The trigger was the switch to electrification, explains Constance: “In a growing market, it is always easier to gain market share than with those who are already established. For example, if you are trying to gain market share with instrument panels, you are in a zero-sum game. The market is growing for electric motors, batteries and power electronics, so you have to secure your share. “
Where Britain failed was commercialization, Constance added, “Britain is great at coming up with new ideas, but what happened was that those ideas fell to the ground because nobody wanted to fund them or they” were bought by a company and financed elsewhere. “
Manufacturing jobs are big win as the UK seeks to rebuild the automobile manufacturing network after it has eroded over the past three decades.
Constance said funding his organization created 50,000 jobs, many in manufacturing, but declined to provide an example of an APC innovation project that created significant numbers of manufacturing jobs in the UK.
It is clear, however, that the money was mainly used to support research and development jobs. That’s not bad, but production has the biggest impact on the economy.
“Nissan, which makes 400,000 cars a year in Sunderland, has billions in sales and a large part of that is the added value of the UK economy,” said Constance. “A design center with maybe a few thousand employees has an annual budget of a billion, so the added value will not be the same, but the intangible benefits for the industry are difficult to quantify.”
He cites Ford as an example. It received £ 4.8 million to develop with partner firms Prodrive (who built early prototypes) and Revolve Technologies, a Ford engineering company known by its former name RoushTechnologies of the plug-in hybrid transporter Transit Custom.
