TIM WOOLMER

Cutting-edge electric motor tech is making waves across the automotive industry, and it was conceived here in the UK. Steve Cropley talks to the man who made it happen

- Steve Cropley

There's something uniquely charming about the way Tim Woolmer discusses electric motors. Despite the business suit, the tinges of grey in his hair, his rocketing reputation as one of Britain's foremost engineers and his unique position as an Oxford man who has made millions from selling his fledgling company to Mercedes-Benz, Woolmer's open and enthusiastic manner somehow still has 'student innovator' running right through it.

Show interest in his achievements and you will soon be swept into a discussion on the minutiae of electric motors and their future in cars - but the talk won't be about ordinary motors.

These are disc-shaped axial flow machines whose yokeless and segmented armature - the Yasa design-brings bold advances in compactness, efficiency, lightness and torque density to an arena that many engineers thought had achieved its design goals a century ago. Yasa motors have also helpfully provided a name for the company Woolmer launched - once he had completed an Oxford PhD, the goal of which was to unveil the technology's potential.

Yasa Motors Limited, the company, opened for business in 2009 in a university lab in central Oxford, slowly garnering small car industry clients in its first few years and concentrating on survival. It moved and expanded several times as business blossomed (with the help of early adopters like the 2012 Jaguar C-X75 concept and the 2015 Koenigsegg Regera production car) and the first serious investors arrived, and it is currently based in a recently built factory outside Oxford that can build motors in their thousands. Yet even this is just the beginning. Woolmer describes car electrification as "still in its infancy" and says more of Yasa's real potential will be revealed from a much bigger motor factory being built by Mercedes in Berlin.