaracterisation of what was written in the Guardian, a report written from an internal Britishvolt presentation which was issued just two days before they received the grant from HMG.
Even if groundwork was completed ahead of schedule, and, even if, there are design changes going ahead (in itself not necessarily a good thing), the presentation was still a scoping document that was concerned with budget mitigation. The "life support" option chosen was just one of several options on the table including suspending all but electrical infrastructure work until June next year. These are not "awaiting design" comfort breaks. These are programme impact decisions based on cash flow. Decisions taken even when they knew a tax payer funded grant were forthcoming, and there remains some doubt on the cash flow point for the next couple of weeks or so. But even then, by all accounts, not even 50% of the projected costs will have been realised.
And, now, their second of two Co-founders has jumped ship (the first being a convicted tax fraud), because CEOs always do this when everything is going just brilliantly!
Why do you do this Autocar? Where are your journalistic faculties? Is it "wave a shiny trinket" (in the form of "big name backers" in this case") and you get all giddy?
You did the same with Lotus under Bahar and his ridiculous junket to China, trying to setup a dealer chain in Tier 2 and 3 cities (because everyone in Baotou wants a Lotus, FFS), and now you're doing it with TVR.
Creating something new, from the ground, is always challenging, can be exciting, often fraught, but can also be incredibly rewarding. Faking it until you make it, with code tapped out in a small room, has led to some great things, but even when it doesn't the impact is minimal to outsiders and the creators usually come up with something else, having learned from their experience. Faking it until you make it with real tangible objects, in actual locations, is a very high risk strategy. When it goes wrong it screws with the lives of ordinary people and leaves social scars behind long after the site has been repurposed. All the while the likes of Calstrom, Nadjari, and Hoare will pop up somewhere else, with a new plan, having been insulated against the effects of the previous failed one. But here we have complete, unquestioning, brown nosing.
Why?
Are you afraid of losing out on something?
A company from which I can tell has absolutely no history in producing batteries. Not one.
Wants to build a factory at the cost of £3.8bn, manufacturing something they have zero expertise in.
Have they even licensed the intellectual property rights to an existing battery?
This sounds even worse than the Chunghwa factory in Scotland. At least they were a company which had made something before building an out of date factory!