eAPC23: Industrialising Net Zero Automotive Technology (UK)

The Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) provides funding, support, insight and foresight for the development of low emission transport solutions and automotive technologies.

The aim of this competition is for collaborative R&D projects that design, develop and manufacture technology that will work towards delivering net zero carbon emission. This is for on-vehicle technologies for on-road or off-road vehicles.

Your proposal must be a collaborative, pre-production research and development (R&D) project that:

• supports the UK’s long term vision and underpinning capabilities by securing long term R&D investment
• achieves through the associated supply chain, the designing, building, testing and manufacture of net zero carbon emission vehicles.

Specific Themes

You must consider which technology or technologies best represent your project and rank them in order of their significance and impact to your project. The one ranked first must be the lead technology:

• electric machines and power electronics design, manufacture and disassembly and recycling processes
• energy storage and energy management
• lightweight vehicles and powertrain structures, including lightweight materials and manufacturing
• fuel cell systems and associated balance of plant
• thermal propulsion systems and alternative fuels
• digitalisation for design for manufacture and recycling, development of low carbon vehicle innovation, manufacture of vehicle systems and sub-systems, data analytics, redesign, test and validation and verification.

Funding Information

• Your project’s total grant funding request must be between £2.5 million and £20 million. Your project must be a minimum of 50% match funded, with a suggested maximum number of six partners.
• The UK government invests up to £75 million a year through the Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) in collaborative research and development (CR&D) projects.
• These are pre-production projects and applicants should apply for the minimum amount of APC funding required to make the project viable.
• In this competition APC is investing £20 million.
• Your total project grant request must be no more than £20 million and no more than 50% of your total project costs. This is regardless of the individual partners’ grant claims.
• A minimum of 70% of your projects total project costs must be incurred by commercial organisations.
• If your organisation’s work on the project is commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically but for the purpose of this project will be undertaking commercial or economic activity.
• For industrial research projects, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:
  • up to 70% if you are a micro or small organisation
  • up to 60% if you are a medium sized organisation
  • up to 50% if you are a large organisation
• For experimental development projects which are nearer to market, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:
  • up to 45% if you are a micro or small organisation
  • up to 35% if you are a medium sized organisation
  • up to 25% if you are a large organisation.

Who can apply?

• Your project
  • Your project must:
    • last between 18 months and 36 months
    • carry out all of its project work in the UK
    • intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
  • You must only include eligible project costs in your application.
  • Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian and Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian and Belarusian source.
  • If you have not requested approval or your application has not been approved by us, you will be made ineligible. Your application will then not be sent for assessment.
• Lead organisation
  • To lead a project your organisation must:
    • be a UK registered business of any size
    • be or involve at least one grant claiming micro, small or medium-sized enterprise (SME)
    • have an active registered business base in the UK
    • be a grant recipient
    • collaborate with other UK registered organisations
  • Academic institutions cannot lead or work alone.
• Project team
  • To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:
    • business of any size
    • academic institution
    • charity
    • not for profit
    • public sector organisation
    • research and technology organisation (RTO)
  • Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once partners have accepted the invitation, they will be asked to login or to create an account in the Innovation Funding Service. They are responsible for entering their own project in the application.
  • To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
• Non-funded partners
  • Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.
• Subcontractors
  • Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.
  • Subcontractors can be from anywhere in the UK and you must select them through your usual procurement process.
  • You can use subcontractors from overseas but must make the case in your application as to why you could not use suppliers from the UK.
  • You must provide a detailed rationale, evidence of the potential UK contractors you approached and the reasons why they were unable to work with you. They will not accept a cheaper cost as a sufficient reason to use an overseas subcontractor.
  • All subcontractor costs must be justified and appropriate to the total project costs.
• Number of applications
  • There is no limit on the number of applications an organisation can be involved in.

For more information, visit Innovate UK.