Amphibious electric bus technology on display in Coventry

The future of green transport technology has been showcased at Coventry University’s Institute for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering (AME). Thirteen businesses focusing on efforts to reduce the transport sector’s reliance on fossil fuels have been chosen to be part of the Clean Futures accelerator programme, which saw them receive up to £50,000 to test their solutions and to address challenging areas associated with rail and road transport. production sectors.

Clean Futures is run by the Connected Places Catapult alongside Coventry University and the Black Country Innovative Manufacturing Organisation. The chosen firms are supported by Coventry University’s Manufacturing and Materials Research Centre.

Ideas and prototypes on display at AME included a new way to charge electric motorcycles used by grocery stores and an amphibious tour bus that can be driven on road and water. Its developer, Seahorse Amphibious Vehicles, currently has one bus in Cape Town, South Africa, and another in Liverpool, with plans to deliver other vehicles to Helsinki, Singapore and Glasgow.

Co-founder Ed Lumley said: “We started out using diesel but as time went on we saw a real gap in the market and a need to go clean and use clean energy. Now we’re developing an electric vehicle and we’ve used second-life components, so from things like crashed electric vehicles we’ve taken the batteries and tried to make them communicate with our own systems as well. .

“I heard about Clean Futures about eight months ago and this was the first time this grant was launched. We were awarded the grant and it was fantastic. It gave us credibility in the market, which allowed us to sell these electric amphibious vehicles – at the beginning of the project we had no sales, but by the end of the project we had sales for five electric vehicles.”

Professor Marcos Kauffman, Director of the Manufacturing and Materials Research Center and Institute for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering, said: “The Clean Futures project aims to help the West Midlands Combined Authority achieve its 2041 net zero strategy. The combined authority has created a roadmap to 2041 and identified certain areas of critical technologies that will be needed for us to achieve net zero in our region; industrial emissions, transport emissions and housing emissions.

“In this program we are particularly addressing transport emissions and these 13 SMEs are working in a wide range of technologies, mainly related to the internal combustion to electric vehicle transition. We have battery cell chemistry, battery cell components, companies working on clean sustainable fuels, clean sustainable materials and recovery of materials from end-of-life vehicle recycling.

“It’s very exciting to have everything together and for SMEs to have their technologies here so we can see the result of the work we’ve done in the first six months of this project with the first cohort. It’s also exciting to see the cross-pollination of local companies all working on complementary technologies that could come together to really make a difference in our region.”