Completed Clean Energy Materials & Manufacturing

UK Niche Vehicle Battery Cell Supply Chain

Funder UKRI
Recipient organisation Agm Batteries Limited
Funding £3.2M
Period Jul 2018 — Apr 2021

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

The UK’s only lithium-ion cell manufacturer is joining forces with niche vehicle makers, materials suppliers, and research organisations to build a domestic battery cell supply chain from scratch. This matters because the UK invented lithium-ion technology but lost the manufacturing lead to Japan and others. Today, the country excels at battery research but has almost no production capacity for the cells themselves. Specialist vehicle makers—producing sports cars, luxury cars, emergency vehicles, and heavy-duty trucks—cannot rely on the high-volume, standardised cells made in Asia. They need smaller batches of customised, high-performance cells that global factories are not set up to supply. If the project succeeds, it will create a UK-based supply chain for these niche vehicles, allowing them to electrify without depending on foreign suppliers. The cell volumes required are modest by global standards, which makes the venture commercially viable. This is the first step toward building a broader UK battery cell industry. The immediate impact is on manufacturing supply chains and the competitiveness of a sector the UK already leads.

View original technical description
The UK Niche Vehicle Battery Cell Supply Chain project brings together niche vehicle manufacturers and Tier1 developers and suppliers with the UKs only Li-ion cell manufacturer, a UK materials manufacturer, an automotive supply chain specialist and three prominent Research and Technology Organisations. It addresses a problem that affects many developers and manufacturers of specialist products that rely on batteries. Although Li-ion technology was invented in the UK, it was the Japanese technology giant Sony that commercialised and brought the first Li-ion products to market. The UK is very strong on battery technology research. This project aims to bridge the gap between research and product and to bring battery cell manufacture to the UK. We're doing this in a very focused way, where we can support one of the UKs strong existing manufacturing sectors, niche vehicles, helping it to thrive in the new world of vehicle electrification. The volume of cells required by this industry are manageable by global production standards and play to the UKs strengths of high performance, quality and customisation. This is the first step to creating a significant UK industry.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Related Research

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Securing Domestic Lithium Supply Chain for UK
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High Powered Anodes for Fast Charging Buses

Original classification

Collaborative R&D

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.