Covid-19 has had a marked, detrimental impact on the car industry in the UK and around the globe. Furthermore, automotive development is in the midst of the greatest upheaval since the design of the first cars: electrification, connectivity and autonomy, alongside new players, are rapidly altering the marketplace. Moving to brand new vehicle platforms is seeing traditional and relatively simple iterative design being replaced by wholesale conceptual changes. Expensive and time-consuming manufacture and testing of prototype vehicles is being superseded by digital simulation and analysis. However, the development of the software tools allowing information to be passed from the Computer Aided Design (CAD) environment, which underpins the whole vehicle development process, into the digital simulation tools has not kept pace with the marketplace transformation that is occurring. Typically, this means approximation and simplification is undertaken which inevitably reduces the accuracy and increases the frequency of failure of those simulations. Overall, this costs time and money, delaying the delivery of new vehicles to market. The CADChecker project will create a universal CAD-software plugin enabling the design engineer to ensure that only accurate, detailed, clean CAD data that meets defined company standards is ever outputted to those downstream simulation tools. This will deliver higher data quality than current methods without any slowdown, significantly reducing failures in expensive simulation processes whilst increasing accuracy. CADChecker will enable faster and cheaper design in an industry struggling post-COVID, improving business efficiency and enabling OEMs to get their new electrified vehicles to market sooner.

The aim of the AMMBA project is to improve our ability to simulate the performance of batteries quickly and accurately, thereby enabling better designs to be delivered in less time and for lower costs. The need to reduce carbon emissions from transport is clear and pressing, as part of a strategy to keep global temperature rises below 2degC and minimise the effects of climate change. The key contributor to this within the mobility sector is the electrification of vehicles, enabling the motive power to come directly from low-carbon, grid-generated sources. The most fundamental part of new vehicles is the battery, the storage medium of this renewable energy -- but the current performance of batteries in terms of energy density and cost makes ZEVs lower range and more expensive than the vehicles we wish them to replace. To increase the uptake of ZEVs we need to make them cheaper and with greater range -- both issues which largely stem from the capability of the battery. Simulation and modelling can play a pivotal role in this by providing the engineers and designers with the tools required to understand the performance of the battery pack in a virtual environment, which allows faster, cheaper development to take place. Currently we rely on significant amounts of physical testing which, whilst delivering accurate results, is costly and only provides data for the cell and battery configuration in question. Simulation tools are available and heavily used, but the inbuilt models do not typically link the cell level electro-chemistry to the thermodynamic responses which leads to lower accuracy than is required. Improving simulation and modelling capabilities by coupling these phenomena will allow determination of pack level performance from a simple cell characterisation -- a more accurate method than is currently available. In addition, through the use of machine learning techniques, the AMMBa project aims to develop simulation tools that run far faster than is currently possible, enabling designers and engineers to compare far more designs, in less time than they do now. In doing so this will allow better battery designs to be delivered faster and for lower costs than is currently possible, leading to improved, cheaper ZEVs.

The REBOS project is aiming to revolutionise the design, development and optimisation process for automotive braking systems, particularly those used on electric vehicles. Current industry processes rely heavily on physical vehicle testing, which is time consuming and expensive and the results of which can be open to the subjective feedback of the test driver. This testing also involves significant non-environmentally-sustainable international travel. Furthermore, the inaccuracy of physical testing means that brake systems are rarely fully optimised across all use cases meaning either they are often overly heavy, costing vehicle weight and therefore emissions/range or undersized, reducing performance and safety. D2H's proprietary optimisation system increases the input in the vehicle design process from simulation and modelling, biasing the development away from the physical and into the digital domain. The advantages of this are: 1. Faster vehicle development, bringing new ZEVs to market sooner, therefore speeding our transition to zero-carbon mobility. 2. Better informed decisions can be taken whilst still in the digital domain, reducing the number of changes made once physical prototypes have been built, significantly reducing costs and testing time, so improving business efficiency. 3. More configurations and system options can be trialled in far less time meaning the system can be better optimised, especially for EVs with a combination of regen and hydraulic braking: * Lighter, lower drag vehicles for better range * Improved stopping-power & EV torque distribution, therefore better stability and safety * Reduced emissions from brake particulates Overall, the REBOS project will allow a vehicle manufacturer to offer the consumer better products at lower prices than is currently possible.

The Ultra Low Cost Electric Vehicle Platform project is aiming to understand the technical and commercial viability of a multi-configuration vehicle that is cheap to buy, cheap to run and cheap to maintain - therefore being suitable for sale throughout the world, especially in emerging markets where the road network and support infrastructure is far less developed than in the West. The project will look at both the design of the vehicle platform itself, the use of novel natural-fibre based composite materials and the overall production process to develop a system that can blend the best of UK engineering design with the potential for localised, low-cost production suitable for personal and commercial vehicles alike.