Government offers £24m in vehicle emissions competition

Three government offices have come together to offer £24 million in a funding competition to reduce real-world emissions from vehicle tailpipe (exhaust) systems

Announced today (31 August), the funding offer comes from Innovate UK, the Office for Low Emission Vehicles and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.

The aim of this competition, said a government statement, is “to support industry-led research and development (R&D) projects. These should be for vehicle technology that reduces or removes real-world emissions at tailpipe.”

Integrated

The competition aims to cut or end tailpipe (exhaust) emissions with applicable vehicles on sale in 2025

Projects will have to take an integrated systems approach to vehicle emissions reduction. The end result, says government, should be lower emissions at vehicle level in the real world. “In particular, we are looking for projects developing low-cost, highly integrated systems enabling zero emission journeys,” the competition documentation states.

Projects will have to focus on on-highway vehicles (L, M or N category vehicles) as their primary exploitation route. And, “secondary exploitation” through off-highway vehicles (non-road mobile machinery) is in scope.

Proof of concept

Projects must produce a proof of concept by around 2020 and the government expects projects that have shown technical and commercial feasibility to then target programmes for vehicle sales in around 2025.

Proposals must focus on one or more of the following strategic technologies from the Automotive Council UK:

• electric machines and power electronics
• energy storage and energy management
• lightweight vehicle and powertrain structures
• thermal propulsion
• highly disruptive technologies which would significantly speed up the reduction of CO2e and other emissions

A government statement said: “We prefer projects that focus on more than one strategic technology. Proposals that focus on just one area must clearly explain how they achieve the systems approach.”

Priorities

The priorities for this competition are:

• systems for zero tailpipe emissions running, appropriate to vehicle class. For example, enabling M1 vehicles to complete a 50-mile zero emission journey
• systems achieving significant reduction of tailpipe CO2e or other emissions
• systems achieving significant reduction of CO2e emissions on a Well-to-Wheel basis (ie including fuel/energy storage, production, processing and delivery).

Full details of the competition are available at: Funding Competition