A collaborative project involving specialist UK-based companies and academia to develop, localise and industrialise the next generation of EV technology for existing and future vehicles produced by London Electric Vehicle Company (LEVC). Building on the success of the current ‘eCity’ technology that has already helped to reduce over 30,000 tonnes of CO2, investment in this new EV technology ensures that LEVC will continue to lead the development of innovative green mobility products.

Battery technology across the broad range of challenging battery electric vehicle (BEV) applications is yet to reach a level of maturation enabling significant commonality of designs and components. As well as being isolated from battery design and development (D&D), the embryonic UK and global Tier 1/Tier 2 supply chain is highly fragmented, and fails to meet critical OEM requirements for: 1) cost-performance competitiveness with ICE-powered variants; and 2) quality-assured series manufacturing capacity and flexibility to meet diverse product variety requirements. High-performance battery cost/kWh remain 4-times higher than industry targets for cost-parity. Over 70% of these costs arise from non-cell-related components and manufacturing. Mutually-dependent commercial and technical barriers exist across product design, pack production and the UK Tier 2 component supply base. Hyperbat response The H1perChain project targets a step-change in high-performance battery cost, and readiness for flexible series production volumes. H1perChain will realise a novel digital manufacturing platform, to concurently address scalability and manufacturing technology developments across the supply chain. H1perChain represents a significant step towards Industry 4.0 digital transformation, with delivery of an architecture to digitally integrate the end-to-end product lifecycle across the full value chain. Effective capture of all application and manufacturing cost sensitivities at system down to component level, will provide unprecedented capability for detailed, accurate and dynamic cost-modelling across key supply chain functions. Digitally integrating live manufacturing data into D&D workflows H1perChain enables multi-dimensional cost-reduction strategies by precisely informing complex inter-related developments across battery engineering and design-to-cost, Tier 1 assembly, Tier 2 component supply moving into through-life aspects. Innovation outcomes Objectives align with phased business processes (tendering, product D&D and procurement planning), targeting pre-commercial validation on a representative OEM pipeline programme, with full-scale series produced launch programmes within 1-year of APC12 completion: Digitalisation platform: architecture for data capture across the product lifecycle/value chain and design-for-manufacture feedback; model development and integration Battery design and engineering: 3-D model parameterisation; native BEV architectures (e.g. flat-floor structural packs); volume-dependent design-for-manufacturing feedback (component-level, impact of different cell geometries) Business process development: OEM application and design/integration inputs to D&D; cost-modelling of application-specific component/assembly-level cost-sensitivity, and integration into tendering process Digital twins (Hyperbat facility and battery): design, virtual commissioning, live manufacturing and ongoing data capture Series pack production: automated module/pack assembly; cell joining; in-line testing Tier 2 scale-up: volume-dependent cost-reduction planning; internal make-or-buy decision for each component (Hyperbat/Unipart). Component/manufacturing process development; QA Services: feedback of in-use data into manufacturing; down-stream supplier integration