Wednesday 13 Nov 2013 @ 13:20
Innovate UK
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Newcastle leads in the electric car race

It was never going to be easy getting rival car manufacturers into the same room - and then expect them to work together.

But a small British company has done just that - and changed the face of the electric car industry forever.

With help from the Technology Strategy Board, Future Transport Systems (FTS) of Newcastle pulled off the seemingly impossible task of project leading a consortium to take the lid off the electric car debate and test the technology at the same time.
 
‘Submitting a bid to the Technology Strategy Board, funding for a low carbon vehicle demonstrator project created the impetus for us to start discussions with Nissan, Smith and smaller vehicle manufacturers,' says Liz Gray, Senior Consultant at FTS. ‘It provided exactly the right opportunity for bringing together a group of companies that were already active in this area so that they could develop the idea further.'
 

Making the connection with EVADINE

The consortium EVADINE (Electric Vehicles Accelerated Development in the North East) FTS was awarded £5.4m by the Technology Strategy Board in April 2009 for a four-year project.
 
As an independent consultancy, FTS was looking at the scaling up of electric vehicles from trials to mass market and integration of recharging with the energy supply grid. 
 
To help achieve this, it put together a proposal for EVADINE, and applied for a grant from the Technology Strategy Board with the aim of discovering whether electric vehicles are fit-for-purpose, assess battery performance, raise awareness of electric vehicles generally, and understand public perception of them.  
 
FTS also wanted to find out what impact individual driving behaviour had on the range and fuel efficiency of the vehicles, whether drivers avoided certain types of journey, what routes they chose and whether routes were affected by the availability of charging points. 
 
The programme aimed to use the best technology available to accelerate development of electric vehicle technology while gathering a wealth of invaluable data. 
 
‘Environmental impact was a crucial aspect of the research, to establish what carbon savings are possible, the effect on air quality and traffic, and where electric vehicles fit in the sustainable transport hierarchy,' says Liz, who took over the project management for the final month when the original project manager, John Austin, left.
 
FTS had been working closely with the Regional Development Agency, One North East, and had written its recharging infrastructure development strategy, and so appreciated the opportunities available. 
 
‘The North East was rapidly developing an electric vehicle infrastructure but we needed to know more about what worked and what didn't,' says Liz. 
 
‘The fact that ‘Charge your Car' had also won funding was important because we were the only electric vehicle project in the UK that had an easily accessible public infrastructure available to all our drivers. We had already learned a lot from this.
 

Perfect timing

‘The North East was leading on charging points, so it was a promising area and timing was good, explained Liz: ‘We could create a project on such as scale that would persuade big vehicle manufacturers that normally compete to work together and discuss technology and what to do next in a way that wouldn't generally happen.' 
 
In the end, FTS worked with electric vehicle manufacturers Nissan, Smith Electric Vehicles, Avid Vehicles and Liberty Electric Cars, to participate, along with Simon Bailes, a Peugeot dealership, and Newcastle University.
 
Click Here for the full success story and further information.
 

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