Inside the Machine by David Twohig

Author:David Twohig
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Motor cars: general interest
Publisher: Veloce Publishing Ltd
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Uncharted waters

I started my new job as Deputy Chief Vehicle Engineer of the all-new small EV in January 2009. I was delighted to be back to ‘owning’ a whole-vehicle project. My new boss, the CVE, was Jean-François Simon, a Renault ‘lifer’ who’d had a long career in Renault’s Engineering and Program Management teams. He was famous in Renault for being parsimonious with the company’s and the customers’ money. I settled into my new role and started to get to know my new team. As on P32L, I would indirectly manage hundreds of engineers, but my direct team would be surprisingly small – about a dozen ‘core’ senior engineers, to whom Renault gave the horribly clunky title of ‘Technical Synthesis Engineers.’ As before, I would have one of these senior, experienced people for each of the key Métiers or engineering functions – body, trim, electrical, chassis – and my own old team, packaging. And, of course, there was now a small team from the emerging specialist engineering disciplines of high-voltage batteries and electric powertrains. Add to that a few people to help me manage the project costs and scheduling, and we had our core engineering team, our Band of Brothers and Sisters25 that would be tasked with engineering this very new vehicle over the next few years.

25 Renault was a much less ‘masculine’ company than Nissan in these days. It still had the usual engineering, and particularly automotive-engineering massive preponderance of male engineers, but at least we had some female colleagues.

We also had a name for it. Renault loves its alpha-numeric codes as much as any other car company, and has the usual Byzantian-complex method for coding its vehicles. Our new baby was code-named B10. It would later be known as the Renault ZOE, but to us it would always and will always be B10, as Qashqai will always be P32L to me.

It’s very hard now to portray just how novel it was to be designing a mass-production electric vehicle in 2009. Of course, there was already increasing social conscience about the effects of greenhouse gases and a dawning realisation that society in general and industry in particular had to ‘do something.’ Governments had started to talk seriously about restricting greenhouse gases such as CO2. But we were very far from today’s general acceptance of EVs as part of the solution towards slowing global warning. Tesla was still very much a hip Californian start-up. Its only product was the Roadster, which was simply a Lotus Elise body-tub, crammed with batteries bought from Panasonic and retrofitted with Tesla’s own motors. It was a curiosity, and no more. Even when the Tesla S was launched in 2010, it was far from a major event – it was a very expensive toy for Silicon Valley tech staff to spend their bonuses on, not yet seen as a serious threat to the global car industry. Mitsubishi had launched its i-Miev electric car in 2009, rebadged by Citroën as the C-Ion, but unfortunately it had a distinct whiff of the golf cart – it was small, too tall, and rather cheap and rickety.

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