The UK’s unique low-volume car business could be heading for trouble as the 2030 electric car revolution gains momentum – unless it rapidly changes course. So says ace niche vehicle engineer Neil Yates, who has been concerned about the industry’s future for the best part of a decade, but believes he has an important lifeline to offer.
Until now, Yates has been best known for Rally Prep, the Newquay-based competition car business he launched in 2011 to build and prepare rally cars for customers all over Europe. But Yates has also built cars of his own design in a varied career and is a keenly sought consultant on R&D projects for high-tech UK firms like Ariel and Delta Motorsport, so his finger is on the industry’s pulse.
The basis for Yates’s concern is rapidly becoming clear to all: huge electrification changes are coming to all cars by 2030, but the niche industry’s ultra-low sales volumes mean most participants don’t have spare funds to invest in their medium-term future. Covid hasn’t helped: car makers are so busy finding orders to sustain their businesses in the immediate future that they simply can’t yet focus on the cars they’ll build by 2030.
But the pressure is about to ramp up, says Yates: “Well before the end of this decade, low-volume manufacturers will need new products for a new market, using new technologies and dealing with a new supplier group. Almost nothing, except perhaps the exterior shapes of more traditional vehicles, will be the same.”
Yates believes he has a solution: a highly flexible chassis concept that’s configurable in so many ways that it can be used for almost any kind of electric or hybrid vehicle from quadricycle to bus. It’s a classic EV skateboard – a rigid, self-jigging aluminium platform chassis with an innovative integral battery enclosure that complies with all relevant ISO standards, meets current small-series crash legislation and can be made with relatively simple techniques and equipment.
The system’s layout and flexibility is neatly explained in the name, PACES, which stands for Passenger And Commercial EV Skateboard. Confident of its capabilities after a development phase that goes back nearly 10 years, Yates is now well on the way to “proving by doing”, as it were. He has launched a new company, Watt EV, to build an all-electric road car, the WEV Coupé, and prove beyond doubt that his theories and his hardware work in the real world.
Join the debate
Add your comment
I wonder who the "big name" is that's showing interest? The trouble is, there seems to be too many "not invented here" attitudes among the main industry which is too stuck into massive operations requiring huge investment from which it cannot extricate itself. As an example, very little interest seems to have been shown in Gordon Murray's iStream system that would appear to offer similar benefits (perhaps the two ideas should be combined!). I like the way this man thinks though, and would love to see the many over-the-top, overweight EVs that seem to be proliferating everywhere disappear straight down a two-tonne wormhole. He goes on to mention other wonders: comfort, good steering and handling and 16" wheels with 65 profile tyres - bliss!
I applaud his determination,and the other small British businesses, doing what they do best, trouble is, that's not enough,Britain needs to succeed in other areas, big volume cars sales, and not just in the UK, but globally.
Good luck to him. Sounds a great solution and already done in many other industries, allows other companies to focus on making a unique low volume designs but with the benefits of a ready approved platform - a far better idea than Britains richest man making a petrol engined copy of an old Land Rover designed by a yacht builder to be built abroad