The long road back to the water – Part II

Dan Primrose highlights some remarkable new material technology

In 2006 I was given the opportunity to join two of my ex-McLaren colleagues at a new company called Caparo Vehicle Technologies (CVT) that they had formed within the Caparo PLC group. Caparo PLC are one of the largest privately owned companies in the UK and are Tier 1 and 2 suppliers to many significant OEMs (the final car assembly plants) in the automotive world. The principle of setting up CVT was to be able not only to design and engineer lightweight vehicles and parts, but also to draw on the group’s existing infrastructure in the UK and the rest of the world but predominately in India. Certainly, this would enable us to design and produce prototype parts, but we would also be able to follow it up with the much more important high-volume production – the area in which the composite world has traditionally failed to deliver.

The first product that was produced at CVT was a complete car called the T1 (nothing simple!). The objective of this car was to show what was possible in a road car if you really explored all the avenues in light-weighting every part. However, with every part we designed and made we tried to apply the basic principles of using processes that could help develop higher-volume composite cars in the future.

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