EV opportunities as the future becomes current

As OEMs lay out their plans for an increasingly electric vehicle future, suppliers and engineering consultancies consider the way ahead.

Prodrive is an engineering consultancy with a name that is very much associated with motorsport, notably with the Subaru World Rally Car team between 1990 and 2009. It saw its task then as providing technology opportunities born out of tackling very tough challenges. Now it sees tremendous opportunities emerging from a very different challenge: engineering electric vehicles (EVs).

“Across almost every discipline, from dynamics to crash performance, there is significant potential to implement new approaches that will improve future electric vehicles that today are either impractical or too costly,” said David Hemming, Prodrive's Head of Engineering, who has a list of possibilities. “So far, we have only seen production electric vehicles that are based on conventional platforms, but when designing from scratch, without the barriers set by today's powertrain technology, the opportunities will be very exciting.”