19 Beyond this, the assembly of each motor design is an entirely YASApatented series of processes, including the pressing of the aforementioned SMC blocks, copper winding, joint welding, enclosure moulding and welding, and various other bonding and coating techniques. From Yarnton to Berlin Naturally, a production run of Mercedes cars (and those of other OEMs interested in using YASA’s motors for their next-generation EVs) will consist of much higher numbers than the few hundred previously sought by Jaguar and Koenigsegg. “Automotive does tend to be conservative when scaling up, and so you don’t really see new technologies going from zero to very high volume overnight,” Woolmer observes. “In my experience, one can go up by one order of magnitude at a time, but not two, so as the Yarnton facility can produce tens of thousands of motors per year, our next act could see us ramping up to something in the hundreds of thousands, but not the millions just yet.” He says part of YASA’s remit from Mercedes is to remain reasonably agile and innovative in e-motor development in order to maintain a technological edge in electric propulsion, while the German parent company provides an easily adjustable lever of industrial capital and know-how to scale up when it is deemed optimal. “Mercedes really knows how to build factories, how to write 500-page specifications, how to optimise the perfect mass-manufacturing machine – none of that is YASA’s heritage. So, we’ve worked extremely closely with Mercedes over the last three years, and now they’re converting one of their factories in Berlin from making ICEs to making YASA products in the hundreds of thousands,” Woolmer notes. “Most of the processes you’d find in Yarnton, you’ll find in Berlin soon, but they’ve all been polished, optimised and scaled. A lot of what is performed manually in Yarnton has been automated in Berlin, meaning less manual handling, less pushing of goods on trolleys, more conveyors and robotic arms. Doing that takes a lot of money, because automation is expensive, but that was always the vision for working with Mercedes: to scale the technology.” While not an official plan, Woolmer acknowledges that after producing hundreds of thousands of YASA motors, the next stage will be to output millions. The fundamental question prior to making that great leap will revolve around whether the best place for its axial-flux machines is in highperformance sports EVs – Mercedes’ main motivation in acquiring YASA – or whether new roots will be found to justify scaling this up to millions for mainstream automotive. “It’s too early to tell just yet, but as we watch our technology getting scaled up, and how Mercedes is pulling that off, you really start to get a sense of Mercedes’ strengths, and that even though developments in Yarnton and Berlin are both going great, we’ve not hit our sweet spot just yet,” concludes Woolmer. “It’s a very good partnership, and the best is yet to come.” E-Mobility Engineering | July/August 2024 Tim Woolmer Tim Woolmer was born in Oxford, UK, and he grew up in Somerset in the southwest of England. After attending various local schools in that portion of the country, he returned to Oxford at the age of 20 to begin his undergraduate (Bachelor’s) degree in Engineering with Science. Woolmer continued his studies at Oxford University for some time, going on to do his PhD there from 2005-09. He founded YASA in the same year that his course finished. With his colleagues, he went on to develop axial-flux e-motors for numerous partners across the motorsport and automotive worlds, as well as acquiring more than 150 patents for the yokeless and segmented armature that YASA’s name is derived from, and with which its motors are engineered. In 2018, the company opened its first series production facility in Oxfordshire, capable of outputting up to 100,000 units per year, and it officially became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Mercedes in 2021. That same year saw the spin-off from YASA of Evolito, for the latter to develop the former’s technology in an aerospace capacity, which Woolmer also works with and supports. YASA’s first facility in Yarnton can produce up to 100,000 e-motors per year. Its next facility in Berlin will be larger and informed by Mercedes’ industrial know-how (Image courtesy of YASA)
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