Nation of innovation: creativity crucial to industry's future

Neill and his team are innovators in the truest sense, able to follow their instinct and having the talent to make it happen.

“Big business is recognising that SMEs are the accelerators of innovation because they’re the speedboats which can fail fast or succeed way quicker than they, the ocean liners, ever can,” he says.

A further project in conjunction with hydrogen powertrain specialist Viritech has produced a hydrogen-powered version of the Mono.

Next is niobium, an additive that when combined with steel results in an 18% reduction in weight for the same tensile and yield strength. It will appear in the next derivative of the Mono, the Mono F.

Beyond that, BAC is talking with some big firms about synthetic fuels.

“It’s a good fit with smaller businesses as incubators and accelerators,” says Briggs.

BAC has a sister firm, Briggs Applied Technology, that offers anyone access to its technologies through licensing arrangements.

Ansible Motion

Ansible Motion was founded by Kia Cammaerts in 2009 and is now a world leader in driver-in-the-loop (DiL) simulators.

Back when he was a motorsport aerodynamicist, Cammaerts was growing increasingly frustrated by the “relatively primitive” data acquisition systems available, so he wrote his own code, which eventually became the software package Aerolap, first released in 1998.

“I focused quite obsessively on generating something that was of a professional standard when you couldn’t buy one,” says Cammaerts. “In those days, Intel would reward you with more performance from its processors every year. It was phenomenal: I could add more maths and model the vehicle better.”

Then mysteriously, the software’s performance stopped getting better, even with adding more calculations.

“It dawned on me that the missing link was the human and that racing drivers are almost supernatural in their ability to do things computers still can’t do. That was the epiphany,” explains Cammaerts. “Cars are easier to model than humans, and we needed to connect a real human with a car model to properly establish the performance of the car on track.”

Cammaerts called in some help from his friend Bob Stevens, a former Lotus engineer, to develop the first simulator, “and that’s what we built the company on, Ansible Motion”.

Today, customers include Ford, Ford Performance, Honda, General Motors, Chevrolet and Michelin.

This September, Ansible Motion was acquired by British test systems supplier AB Dynamics for £31.2m.

Advanced Electric Machines

“It was clear that from the outset that permanent magnets were going to be a problem,” says Advanced Electric Machines (AEM) boss James Widmer, thinking back to the start of his PhD in rare-earth-free electric machines at Newcastle University.

“Rare-earths are environmentally unpleasant, and the CO2 produced from mining and refinement would be about the same amount as the tailpipe emissions from all conventional cars were we to build 100 million EVs a year using them,” says Widmer. He adds that rare-earths are found beside radioactive isotopes, warning: “The automotive industry would end up producing as much radioactive waste as the nuclear industry.”

Based on his own and previous work done at the university, Widmer concluded reluctance motors without permanent magnets were the answer.

“We wanted to make the most sustainable motor we could,” he says, “but needed to prove this wasn’t like an eco washing-up liquid which is sustainable but doesn’t clean dishes properly. We get superior performance from our motors.”

The latest technology developed by AEM enables the use of cheaper, lighter, more sustainable aluminium windings to replace the usual copper – a hard task if increasing the bulk of motors to accommodate the less conductive material is to be avoided.

Now AEM has two motors: SSRD for cars and HDSRM for commercial vehicles. The latter market is taking off rapidly, and the company now has 25 customers across four continents.