E-Mobility Engineering 019 | In conversation: Stephen Lambert l WAE EVR l Battery case materials focus l Quality control insight l Clipper Automotive Clipper Cab digest l Optimising battery chemistries insight l Powertrain testing focus

“Many other platforms start with this idea of a tray of battery packs at the bottomof the platform, and a flat free- form space above that you can do with as you like, but that inherently pushes the driver up by at least 150mm, maybe 200mm, before you’ve even started designing the cabin,” McCaw explains. For the EVR, the driver’s position had to be kept as low to the floor as possible: this is expected of supercar designs owing to the need to keep their CoGs low for good handling. Given how common this is across different sportscar models, WAE decided that it would be a common requirement of the EVR’s architecture. Asking supercar customers to accept the replacement of an IC engine powertrainwith an all-electric one is already a considerable request; asking them to then also accept the fundamental change in cabin placement and feel that would come fromnot having a lowfloor position for the driver could be asking too much of sportscar enthusiasts. “The EVR is meant to be a basis of common components and a chassis that collectively works for some of the most demanding electric powertrain and vehicle driving profiles, and very early in development we did a lot of studies to benchmark what was on the market in comparable vehicles,” McNamara says. “We extrapolated from that how high-end automotive designs and engineering would be likely to evolve over the coming years, in order to create an architecture that would still work as a template for limited-edition electric sportscar designs coming out upwards of 5-6 years into the future.” Around the time of those studies, electric sportscars such as the Pininfarina Battista, the Rimac C2 and the Lotus Evija were attracting interest. Compared with hybrid EV hypercars such as the Aston Martin Valkyrie and the Mercedes AMG One, it affirmed WAE’s determination to go the all- electric route with the standard-issue from the outset. Compared to the powertrain specifications we’d initially targeted, we’ve since added maybe another 5-10% of power, energy and acceleration to what we thought it would be capable of.” AlthoughMcCaw now has trouble numbering howmany distinct iterations the skateboard went through, as different sections of the vehicle would evolve at different stages, he notes that they used at least five to eight different powertrain configurations – three of which did not even exist when the project began. Similarly, he comments that drive- by-wire systems have only started reaching a level of maturity for use in production cars in the past couple of years, whereas previously they might have been deemed sufficient only for technology demonstrators. They are therefore another subsystem that has been adopted into and iterated on the EVR on an ad-hoc basis. Structural and subsystem overview The basis of the EVR is a wheelbase and track design that can be scaled to an end-user’s particular vehicle. The main difference between the EVR and the EVX is that the former features a very low seating point for the driver and the passenger next to them. 24 May/June 2023 | E-Mobility Engineering The carbon tub features metal inserts to enable the metal to be mated to the carbon without risking galvanic corrosion