YASA's Tim Woolmer on the tiny EV tech powering Ferrari and Lamborghini

In this episode of WhichEV’s “It’s Good To Torque”, editor James Morris sits down with Tim Woolmer, the founder and CTO of YASA Motors, to explore the cutting-edge electric motor technology powering some of the world’s most exciting performance cars. From the legendary Jaguar C-X75 to modern hybrid hypercars from Ferrari and Lamborghini, Woolmer explains how YASA’s compact axial-flux motors have transformed the performance and packaging of electrified supercars.

The discussion also dives into the future of electric sports cars, wheel motors, regenerative braking, Formula E innovation, and the rapidly evolving EV market in China. Woolmer shares insights into YASA’s acquisition by Mercedes-AMG, upcoming high-performance electric models, and why he believes the battle between combustion and electric performance cars is only just beginning. Along the way, the pair discuss Ferrari hybrids, Lamborghini’s electrified drivetrains, the appeal of analogue supercars, and how future EVs could radically change the driving experience for a new generation of enthusiasts.

Transcript

00:00:15 James Morris
Hello and welcome to another episode of the renewed podcast from Which EV, It's Good to Talk.
00:00:21 James Morris
Just to remind you, that's a clever play on words.
00:00:24 James Morris
I'm James Morris, editor of Which EV, and for this episode, we've got another special guest.
00:00:28 James Morris
Tim Woolmer is founder and CTO of YASA Motors.
00:00:32 James Morris
Now you might not have heard of YASA before, but you will have heard of some of the vehicles that use the company's technology and they're some of the coolest high performance cars on the planet.
00:00:42 James Morris
So I guess the first question for you Tim is, what is Yasa and what does it do?
00:00:46 Tim Woolmer
Hi James, and thank you very much for having me on your podcast.
00:00:49 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, it's a great honour to be here.
00:00:51 Tim Woolmer
So, what is Yasa?
00:00:54 Tim Woolmer
Yasa is a relatively young company from 2009, a spin-off from Oxford University that was really pioneering the space of electric motors designed specifically for electric and hybrid cars, although sort of 16 years ago or so.
00:01:11 Tim Woolmer
And we found a real nice niche space in high performance vehicles because the motor is incredibly compact and small compared to its competitors.
00:01:22 Tim Woolmer
So as you said, we're in.
00:01:23 Tim Woolmer
lots of fun, high performance products.
00:01:27 James Morris
So maybe talk about some of the kind of earlier vehicles that you worked on because I think those are pretty legendary.
00:01:33 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, so when Yasa started, like I said, all those years ago, it was very early in the industry and we were really looking for any project that was interested in electrification.
00:01:44 Tim Woolmer
So one of our early ones, for example, was doing a record-breaking land speed car with Drayson Racing where we got a land speed record for the
00:01:53 Tim Woolmer
sub 1000 kilogram electric vehicle.
00:01:57 Tim Woolmer
Then we started doing some other racing programs like Drive EO doing a sort of a Pikes Peak hill climb.
00:02:04 Tim Woolmer
And probably a really important project in the mix was doing our first proper automotive program with Jaguar for the CX-75.
00:02:13 Tim Woolmer
Now, many of you won't have heard of that because it never went into production, but it was a fascinating vehicle because it was really the first proper hybrid
00:02:22 Tim Woolmer
It was a V4 engine, so it was a kind of a Formula One style Cosworth 12,000 RPM revving engine and it had a hybrid on the rear and an electric front axle on the front and Yasser did both of those.
00:02:35 Tim Woolmer
electric motors.
00:02:36 Tim Woolmer
And that really kind of opened, I guess, this whole opportunity of high performance hybrids to Yasso.
00:02:42 Tim Woolmer
It was the first one we did and we've done many since then.
00:02:45 James Morris
So what did you bring to that Jaguar car then?
00:02:49 James Morris
Why did they want to kind of go with electrification for that?
00:02:52 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, so you may remember they first announced the car with, I think it was with mini gas turbines and four-wheel electric dr and I think it was like, oh wow, what is this crazy vehicle?
00:03:04 Tim Woolmer
They then sort of stepped back a bit from that and did something a little bit more, let's say, less ambitious, which was with, like I said, a Cosworth V4 engine, but high revving.
00:03:15 Tim Woolmer
And they wanted as much electric power as possible.
00:03:18 Tim Woolmer
So they found a company in the US that made
00:03:22 Tim Woolmer
50 kilogram motor that produced from memory it was about 160 kilowatts.
00:03:26 Tim Woolmer
And they came and spoke to us and we said, hey, listen, we think we can do you a motor that's around 20, so maybe 40% of the weight and about 1/3 of the axial length.
00:03:36 Tim Woolmer
And of course, they didn't really believe us.
00:03:38 Tim Woolmer
We had never made a product like that before, but we
00:03:41 Tim Woolmer
got stuck straight in and within three months we had made a prototype, tested it on a dyno.
00:03:46 Tim Woolmer
We had to make a few iterations of it, but basically we showed within a few months that, yeah, we could do this.
00:03:51 Tim Woolmer
We could make something super competitive.
00:03:53 Tim Woolmer
And it was very axially short being an axial motor.
00:03:56 Tim Woolmer
So it sandwiched nicely with the gearbox and the engine and was really a big stepping stone for us in terms of doing a, like I said, a first automotive program.
00:04:05 James Morris
There are people there who remember that particular car.
00:04:07 James Morris
I certainly remember it.
00:04:08 James Morris
I think I remember it more for the gas turbines because that did sound particularly bonkers.
00:04:14 James Morris
But you've been involved since then in some pretty legendary electrified supercars.
00:04:20 James Morris
So maybe you could talk us through some of those projects that you'll be working on?
00:04:24 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, of course.
00:04:25 Tim Woolmer
I mean, some of them sadly are not in the public domain that we can talk about, but I'll give you a few examples that are that are I think one of the
00:04:33 Tim Woolmer
Again, one of the most exciting ones was working with Ferrari on their first series hybrid.
00:04:38 Tim Woolmer
So you remember they did their first hybrid with the LaFerrari.
00:04:43 Tim Woolmer
And on that project, they put a P3 motor.
00:04:46 Tim Woolmer
So that's a motor on that kind of output of the transmission, sort of hanging off the back of the vehicle.
00:04:53 Tim Woolmer
I think it was a motor from Magnetti Morelli.
00:04:55 Tim Woolmer
And Ferrari weren't so happy with this.
00:04:57 Tim Woolmer
It was quite heavy.
00:04:58 Tim Woolmer
It was weight in the wrong place of the vehicle, at the back of the vehicle.
00:05:02 Tim Woolmer
And they had this big challenge, which is Ferrari have a very low crank position.
00:05:07 Tim Woolmer
So they were trying to run a crank height of not more than 100 millimetres from the base of the vehicle.
00:05:12 Tim Woolmer
So that's why their centre of gravity is so good.
00:05:16 Tim Woolmer
And they had a very small space to sandwich a motor in between the engine and the transmission because every millimetre you add basically increases the wheelbase of the vehicle, which is just terrible for mid-engine sports cars.
00:05:30 Tim Woolmer
So they gave us this incredibly difficult package of 60 millimeters of axial length and 105 millimeters of radius to fit a motor in.
00:05:38 Tim Woolmer
And they basically said, look, we don't think this is possible.
00:05:40 Tim Woolmer
We've looked around the whole planet, can't find a motor technology that would do this.
00:05:44 Tim Woolmer
So they gave us a real challenge and we dug our heels in.
00:05:47 Tim Woolmer
And whilst we couldn't do it initially, we kept sort of trying to find ways to package more performance in a smaller and smaller space.
00:05:56 Tim Woolmer
And eventually,
00:05:57 Tim Woolmer
we were able to come back to them and go, we can meet that incredibly tough spec.
00:06:02 Tim Woolmer
And that has basically been, or iterations of that product have been on all of the hybrid Ferraris, or maybe not every single one of them, but pretty much all of them since that first one, which was the Ferrari Stradale was the first product to release that product, release that motor in about 2019, 2020.
00:06:21 James Morris
Yeah, but you're in the most, was it the SF90?
00:06:23 James Morris
Is that the one?
00:06:24 Tim Woolmer
LCF 90 is the Stradale and then there's the 296 and then more recently the Testarossa.
00:06:33 Tim Woolmer
So yeah, a few different flavours of that powertrain mounted with different engines, but fundamentally the same technology, which is very actually short to squeeze in between the engine and the transmission, but also
00:06:48 Tim Woolmer
very small radius, which is maybe what some people don't appreciate is so critical for Ferraris.
00:06:54 James Morris
So, but you also, that's not the only very well-known supercar maker that you work with.
00:07:00 James Morris
You also work with Lamborghini, right?
00:07:01 Tim Woolmer
So, yeah, so that was more recent programmes, again, taking similar technology first of all in the Revuelto.
00:07:12 Tim Woolmer
And on that project, we were doing a front axle.
00:07:15 Tim Woolmer
So I think you've driven the River Wells, haven't you?
00:07:18 Tim Woolmer
So it's got a tall exit front axle and that's got two of our motors.
00:07:23 Tim Woolmer
And I think the feedback has been really positive that it just really improves the drivability, includes the braking into corners and the exits out of corners.
00:07:30 Tim Woolmer
So really positive to see electrification having a real meaningful impact on the way these cars drive.
00:07:37 Tim Woolmer
And then on the Temerario, their more recent vehicle, we've also got a
00:07:41 Tim Woolmer
what's called a P1 motor, so it's on the back of the engine, so there isn't a clutch, it's sort of permanently engaged to the engine, but it can do all the torque and fill, so you don't get kind of turbo lag, you get really rapid torque response.
00:07:55 Tim Woolmer
So the front axle coupled with the rear axle, yeah, it gives that really nice blend of high performance IC engine with very high performing electrification, sort of the best of both worlds.
00:08:07 James Morris
Yeah, I mean, I've driven both those.
00:08:08 James Morris
I've driven the Temerario more than the Revuelto and I certainly felt that, you know, the kind of typical thing you have with cars that are petrol cars that are that powerful, especially if they only put the power down through.
00:08:20 James Morris
one set of wheels is that, if you over it, you lose traction pretty easily and that car still loses traction, but because of the way the torque vectoring on the motors, I've certainly felt, when I've really gunned that car when I was test driving it, that the motors would kick in and it would actually right itself and kind of stay in a straight line and not in a hedge.
00:08:41 James Morris
It's probably good for my reputation with Lamborghini as well, because I don't think crashing a 600,000 pound car is a particularly good, or actually that's more like 300
00:08:50 James Morris
I think the Reveltos were like 600.
00:08:53 James Morris
But you're not probably not a good look as a journalist.
00:08:56 Tim Woolmer
You don't get invited back, do you, James?
00:08:58 James Morris
If you do that.
00:08:59 James Morris
Exactly.
00:09:00 James Morris
Yeah.
00:09:00 James Morris
Although I have occasionally broken test cars, but not being invited back.
00:09:05 James Morris
So that's not always the case.
00:09:06 James Morris
But so
00:09:08 James Morris
I guess so we've got a general idea of what your application of your motors are and kind of some idea about the kind of what makes them the small size, the kind of the particularly the small width.
00:09:21 James Morris
of the motors.
00:09:22 James Morris
So maybe you could kind of explain what your technology actually is, because that also feeds into the name as well, doesn't it?
00:09:27 James Morris
So, and kind of, what your USP, what's special about Yasa Motors?
00:09:34 Tim Woolmer
This is a little bit hard to describe on a podcast, but I encourage any of you is if you do a Google search.
00:09:39 James Morris
I'll do hand gestures or something, that won't work either.
00:09:43 Tim Woolmer
If you do a Google search for a paper, yokeless and segmented armature, which is where the name Yasa comes from, you can
00:09:51 Tim Woolmer
papers online published all the way back in 2007 about the technology.
00:09:56 Tim Woolmer
And it's a fundamental magnetic trick whereby because we have two rotors and on pretty much all other machines which are radial, you have a single rotor other than one exception, which I'll talk about.
00:10:09 Tim Woolmer
The 2 rotors and the flux traveling straight through the stator means you don't need what's called a stator yoke, which is basically what holds all your teeth together and enables the flux to return
00:10:21 Tim Woolmer
basically from one side of the motor to the other.
00:10:24 Tim Woolmer
And that state of yoke is actually incredibly heavy.
00:10:26 Tim Woolmer
So if you've got a motor that say weighs 50 kilograms, like I don't know, a Tesla Model 3 motor, let's pick on them, maybe 20 kilograms of that 50 would be the state of yoke.
00:10:38 Tim Woolmer
So immediately you can chuck away, you know, 40 and in some cases 50% of the mass of the motor.
00:10:47 Tim Woolmer
Now, maybe in for a mainstream vehicle that isn't so critical, but as you go towards the more high performance end, every kilogram, certainly 10s, and in some cases, hundreds of kilograms become really, really important.
00:11:01 Tim Woolmer
So we took that basic sort of magnetic concept and then we've spent 15 years
00:11:08 Tim Woolmer
optimizing it and making it better and better and better.
00:11:11 Tim Woolmer
And our technology has probably improved a factor of 50.
00:11:15 Tim Woolmer
So if you look at the kind of power densities that we were achieving in 2009 when we kind of started the company, maybe 1.2, 1.5 kilowatts per kilogram up to today, yeah, we've seen huge, huge improvements.
00:11:30 Tim Woolmer
And they've been annualized improvements of maybe 20, 25% on power density just by
00:11:36 Tim Woolmer
improving the manufacturing, improving the materials, improving the cooling.
00:11:40 Tim Woolmer
And every time we've improved the power density, that means you can either make the motor smaller, shorter, smaller radius, which has mean we've been able to package in more applications, more difficult applications, and offer more differentiation for our customers.
00:11:54 Tim Woolmer
And.
00:11:54 James Morris
Presumably this is, I think you kind of hinted upon it there, but this is more important for a hybrid than it is for a full electric car, because you know, if you've got a full electric car, you've probably got
00:12:02 James Morris
The big heavy thing is that 300 kilogram plus battery.
00:12:06 James Morris
So shaving 30 kilograms off your motor is not so important, but where you've got a hybrid, you know, you're adding stuff on to an already, you know, a car that's got all this other stuff and you want to add as little on as possible.
00:12:21 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, absolutely.
00:12:22 Tim Woolmer
So, well, I would say the we found
00:12:25 Tim Woolmer
two areas where the technology really adds value.
00:12:29 Tim Woolmer
And one, as you mentioned, are in these high performance hybrids because axial space and weight are both so critical and they are 100% the USPs of the technology.
00:12:38 Tim Woolmer
The other place where we found real benefit is in high performance electric vehicles.
00:12:42 Tim Woolmer
Now,
00:12:44 Tim Woolmer
We're seeing quite a lot coming on the market, which are kind of, up to 1000 horsepower, maybe even more than that.
00:12:50 Tim Woolmer
there's been this almost kind of arms race to make them quicker and quicker and quicker.
00:12:54 Tim Woolmer
The big challenge is they've also got heavier and heavier and heavier.
00:12:57 Tim Woolmer
And anyone who likes their sports cars know that enemy is basically, or mass is the enemy of the sports car.
00:13:04 Tim Woolmer
So if we can make a motor, which is 3 times the power density, which we typically can in the electric sports car space,
00:13:12 Tim Woolmer
you won't be saving 30 kilos, you can be saving, 100 plus kilos just on the motors.
00:13:19 Tim Woolmer
And then you get this lovely mass compounding effect or mass decompounding effect where if you save a kilogram somewhere, you typically on an electric vehicle could save a kilogram somewhere else just because it's got lighter, more efficient, therefore the batteries
00:13:32 Tim Woolmer
You need less battery, brakes get smaller, chassis get smaller, and then you need less torque to propel the vehicle.
00:13:38 Tim Woolmer
So typically they are the two main USPs of the technology.
00:13:42 Tim Woolmer
Of course, for a mainstream EV, saving 20 or 30 kilos is not so significant.
00:13:47 Tim Woolmer
So there are other USPs of the technology that could be relevant there.
00:13:51 Tim Woolmer
But certainly that is why we started in the high performance spaces, because that's where the advantage is the biggest.
00:13:56 James Morris
Now, I know from talking to you before that you have thought about this area, but you're not specifically
00:14:01 James Morris
working in the kind of hub motors, but your technology would work for that, right?
00:14:07 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, we've been, that's actually been a journey we've been on the last couple of years.
00:14:12 Tim Woolmer
I would say probably every three or four years for the last 10 years, we've looked at hub motors because as an engineer, there's something almost eutopic about them that you can put your entire powertrain in the wheel itself.
00:14:26 Tim Woolmer
clearing up all that chassis space for aerodynamics or light weighting or better packaging.
00:14:33 Tim Woolmer
The big challenge has always been in the sports car space on sprung mass.
00:14:37 Tim Woolmer
And when talking to our customers, they've said, hey, we can't have a wheel motor because even if you add a single gram to the wheel, we're not interested, or certainly 10s of kilograms, which the sort of the competitors might do.
00:14:51 Tim Woolmer
And to get the kind of torques you would need in a sports car, we're more like talking 80 kilograms of
00:14:56 Tim Woolmer
additional unsprung mass per rear wheel.
00:14:58 Tim Woolmer
If you look at the technology that's available on the market today, that's not possible for a sports car.
00:15:04 Tim Woolmer
Now, as our technology has been getting better and better, we hit an inflection point maybe 12 months ago where we could match the power density of a carbon ceramic brake disc, okay, which are obviously used on all top end vehicles.
00:15:18 Tim Woolmer
They're up at about 50 kilowatts per kilogram.
00:15:21 Tim Woolmer
So just to give you an idea, a 14 kilogram
00:15:24 Tim Woolmer
carbon ceramic brake disc and caliper will probably have about 650 kilowatts.
00:15:28 Tim Woolmer
So pushing towards 1000 horsepower braking power, right, all being turned straight into heat.
00:15:34 Tim Woolmer
We managed to cross that 50 kilowatt per kilogram threshold maybe 12 months ago, we're up at maybe 60 today.
00:15:42 Tim Woolmer
So our argument was well, as batteries get better and better, why not have a massively reduced brake, like just almost like an emergency brake, have a wheel motor that can do 95% of your braking, but doing it electromagnetically.
00:15:56 Tim Woolmer
And now you're reusing 95% of that energy back into the battery.
00:16:01 Tim Woolmer
And we did a bit of modeling and showed that actually you double your track range if you can do that.
00:16:05 Tim Woolmer
It's not just a kind of extra 5%, it's this dramatic kind of
00:16:09 Tim Woolmer
And you can, I mean, that's why your brakes glow red on a track because you're throwing so much energy through them.
00:16:15 Tim Woolmer
Surely the right solution as an engineer is to, if you can recycle that energy, and like I said, it has such a dramatic impact on your battery requirements.
00:16:24 Tim Woolmer
They halve, you know, so instead of needing these massive battery packs, you can shrink your battery pack.
00:16:29 Tim Woolmer
And because the wheel motor is so light, we can actually get something pretty much mass neutral that then doesn't need that big EDU, 200 kilograms of EDU on the vehicle, drive shafts, cradles, smaller battery pack.
00:16:41 Tim Woolmer
And before you know it, you're talking saving 500 kilograms, these kind of numbers out of a high performance electric sports car, which is the kind of, yeah, kind of number that gets me excited.
00:16:51 Tim Woolmer
It's not a sort of 20, 30 kilogram saving.
00:16:53 Tim Woolmer
It transforms
00:16:55 Tim Woolmer
something quite heavy into something that might get towards the weight of very pure racing IC engine vehicles.
00:17:02 Tim Woolmer
But we're still 5 to 10 years away from that, but it's exciting nonetheless that it is coming.
00:17:07 James Morris
What you're talking about here, I mean, Formula E has been doing, using this equation for years.
00:17:12 James Morris
I mean, it's quite incredible.
00:17:13 James Morris
I think almost half of the energy used in a race comes from regenerative braking.
00:17:18 James Morris
And they, and you know, they, for I think for the Gen 3 car, they basically
00:17:24 James Morris
Took that they have kind of emergency only brakes, exactly like you're saying on the back, yeah, and they use proper friction brakes on the front for safety, but they're but they're primarily.
00:17:36 James Morris
doing normal driving, they're using 350 kilowatt of regenerative braking on the rear wheels to do most of the braking, which apparently it's not, I've been talking to drivers about this and I thought, is this a bit, because, you know, when I've driven electric cars around the track, I found that kind of mixture of friction and electric braking and kind of regeneration, it makes some of the kind of braking behaviour a little bit lumpy for me, but they seem to be fine with it.
00:18:04 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, I think it
00:18:06 Tim Woolmer
It does take a lot of work, especially if you're doing very dynamic.
00:18:09 Tim Woolmer
So, very hard breaking events to get that break blending between electromagnetic and mechanical is difficult, but there are increasingly sort of break by wire systems that make that much easier.
00:18:21 Tim Woolmer
I think that the next step for Formula E in a sort of Gen 5 system would be to look at something like fully regenning on the front axle as well.
00:18:32 Tim Woolmer
And like I said, the batteries and the motors are getting light enough to be able to do that.
00:18:39 Tim Woolmer
And then you're into a whole different realm of, yeah, you're stepping up from collecting, you know, 30% of your regen to 80%.
00:18:47 Tim Woolmer
So it's an exciting, exciting journey.
00:18:50 James Morris
I mean, Formula 3 cars only have like a 50 kilowatt hour battery and then they do 45 minutes of really quite full on racing within that.
00:18:59 James Morris
So exciting stuff.
00:19:02 James Morris
So I mean, your technology is obviously really advanced and Mercedes-Benz
00:19:08 James Morris
liked it so much they thought they'd buy it.
00:19:09 James Morris
So kind of maybe talk about that, your relationship with Mercedes, kind of where it started and kind of where it is right now.
00:19:19 Tim Woolmer
So we started working with AMG a number of years ago as they were starting to think about doing an electric vehicle.
00:19:27 Tim Woolmer
And quite excitingly, that is going to be launched in the coming weeks and months, which is based on this AMG.EA platform.
00:19:36 Tim Woolmer
And that uses our technology.
00:19:39 Tim Woolmer
We've developed three different motor types for the rear and the front axle.
00:19:43 Tim Woolmer
And there's some stuff you can find online on this.
00:19:46 Tim Woolmer
So some stuff has already been published.
00:19:49 Tim Woolmer
That's been a big development to take the technology from mainly hybrid supercars into the electric sports car space where we've had to develop much higher rotating machines.
00:20:00 Tim Woolmer
So instead of being engine limited to 8 1/2 or 10,000 RPM, you really want to spin your electric motor vehicles for battery electric vehicles up to much higher speed.
00:20:10 Tim Woolmer
And that's where we've had to make big developments in the axial flux space.
00:20:16 Tim Woolmer
The other area is efficiency becomes absolutely critical.
00:20:19 Tim Woolmer
So we've done a lot of work developing the technology to really maximize the efficiency and the motors are pushing
00:20:25 Tim Woolmer
just shy of 98% peak efficiency.
00:20:27 Tim Woolmer
So we've got not only a really lightweight product, but it's very efficient and it can spin to very high speeds with a lot of torque.
00:20:33 Tim Woolmer
And that makes it really good for an electric vehicle.
00:20:36 Tim Woolmer
Now, Mercedes, as they were looking at the technology, I think they came to YASA maybe almost five years ago saying, look,
00:20:46 Tim Woolmer
We really like your technology.
00:20:49 Tim Woolmer
How would you feel about a deeper partnership?
00:20:53 Tim Woolmer
Because one, we want to scale your technology to much higher volumes.
00:20:57 Tim Woolmer
That's a challenge for a startup.
00:20:59 Tim Woolmer
Two,
00:21:00 Tim Woolmer
We would see it as a de-risk being involved.
00:21:03 Tim Woolmer
And #3, we like your innovation.
00:21:06 Tim Woolmer
We want you to keep being a speedboat, keep innovating, keep doing new things because they describe themselves, look, we're a tanker.
00:21:12 Tim Woolmer
It's hard for us to innovate, hard for us to change direction.
00:21:15 Tim Woolmer
We want YASA to keep doing that.
00:21:17 Tim Woolmer
So yeah, that discussion eventually led into an acquisition because it was probably simpler than an investment or a license or some other things.
00:21:28 Tim Woolmer
But generally, I think very much they have been, Mercedes have been true to their word.
00:21:33 Tim Woolmer
They've kept Yasa as an independent entity, still working with a range of customers, pushing our technology through lots of new programs, both with Mercedes and with others, and manufacturing in the UK, but Mercedes also scaling up the manufacturing in Germany and Berlin.
00:21:49 Tim Woolmer
So I think it's been a great partnership showing how an acquisition can work well for all parties.
00:21:57 Tim Woolmer
And we've continued to innovate.
00:21:58 Tim Woolmer
That's been the key thing is the innovation has stepped up, not slowed down since the acquisition.
00:22:03 James Morris
I think last time we talked, you were just opening your brand new facility that's actually on the grounds of Bicester Heritage and you obviously you have your own offices near there already.
00:22:14 James Morris
So I mean, how's that going, the new facility?
00:22:18 Tim Woolmer
So, I guess there's we have a brand new HQ being open in Vista Motion, as you just said, and we move into that in August.
00:22:26 James Morris
Are you moving the whole lot into there, are you?
00:22:28 Tim Woolmer
Not the whole lot.
00:22:29 Tim Woolmer
We're moving everything apart from production.
00:22:31 Tim Woolmer
So our current production site, which you visited last year, which we sort of reopened it as a, I think we called it, you know, Yasa's new Super Factory.
00:22:39 Tim Woolmer
That is where we are manufacturing our, you know, this year, you know, roughly 25,000 motors and we're scaling that up to 50,000.
00:22:46 Tim Woolmer
So this site in Jarnton is very much focused on production.
00:22:50 Tim Woolmer
And by clearing out the dynos and the labs and the space, we can get more motors and more production out of this site.
00:22:58 Tim Woolmer
And pretty much everyone else moves to the new facility in PistaMotion, which is really for all the engineering, all the test labs, all the magnetics labs and also a pilot plant so we can produce there as well, but at lower volume.
00:23:11 James Morris
So far, most of the cars you talked about have been hybrids.
00:23:14 James Morris
you're talking, but you are, you're working on this electric sports car project with Mercedes now.
00:23:22 James Morris
I've been talking to a lot of...
00:23:25 James Morris
I love my exotics.
00:23:28 James Morris
I normally drive electric cars, but if a company says, would you like to drive my Maserati MC20 or something?
00:23:34 James Morris
I'll find a way to kind of fit that in.
00:23:37 James Morris
the case of the MC20, it was because at the time they were thinking of electric version of that car, but they pulled back from it.
00:23:44 James Morris
And, you know, I've talked to them about this last year at the Festival of Speed.
00:23:48 James Morris
And, you know, although they produce some really beautiful electric cars, I think the Gran Turismo,
00:23:54 James Morris
and the Gran Cabrio are fantastic electric sports cars.
00:23:58 James Morris
I mean, okay, there are 200,000 pounds each, but they're not selling in great quantities.
00:24:02 James Morris
And there seems to be, you know, there's a kind of customer choice thing, which I think is problematic.
00:24:08 James Morris
And I think this is why I think the, you know, I particularly like the Temerario.
00:24:12 James Morris
You know, one argument is that,
00:24:16 James Morris
if you super cars don't get driven very often, I think they quoted when I last saw Lamborghini, the average number of miles a Lamborghini's driven is like 1000 or something a year or something.
00:24:29 James Morris
That's not going to cause global warming.
00:24:30 James Morris
So that's one factor.
00:24:32 James Morris
But also there's a whole thing about why do you buy a car like that and you don't buy it to be efficient.
00:24:37 James Morris
You buy it to have a kind of emotional experience, which is why I think it was
00:24:43 James Morris
Perhaps less surprising that Matteo Rimac, when he launched the new Bugatti as CEO, the Tourbillon is a hybrid.
00:24:51 James Morris
I know that doesn't use your motors, but you know, they've gone away from turbocharged engines to, and they're almost using the electric motors to give what the turbocharged engine did and using a naturally aspirated V16, almost like as a real noise maker.
00:25:07 James Morris
So, you know, do you think the electric
00:25:11 James Morris
It's going to be popular in that particularly rarefied market, or do you think the approach that you've taken in the past is actually the one that seems to be for the foreseeable future?
00:25:24 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating question, and I've had quite long chats with Marty Rimic about this.
00:25:30 Tim Woolmer
He's a friend of mine.
00:25:32 James Morris
Great guy.
00:25:33 Tim Woolmer
He's a great guy, real visionary.
00:25:35 Tim Woolmer
And
00:25:37 Tim Woolmer
I think his analogy is a really good one, which he says, look, if you want to buy the best watch to use for every day, you use a smart watch, right?
00:25:46 Tim Woolmer
An Apple watch or whatever.
00:25:47 Tim Woolmer
But if you want to buy a collector's watch, you buy, it's a mechanical Swiss branded watch, you know, and you keep them for 50 years.
00:25:55 Tim Woolmer
The electric ones go out of date in
00:25:58 Tim Woolmer
Two years, five years, right?
00:25:59 Tim Woolmer
So there is a nice analogy and I love the way they made all their dials mechanical.
00:26:04 Tim Woolmer
They went to a Swiss watchmaker to make those.
00:26:07 Tim Woolmer
And that's such a great analogy, isn't it, for making a sort of a timeless masterpiece.
00:26:14 Tim Woolmer
And I think, so I can see for many years, we are going to have a very top end segment of the market, which is going to have, you know, these very special
00:26:25 Tim Woolmer
Cosworth type engines with hybridization to make them absolutely modern and quick and mean and get all the feedback you want from them.
00:26:34 Tim Woolmer
I absolutely don't see those going away.
00:26:37 Tim Woolmer
The CO2 is meaningless because like you said, they don't get driven A lot.
00:26:42 Tim Woolmer
It's more like a, you know, a very niche, niche
00:26:46 Tim Woolmer
market, which I think will remain forever.
00:26:49 Tim Woolmer
And in fact, as we go more and more electric in the mainstream, I think if anything, they become more popular and more exclusive because they just become more and more differentiated.
00:27:00 Tim Woolmer
I think there's an interesting place though, where I use the analogy sometimes that we're in the 1920s of electric vehicles.
00:27:08 Tim Woolmer
You know, people have been working on electric vehicles now for what, like 15 years, 20 years, maybe in some cases.
00:27:15 Tim Woolmer
And if you look at all the innovations, if you go back in the 1920s and you look at all of the innovation that happened in the IC engine world, you had the first starter motor generators and you had the first, I don't know,
00:27:30 Tim Woolmer
vehicles with proper pneumatic tires and suspensions.
00:27:33 Tim Woolmer
And you can list out many, many, many innovations that transformed a pretty terrible technology in 1900, 1910 into something that resembles the modern car in the 1940s already.
00:27:45 Tim Woolmer
I think what we're going to see in the electrification space is
00:27:50 Tim Woolmer
We are in the 1920s.
00:27:52 Tim Woolmer
There are going to be many, many innovations still to come.
00:27:54 Tim Woolmer
I mean, you see the rate of improvement of batteries where maybe every generation, every seven to 10 years, we're seeing battery energy density double.
00:28:03 Tim Woolmer
We're seeing motor power density double.
00:28:06 Tim Woolmer
We're seeing electric, we're going to see electric cars get more and more efficient given the amount of energy they use.
00:28:12 Tim Woolmer
So they're going to get lighter.
00:28:13 Tim Woolmer
they're going to get more efficient and they're going to get lower cost.
00:28:16 Tim Woolmer
Now, that's great for the mainstream.
00:28:18 Tim Woolmer
I've got no doubt they're going to pretty much dominate mainstream.
00:28:21 Tim Woolmer
The interesting question, which I really don't know where it's going to land is where do they land in that kind of, you know, take that Porsche 911 space, that kind of, you know, 150,000
00:28:34 Tim Woolmer
type sports car.
00:28:35 Tim Woolmer
I don't think there's any question that the multi-million pound cars are going to be analogue, right?
00:28:40 Tim Woolmer
No question.
00:28:40 Tim Woolmer
They're just going to be collector's items.
00:28:42 Tim Woolmer
I don't think in that sort of entry level 30 to 60,000 pound space, they're going to be electric because they're just going to be, in my view, this can be better and cheaper to run.
00:28:52 Tim Woolmer
And that's what dominates.
00:28:53 Tim Woolmer
In that kind of sports car space, I don't know where it lands, but I think we're going to see a bit of a battle between the technologies because
00:29:03 Tim Woolmer
I think the electric technology is just going to get better and better and better to the point where you will take your 911 to the track and you'll take your electric equivalent to the track and the electric equivalent in terms of bang for buck will start being quicker and potentially more engaged in different ways than just the vibration from the engine.
00:29:25 Tim Woolmer
There will be more software features, more control features.
00:29:28 Tim Woolmer
And I just see a really interesting battle going on there.
00:29:31 Tim Woolmer
And it's not going to be won or lost in the next five years.
00:29:33 Tim Woolmer
It's going to continue for the next couple of decades.
00:29:36 Tim Woolmer
So I think it's too early to tell.
00:29:39 Tim Woolmer
What I do see is a huge number of opportunities in terms of the way the PlayStation generation is kind of coming through.
00:29:48 Tim Woolmer
And are they want to drive, is the PlayStation generation going to want to drive a car that they can transform from, you know,
00:29:55 Tim Woolmer
I don't know, some Bugatti performance to a Ferrari performance with a flick of a switch, you're going to get that kind of amazing sort of adaptability with software and tunability that you just can't do with mechanical devices.
00:30:08 Tim Woolmer
So I'm intrigued.
00:30:11 Tim Woolmer
I think certainly what Yasa can offer is weight savings and technology that enable electric vehicles to be compelling in the sports car space.
00:30:21 Tim Woolmer
But again, ultimately, the user will decide which one they want to buy.
00:30:25 Tim Woolmer
But I think that battle is going to continue for many, many years.
00:30:28 James Morris
I almost always in these podcasts end up talking about China.
00:30:31 James Morris
Before we started this podcast, we mentioned, you know, I've just got back from Beijing and Guangzhou Auto China show.
00:30:40 James Morris
And you know, one of the one of the big releases there was the, you know, the new BYD Denza, Denza Z.
00:30:47 James Morris
which is, I presume you've seen it, see what it looks like.
00:30:51 James Morris
It looks fantastic.
00:30:52 James Morris
It's got 1000 horsepower.
00:30:54 James Morris
It supposedly does naught to 60 in under two seconds, which having driven the Rim Aster Vera that also does that and launched it, that's going to basically turn your brain into scrambled egg, frankly, if you do it on two.
00:31:05 James Morris
You know, it's interesting you talk about the PlayStation generation.
00:31:09 James Morris
You know, their market's very different because, you know, they've only really had decent cars for about less than 20 years that they produce locally.
00:31:17 James Morris
And most of the people who buy cars there might be buying, at the moment anyway, buying their first car rather than, their first four-wheel vehicle anyway.
00:31:27 James Morris
And they have a very, and they're younger, they're like 20 to 30, whereas people who can afford new cars in Europe and America might be 50.
00:31:35 James Morris
So, there's a very different thing there.
00:31:37 James Morris
And you can see, because, those who are listening to the podcast can't see, but I have the Yang Wang U9 Extreme, which is a very, very exciting.
00:31:47 James Morris
sexy name for a car, which is the fastest production car in the world and it's all electric.
00:31:53 James Morris
I think it will be this battle between those two things.
00:31:55 James Morris
I mean, I'm very much in favour of electric cars, but I'm sure we've both been petrol heads in the past.
00:32:03 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, no, for sure.
00:32:05 Tim Woolmer
And I just think it's an evolving space.
00:32:08 Tim Woolmer
It's really fascinating to look at
00:32:11 Tim Woolmer
the 24-hour record has been broken like multiple times, even in the last 12 months for electric vehicles.
00:32:18 Tim Woolmer
And I don't know if you were familiar with the AMG GTXX, that orange car.
00:32:23 James Morris
Yeah, I saw it.
00:32:24 James Morris
was it was on show in Beijing?
00:32:27 Tim Woolmer
Okay, nice.
00:32:28 James Morris
I see almost every time I go to a Mercedes related car show.
00:32:32 Tim Woolmer
Mercedes are super proud of it because I mean it absolutely obliterated the 24 hour record.
00:32:38 James Morris
And also they haven't actually bothered to clean it.
00:32:41 James Morris
They've left it with the kind of fly things on it.
00:32:43 James Morris
To show that anyway, sorry to **** in.
00:32:44 Tim Woolmer
Adds more value to the vehicle.
00:32:45 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, Absolutely obliterated the 24 hour record.
00:32:50 Tim Woolmer
I think they got, you know, like 5, is it 5 1/2 thousand miles or something in 24 hours?
00:32:54 Tim Woolmer
I'm going to get the numbers a bit wrong, but it was kind of a huge step up on the previous vehicle because they were doing 1 MW charging.
00:33:02 Tim Woolmer
It was a very aerodynamic vehicle, so running at 300 KPH.
00:33:05 Tim Woolmer
And then they just kept going, ran it for 7 1/2 days until it had done the equivalent of 40,000 kilometres, so the entire lap of the globe.
00:33:12 Tim Woolmer
Now, you could never have imagined, imagine, I mean, we both got a first generation Nissan Leaf, or maybe I still have one, my mother-in-law drives it.
00:33:20 Tim Woolmer
I mean, 50 miles range, right?
00:33:22 Tim Woolmer
I mean, you would never, ever dream of trying to do a around the world trip in that.
00:33:26 Tim Woolmer
It would be horrifically painful.
00:33:29 Tim Woolmer
And that is only a 13, 14 year old car.
00:33:32 Tim Woolmer
And it's just a reminder just how far the technology has come.
00:33:37 Tim Woolmer
So again, you look forward a couple of generations and you think, well, what could these vehicles be doing?
00:33:43 Tim Woolmer
Well, they could be charging a couple of megawatts, efficiency right up there, aerodynamics improved, such that they really are on par with what you can do with an IC engine.
00:33:55 Tim Woolmer
So again, I think you just got to watch the space.
00:33:57 Tim Woolmer
And I think probably what we'll find is that the PlayStation generation, the younger, like you were saying, those in their 20s and 30s coming through may be more interested to get the latest and greatest, control technology, battery based technology.
00:34:13 Tim Woolmer
And if you're buying, if you've got the luxury to spend, 100, 150K in your 50s and 60s, you might want to buy something with an IC engine.
00:34:21 Tim Woolmer
We may well see it's an age divide thing.
00:34:24 Tim Woolmer
But that only goes one way, right?
00:34:25 Tim Woolmer
Because in 10 years, that demographic moves forward.
00:34:28 Tim Woolmer
In 20 years, it moves another 20 years forward.
00:34:31 Tim Woolmer
So I think again, you just got to watch this space and see where it lands.
00:34:36 James Morris
Next week, the company X Bank, who actually ironically was my host when I was in China, is doing laps of the test track in Millbrook.
00:34:45 James Morris
And they're going to try and break a record because they have really fast charging and Millbrook happens to have like a 400 or 450 kilowatt charger.
00:34:52 James Morris
So they're going to try and
00:34:54 James Morris
break some kind of endurance record, not by being really efficient, but by actually being really, really fast to charge instead.
00:35:02 James Morris
And, BYD, who already mentioned, that not with the Z, but with the Z9 GT, I think it was, that they launched a couple of weeks ago, the Denza kind of Taycan alike, has megawatt charging as well.
00:35:16 James Morris
So, there's all these variables, usually we're thinking about efficiency and a large battery for large range, but does it matter if you've got
00:35:24 James Morris
if you can charge the thing up in 5 minutes, will you care?
00:35:26 James Morris
So that's, and we'll be kind of diverging.
00:35:29 James Morris
So I mean, I guess a couple of things before we kind of round up.
00:35:32 James Morris
Firstly is kind of what's coming that you can talk about.
00:35:36 James Morris
You know, you talked about this forthcoming Mercedes.
00:35:39 James Morris
Is there anything else that you're really excited about that's coming from you that you're working on?
00:35:44 Tim Woolmer
Yeah, I mean, super exciting, of course, that Mercedes are launching
00:35:50 Tim Woolmer
a whole set of vehicles with the AS technology.
00:35:53 Tim Woolmer
I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on some of those vehicles.
00:35:59 Tim Woolmer
And then I guess in the kind of more R&D space, we're working on these very high performance wheel motors.
00:36:06 Tim Woolmer
Now, again, the jury's open whether
00:36:10 Tim Woolmer
a sports car manufacturer will take those and redesign their vehicle and the aerodynamics and the opportunity around that, or whether it ends up being a fantastic motor technology, but ends up getting integrated into an onboard EDU.
00:36:23 Tim Woolmer
We're kind of very open to either.
00:36:26 Tim Woolmer
Ultimately, it's a great motor technology.
00:36:27 Tim Woolmer
So we have in the last sort of three, four years, we've quadrupled the power density like factor 4
00:36:35 Tim Woolmer
of our technology, which again enables another step change in weight of upcoming electric vehicles, electric sports cars.
00:36:42 Tim Woolmer
So like I said, I think it's an exciting space to be working in.
00:36:47 Tim Woolmer
There's a lot happening, a lot of new vehicles being launched, which is obviously the goal.
00:36:51 Tim Woolmer
And there's a lot happening in the R&D space.
00:36:53 Tim Woolmer
So I think both remain pretty interesting.
00:36:57 James Morris
So 2 final questions I like to ask when I have guests on.
00:36:59 James Morris
First is, what's your current car?
00:37:02 Tim Woolmer
Okay.
00:37:04 Tim Woolmer
So current car I'm driving is an EQS.
00:37:06 Tim Woolmer
So that's a Mercedes.
00:37:07 Tim Woolmer
It's their kind of big, yeah, I think their biggest, longest range electric vehicles.
00:37:13 Tim Woolmer
So 400 drives.
00:37:14 James Morris
That's the SUV version, is it or is it the sedan version?
00:37:17 Tim Woolmer
It's the sedan version.
00:37:20 Tim Woolmer
I think it's actually think it's a great car.
00:37:22 Tim Woolmer
I think the SUV version is probably a bit more comfortable.
00:37:25 Tim Woolmer
But it's, fantastic.
00:37:28 Tim Woolmer
I mean, again, the idea of having a 400, 450 mile range electric vehicle, we regularly take it to France and we barely even notice the fact it's electric because you have to stop every two or three hours with kids and you just plug it in.
00:37:42 Tim Woolmer
And by the time they've had lunch, you've got, yeah, 90% charge again.
00:37:46 Tim Woolmer
So it just shows it's super practical, convenient as a vehicle.
00:37:51 Tim Woolmer
I'm hoping that the next car I get will be based on something using YASA products and Mercedes.
00:37:58 Tim Woolmer
We will see.
00:37:58 Tim Woolmer
So that's the hope.
00:37:59 James Morris
Yeah, I mean, if you're doing long distance, you're quite likely to have kids or be middle-aged and have certain have two similar reasons for needing to stop at before your battery requires you to stop.
00:38:12 James Morris
So my final question for you is, what's your favourite car of all time?
00:38:17 Tim Woolmer
So if I could pick a car, if you said to me, hey Tim, you could have any vehicle and yeah, I'd probably pick a McLaren F1 just because it is unbelievably iconic.
00:38:35 Tim Woolmer
I think if I could
00:38:38 Tim Woolmer
pick a vehicle we have been involved in and get to drive it every day.
00:38:43 Tim Woolmer
Probably it'd be a Ferrari 296 because they just get such fantastic reviews.
00:38:50 Tim Woolmer
And I think it just looks like a car which is loads of fun and you can drive it every day.
00:38:55 James Morris
As I mentioned before we came on air,
00:38:58 James Morris
potentially going to be driving one of my favourite cars of all time, the Miura from Lamborghini in a couple of weeks and comparing it to a car that actually has your motors in it, the Temerario.
00:39:08 James Morris
So I think that's going to be quite an interesting, you know, comparison that really speaks to, you know, what we're talking about, the kind of pure
00:39:17 James Morris
petrol experience versus the technological kind of electrified experience, which, I think, from my driving the Temeraria, your motors only do good things for, it's not just we've got to do this because of to be eco-friendly.
00:39:32 James Morris
I think the Temeraria is vastly better because of the electrification.
00:39:36 James Morris
It's smoother delivery, less fierce for rubbish driving.
00:39:42 James Morris
And so,
00:39:45 James Morris
I really wish you well with producing cars as great as that in the future.
00:39:51 James Morris
That's all we have time for in this episode.
00:39:53 James Morris
That's it for today's podcast.
00:39:55 James Morris
We've been James Morris and special guest Tim Warmer and you've been a great audience.
00:39:59 James Morris
Please subscribe to our podcast if you haven't already and tunein next time for more chat and analysis of the latest EV stories.
00:40:06 James Morris
Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram and of course please come back to our website whichev.net for the most recent news, reviews and features on everything electric vehicle.
00:40:15 James Morris
We'll sign off with a bit more of our theme tune, which is called Gun It to the Red Light by Three Colour Dessert, a local London band.
00:40:21 James Morris
Keep an eye out for forthcoming gigs.
00:40:23 James Morris
In fact, they've just released a new album too, which they had a party for.
00:40:27 James Morris
Anyway, we'll talk to you next episode.