Hyperbat In Multimillion-Pound Deal To Supply Battery Packs For Lotus Supercar
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Times.
Lotus or supercars for that matter, will not be a big market for battery packs, but they will be a high-profile one. The article in The Times may well flush out a few good sales leads from companies who want to decarbonise their products.
Many years ago, I did a consultancy job for Cummins, where my software was used to look for faults in their engine testing system. One of their engineers explained to me that they had a sales and production philosophy that could handle all markets from the large down to small niche ones. He said that we can’t tell which niche markets are going to be successful.
In the last couple of years Cummins have embraced hydrogen very strongly and it looks like they are adopting a similar philosophy.
So in the Cummins engine business model, it looks like the niche market is important.
I suspect that what goes for the diesel engine market will also go for the electric transmission market, with niche markets being nicely profitable and an important part of sales.
It looks to me that Hyperbat are going for that market, backed up by the engineering and battery experience of Williams Advanced Engineering and the manufacturing knowledge and logistics of Unipart.
Note that Williams Advanced Engineering is now owned by Australian billionaire; Andrew Forrest, through his company; Fortescue Future Industries. I wrote about this purchase in Fortescue Buys Williams Engineering In Major Push Into High Performance Batteries.
On the Hyperbat web site, this is said about their manufacturing facility.
The facility is about to double in size to meet current needs, with plans to double again in the next 2 years.
The factory is based on the site of a former exhaust plant and reintroduces manufacturing to the area, with an environmentally sustainable future.
Capacity of the factory is approximately 10,000 packs per year.
I;m sure the company, has enough backing for a very successful future.