The CAR Inquisition: why an industry veteran dropped everything to embrace electrification
If Britain is serious about joining the EV-making elite, it also needs to build its own batteries
Graham Hoare’s handiwork is all over the engines that have powered Fords great and small for the past 20 years, not to overlook a few BMW and Land Rover ones before that. With hits like the threecylinder EcoBoost turbo petrol on his CV, Hoare rose to become Ford’s global director of engineering operations and Ford of Britain chairman. Yet earlier this year he packed it all in to join the battery start-up Britishvolt. Why?
Like many people, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed his outlook on life. He answered the government’s call to help with the emergency ventilator challenge, collaborating with experts from McLaren, Airbus and intubation company Penlon. ‘We put this group together over about 100 days and built 12,000 ventilators at the speed of light,’ he enthuses. ‘The velocity and energy were just phenomenal and I loved it.’
Another massive societal issue – the car industry’s shift to electrification – also played a profound role. Hoare, who received an OBE in 2018, is joint chair of the Automotive Council, which works with the government to develop the strategy to protect and enhance Britain’s car industry.
‘We put steps in place, recognising that a wall of change was coming with electrification. And buying behaviour has changed very quickly: 10 per cent of new car sales are electric.’
‘Put those two things together, and it felt like a natural time to move into something smaller and more agile. At no point did I ever not love being at Ford, it’s a fabulous company with great people. It was just my time to do something different.’
And how. Britishvolt is leading the mission to build sucient domestic battery manufacturing to power tomorrow’s car industry, with Hoare its president of global operations. Britishvolt has broken ground on the fourth biggest building in the country, a £2.6bn gigafactory in Blyth, Northumberland, which aims to be manufacturing cells in 2024 and supplying 30GWh in 2027 – sucient to power 300,000 new cars annually.
‘Britishvolt is trying to fuse the best of the UK’s autos experience with the best of the battery and chemistry world, to create the world’s best battery company,’ says the genial engineer.
The company’s founder, Orral Nadjari, hails from the UAE but the UK’s infrastructure and talent drew him to the place that invented lithium-ion batteries. Some 450 researchers
work here, with leading university programmes and a novel UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, boasting everything on-site to help companies produce and test batteries in low volumes before scaling up.
‘Across Europe, I think the UK is punching above its weight [in battery development], and that’s because the UK started to organise itself around this transformation two to three years ago,’ Hoare says.
Britishvolt claims its site is the continent’s largest gigafactory to have secured full regulatory approval (Elon Musk’s planned factory in Berlin, for example, is mired in environmental red tape), with Britain’s plentiful green energy supply another critical draw for Nadjari’s project.
Blyth is sweetly located to tap into North Sea wind power and Norwegian hydropower, as well as creating its own solar energy. Clean energy is critical to reducing the high carbon footprint of battery production, and Hoare is adamant that the raw material supply chain will have a clean and ethical approach too.
And he’s clearly thrilled at the prospect of working with some of Britain’s lustrous car brands, and fettling batteries for the incredibly diverse range of vehicles the nation produces.
‘Until today, battery chemistry has been relatively standardised,’ he explains. ‘Volumes have been low, so there hasn’t been the demand or an economical way of customising cells. That’s changing because the scale is coming, and tailoring is the answer.
‘A commercial vehicle will want to high-speed charge very regularly without deterioration over an extended lifetime. A supercar will have more exacting power requirements and weight will be an issue. A McLaren and a Sprinter are completely different products with a completely different character, and the battery can be a differentiator.’
Real character in a battery electric vehicle’s powertrain? If Britishvolt can achieve that, Graham Hoare will be in line for a sainthood from the petrolhead fraternity.
PHIL MCNAMARA