How Ricardo is building the battery supply chain for high value, low volume manufacturers

Nissan has announced a major expansion of electric vehicle production at its car plant in Sunderland, and that its partner Envision AESC, will build a new electric battery gigafactory. This is great news for mass market car production in the UK, but what about prestige UK-based manufacturers which need to produce high value, low volume electrified vehicles every year? We at Ricardo Performance Products are currently assessing the commercial feasibility of a UK-based battery manufacturing facility for UK niche volume electrified vehicles. This in turn is supported by the Advanced Propulsion Centre’s Automotive Transformation Fund supported by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

The UK has a diverse mix of sector-leading manufacturers from automotive, off highway through to defence and commercial vehicles and everything in between. These vehicle manufacturers include some of the world’s best known prestige brands which create their luxury saloon cars, armoured military vehicles, mid engine sports cars and rugged yellow goods for a customer base in the low thousands. This compares with the hundreds of thousands or millions of vehicles produced for the mass passenger car market around the globe. The volume requirements, pace of innovation and flexible product specifications of niche volume manufacturers are not aligned with the high-volume outputs from emerging ‘gigafactories’. A niche volume battery manufacturing facility will help to establish a robust supply chain for these critical electrification components while ensuring the UK remains at the forefront of these prestigious markets.?

So, what is Ricardo doing to address this? Ricardo’s mission is to support the decarbonisation of the global transport and energy sectors. We are currently using our expertise in niche volume manufacturing, battery R&D, second life and recycling, complex supply chain management and strategic consultancy, to undertake commercial studies into how to meet the particular battery hardware needs of these diverse niche manufacturers across a wide range of business sectors, by ensuring a UK supply chain in electric vehicle components.?

We are assessing how a proposed facility could help minimise the risk of scaling up the innovation of new battery concepts to niche volumes. We are also harnessing our world-renowned expertise in batteries, to explore opportunities to minimise the environmental impact of battery pack manufacture through ‘second life processing’ and recycling of core elements from construction. This should help to ‘level up’ the UK supply chain in critical electric vehicle components to support manufacturers producing fewer than 10,000 electrified vehicles per year.

In doing so, our ambition is to deliver national competitive advantage for the UK, and support the adoption of electrification in all sectors and in doing so contribute to the green bounce back through sustainable practices. Ricardo’s future manufacturing strategy is very much aligned to this emerging need for world leading electrified vehicle components. Leveraging our proven track record in industrialising technology, we are very pleased to have received the ATF funding, which will enable us to pursue this strategy, and help the UK reach its ambitious targets to achieve its net zero goals.