17 Tony Fong | In conversation E-Mobility Engineering | March/April 2025 innovations he worked on included an e-Supercharger, a belt integrated starter generator (BISG) and 48 V chassis control – a fascinating concept for a form of hybridised suspension. “It used the battery to power the anti-roll bar,” explains Fong. “And because there was a lot of energy in the system going the other way too, if you could manage the surges that energy could be used to recharge the battery. It was very interesting and I think there’s still a lot of discussions around that, so it may advance in the future.” Many of these hybrid programmes expanded on Fong’s past experience in vehicle integration as that is one of the biggest challenges of hybrid engineering. Indeed, he says the need to fit technology into an existing vehicle, rather than creating a ground-up design from scratch, makes its development far more challenging than full EVs. After almost two years at Ricardo, he founded his own vehicle electrification engineering consultancy, AYF Solutions, and as hybrid technology matured and the development of EVs started to gather pace, he began to apply what he learned in the hybrid space to support OEMs with their efforts to steer their vehicles in a new direction. “I’d built a good understanding of vehicle-level delivery and electrical design fundamentals, and I like problem solving, so most of my assignments involved parachuting in and trying to solve challenges faced by OEM component teams,” Fong recalls. “Often, when they had a big EMC problem, they did not necessarily know how to navigate around it, so I came in to help. “The JLR battery team, for example, wanted to apply a common 48 V mild hybrid battery system across all platforms, but when you create common parts to reduce cost, there is always a compromise. On different platforms the battery could be installed under the vehicle, under the driver’s seat, in the boot, and they all had different unique challenges.” Another project that Fong worked on was with MG, helping to develop its two-seat Cyberster GT Roadster at Longbridge prior to the factory’s closure. This briefly steered him away from electrical engineering back to chassis development, and at the time the vehicle – due to enter production this year – was a totally unproven concept. Fong was tasked with working out how the car would perform on the road, but with no existing type comparisons available, it required a lengthy period of complex computer calculations and simulations – ultimately resulting in some interesting insights into the important impacts of an EV powertrain on the overall framework of a vehicle. “When you measure roll-load data for the chassis and suspension design you normally start by using virtual data and simulations,” he says. “If you haven’t built the car, you have to find the closest type to it, and at that time there were a few two-seater hypercars around, but not many two-seater EV sports cars similar to the Cyberster. apparent,” he recalls. “Now I can see that relating to the modern EV powertrains being developed.” After graduating from Cranfield University with an MSc and following that with an MBA from Cardiff Metropolitan University, Fong secured a dream first job as a vehicle integration engineer at Ford, tuning cars and travelling all around the world to test cars in different environments. At the time, even hybrid was still in its infancy, so much of Fong’s work at Ford and then Jaguar Land Rover focused on the Stage IV and V emissions-reduction standards and diesel particulate filters in ICE cars. However, these roles embedded in him an understanding of the entire vehicle development cycle, which he is now able to deploy in the EV world. Hybrid innovation A move to Ricardo in 2014 fed Fong’s passion for innovation, and he began to specialise in electrics and systems. Many of his projects focused on mild hybrid technology and the Everrati’s Tony Fong is engineering old classics into modern-day electric marvels (Image courtesy of Tony Fong)
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