With a world-class team in the North East of England, Advanced Electric Machines (AEM) delivers market-leading electric motor technologies for clients and partners around the globe and is at the forefront of green mobility.
Following a recent £23 million investment to scale up production capacity, the NEAA caught up with Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, Dr James Widmer, to hear about the company’s journey to date, its mission to make the world’s Electric Vehicles (EV) truly sustainable and what’s next for this is innovative Newcastle-based SME.
For readers not familiar with AEM, can you tell us more about how the business started and what you do?
I completed my PhD at Newcastle University in 2009 and spent the next few years researching and developing rare-earth free motor solutions alongside Dr Andy Steven. This, of course, was right at the very start of the electric vehicle movement – Nissan’s Leaf only entered production in 2010.
In the years that followed, we developed Newcastle University’s Centre for Advanced Electrical Drives. As a team, we helped vehicle manufacturers to build their first electric vehicle powertrains and supported a renowned aerospace corporation to complete the world’s longest self-powered flight.
By 2017, we’d created a commercially viable, rare-earth free electric motor that could not only exceed the performance characteristics of a permanent magnet motor, but was capable of being produced ethically and sustainably, too. Advanced Electric Machines was spun out of the University as a standalone business and, in 2019, we secured £25million of seed funding to scale our prototype HDSRM commercial vehicle motor and move into a 1200m2 production facility.
Since then, we’ve worked with major automotive partners worldwide to develop new integrations for our electric motors. We’ve partnered with the likes of Bentley to engineer our SSRD performance-driven passenger car motor. AEM even had the privilege of presenting at COP26 in Glasgow, where we highlighted to industry-wide importance of sustainable vehicle electrification.
Most recently, we secured a further £23 million of Series A investment, which will allow us to scale capacity and accelerate our motor roll out to customers.
What is AEM’s USP?
I’d say that our USP is twofold. Firstly, as I’ve already touched on, the key driver behind the formation of Advanced Electric Machines was to make sustainable electric motors. A significant factor in producing such a product is the removal of rare earth materials. Typically, these are found in the magnets of a permanent magnet machine. Rare earths, as their name suggests, are finite in their supply, but they’re also environmentally damaging to extract. By reducing the number of materials used within an electric motor – ours currently use only aluminium, steel and copper – it also makes them much easier to recycle at the end of their working life.
Our other USP is tied to the array of benefits that come from our sustainably driven design. In addition to being a durable, homologated, off the shelf solution for vehicle manufacturers and Tier 1 suppliers, our motors are invertor agnostic and, significantly, freewheeling. This enables the ability to coast – a benefit not commonly seen in electric motors without the need for a mechanical clutch. Ultimately, the ability to coast without the need for an additional point of potential failure, makes our motor a highly desirable, highly efficient option for customers.
Where do you see the key markets and areas for growth over the next 5-10 years?
We’ve not, in our lifetime, seen the automotive landscape evolve as quickly as it is doing now. I think it would be a mistake to think it’s going to slow down any time soon, either. Therefore, for a supplier like AEM, we need to be reactive to the various twists and turns presented by the industry as a whole.
Europe will continue to be a major player in the make-up of the sector, as, we’re sure, will be North America. We’ve already got feet on the ground in the US, as we see it to be a major growth area for our business in the next few years.
It’s no secret that players in the Asia Pacific region are growing exponentially, which is why we also have an office in Thailand.
Beyond geographical reach, we’re looking at the various niches where sustainable electrification of commercial vehicles makes sense, and how we can support other businesses with solutions that make existing combustion powertrains more efficient.
