One of the UK’s leading manufacturers of high-performance electric vehicle battery packs has sealed a £multi-million-pound contract to supply batteries to Lotus for its new all-electric Evija, the world’s most powerful production car.
Hyperbat was formed to bring together Williams Advanced Engineering’s (WAE) EV battery expertise with Unipart’s capability in manufacturing safety-critical products for premium OEMs. This combination of engineering excellence and Tier 1 manufacturing capability was established to support the scale-up of EV production in the UK and will manufacture the 90kWh lithium-ion battery packs destined for use in the first British-made all-electric hypercar.
Full production will take place at the firm’s brand-new production line at Unipart Manufacturing Group’s site in Coventry.
The mid-mounted battery pack will support a target output of 2000 PS and performance targets of 0-62mph in under three seconds and a top speed of over 200mph.
The manufacturing process involves assembling 12,000 components split across 500 unique parts and 100,000 welds in each pack. This is a complex process for which Hyperbat employs a unique system using cameras, sensors and vision systems to monitor data for each of the battery components.