TKC MAG’s video editor NEIL WINNINGTON went to visit ex-TVR designer Graham Browne (TVR Sagaris etc etc) for a look at the brilliant Northern Light
Foreign My name is Graham Brown and the company is Northern Light Motors so um tell me about your vehicle because it is a little unusual in the in the Kitco world and it’s also very innovative yeah it started about um seven or eight years ago just as an
Idea really it was getting a bit uh my background is in car design um and as the transition to electrification started I was surprised that people were just putting loads of batteries in what were essentially normal cars uh and thinking that was the way forward so it was a case of thinking
About you know if he strips everything back to in terms of weight and and made it really slippery academically is is how how much could you get away with um in terms of batteries to get a decent range and we’ve managed to do that we’ve got a incredibly lightweight slippy
Vehicle and our batteries are a fraction of what’s required um with traditional vehicles so you’ve uh in terms of um uh the vehicle instead of instead of something the size of a big car this is designed for someone who say community commuting or doing um sort of uh solo
Uh Journeys which most people are this is just stripping everything back to the requirements to get a decent range so you could use it for commuting to work for example yeah you know yes it’s essentially a commute vehicle but having said that 80 of UK Journeys a single occupancy
Um and only a few miles actually so it you know there’s no reason why most people wouldn’t benefit from from using something like this but obviously it’s not something you’d set the family um to Scotland it’s it’s designed for relatively local commutes but you know
50 50 miles 60 miles 70 miles a day up to 100 miles if you charge it at work a perfectly achievable achievable the controls to turn this way on you’ve got the gear shifter on the left and the rear brake rear handbrake you’ve got my lights on the right hold on
Just a pedal assist level one two five and you’ve got the throttle for the indicators and then the main switch the battery’s down Main switch turns all the power off Thank you foreign foreign foreign you said that the vehicle’s been in the design process for several years um in terms of construction grp Monaco that’s right yeah it’s a grp monocoque um again mainly because of the weight issues so um I’ve been a fan of monocox especially
In an even Gip makeup for a long time so I used to have a rockstar Olympic which I think was the yeah second grp monocot after the elite I think it was the first yeah um and I’ve always admired uh the Simplicity of that um so yeah from from quite an early
Early stage um I decided it was going to be a monocoque and because I’ve made lots of vehicles out of both grp and carbon fiber at my time at TBR um there’s obviously a lot of drawbacks with carbon it’s brittleness um you know it’s cost being another one
And because this is a mono clock it needs to absorb impacts and shocks over bumps it’s got suspension but even so if it was cab wouldn’t it be much more susceptible to to breakages and to be very expensive to fix um talking about the the structure you mentioned that you’ve actually
Incorporated crumple zones into the design or safety into the design um within the shape of the the vehicle John to explain some of that as well yeah so the shape of the vehicle uh a lot of people you know can see lots of classic shapes in there World War II
Airplanes and vintage Vehicles you know but essentially it was designed from a clean sheep and the reason it’s the shape of it is that the obviously it’s a teardrop which is low drag um it’s an egg shape because that’s the ideal monocoque shape so it’s got lots of compound curvature in it
Um all of the the contactable surfaces are well above bump height which is important for safety and even like the front the front is like almost a vertical as opposed to diving down to the ground so that if you impact into a car or anything else you’re not going to
Go under it you’re going to be deflected from it at the rear we’ve got the wheel which is a an over engineered bicycle wheel essentially which is fantastic fantastic crumple Zone in its own right then we’ve got the composite suspension struts and then we’ve got a further area
Um of luggage space that was an enormous amount of bumpers on at the rear including the shape of the claw which is the kind of tail of the vehicle which again is designed to deflect in Impact so that if somebody runs into the back of you you get pushed away rather than
The vehicle going over the back here and you mentioned luggage space which people wouldn’t be expecting as well but there’s actually quite a fair bit behind the the seats isn’t there yeah there’s 160 liters in total there’s a big chunk behind the seat so you I mean you could
Get a probably for a single person certainly a week shopping in there and there’s a further area at the front and you can even get longer items like guitars and even a pair of ladders down the side of the seat so yeah [Laughter] um and and going back to the uh to the
Electric power unit obviously when we’re talking about reduced weight uh if you move away from the car World there are electric bikes with wheels in the hubs so uh obviously that reduces a lot of weight as well and that’s the route pretty much that you’ve taken isn’t it
The uh yeah it was a very deliberate um decision very early on to utilize e-bike technology which was you know when I started was probably in its infancy but you know it’s exploded since then um and the beauty of it is it’s readily available it’s cheap about off the shelf
And it fits it works um so and the other thing is adaptability so a lot of customers some customers want mid drives some people want Hub Motors and because of the way we’ve designed uh the transmission now everything’s achievable so people can pick and choose any any bicycle
Components and the other beauty is if you know we’ve got a customer let’s say in France or wherever which we have a number of and they’ve got a problem with their chain or sprocket or derailleur they can go to the local bike shop and
Pick one up and get it or get it fixed which is a massive bonus now um you’re talking about range um uh most people will think oh it can only do 20 miles an hour it’s got a bike wheel but that’s not the case is it well legally
Um e-bikes in Europe and the UK are legally restricted to 15.5 miles an hour um but um and it this is it varies from country to Country UK and Holland being good examples um there’s a scheme called the msva scheme which is a single vehicle approval whereby if you go through that
Scheme which isn’t that complicated to do or costly um you can basically register it as a motorcycle of varying degrees of power so we’ve we’ve got one in the UK we’ve got a question in Holland who’s doing that so they’re putting essentially more power more speed that we’re allowing more speed
Um and with that in mind our model controller at which we fit standard um we can’t legally sell it with a switch on that’s illegal so probably it does have a cable that can be cut which will release it from 15.5 mile an hour to unlimited which is in the case of the
250 watt motor that’s 30 miles an hour of assistance which for the legality is the owner would declare yeah if the owner was to cut that cable they would need to then register it as a legally covering the legalities absolutely it’s it’s crucial yeah uh what sort of battery pack have you got
And what sort of range does that give you again um because we’ve used or utilized e-bike parts we use ebike batteries and they are incredibly reliable and available and inexpensive the lithium batteries we use a 48 volt battery we start off with a standard 10 amp hour which will get
You about 30 miles with very little effort from yourself it it’s the difficult one cycling as well you’ve got pedals in there as well yeah exactly and it depends on the weight of the driver it depends on how much luggage you’ve got it depends on the terrain so well
It’s a good ballpark uh you get you completely get 30 40 miles out of the 10 10 amp hour 16 amp hour which is only you know another 100 pound or so more expensive and we’ll get you 50 miles and then what the sky’s the limit and the
Other beauty of the of using the about batteries they’re on a sliding and a key system so you just unlock the thing slide it out it’s looking roughly the size of a coffee flask you can take it into the office and recharge it so with
A 16 amp hour battery you can do 100 miles a day comfortably yeah which for like a local vehicle which is what it’s designed to be is is pretty excessive really yeah if somebody wanted to do um 300 miles it’s just a case of putting more battery in it once well it defeats
The object because you’re just putting more weight in there yeah and more cost which which is against the ethos of the vehicle really um the kit prices um talk me through the kit prices and and how much work someone would have to put into uh putting it on the road yeah
So we the the base model if you like the four to eight um starts at four and a half thousand pounds in kit form and the only thing that doesn’t include uh are the The Hub motor and the batteries and the display which are all available as kits from from anywhere
EBay or whatever um and the idea being that people lots of people want to do their own thing and put their own modes on they’ve got their own ideas so that’s what that product’s about um everything is built up that we weep on the suspension because that’s a
Safety critical part I’ve got it’s actually bundled in the bulkheads are bonded in the suspension is bolted in every all the holes the CNC drilled we supply all the nuts and bolts we Supply the brakes Supply the wheels so with the exception of the the transmission that a
The electrical transmission on the 408 we Supply everything and it’s you can you can basically bolt it together in a day it’s you know if you can bolt together an Ikea wardrobe you should be able to find you find your way around that easy enough and uh the package is going further up
Oh so yeah so the the 557 um if that’s five and a half thousand pound uh fully built five thousand pounding kit form and that is essentially the same thing but we we then Supply the 251 uh Hub motor and the display a lot of customers in fact just
About everybody so far has gone for the rear view camera auction which is a 200 pound option um which is nice because otherwise you’re into putting Wing mirrors on there which are not great in terms of drag yeah and it works really well so most people are going for that and a lot
Of people are just going from these with the standard 10 amp power battery to the 16 amp hour battery a few people have gone to the 20 ampere battery um and that that one comes actually with a um an air tag built into it for for tracking uh otherwise people could just
You know a lot we get asked a lot about um security obviously the standard locks all apply uh but in terms of tracking these new air tags which are available for Android and Apple and you know you can discreetly put them somewhere on this strike and you can you get
Notifications as to its location if it was to go missing which is which is nice welcome to the kit car history file Series where we’ll be going through the industries past we’ll be visiting old marks of long ago some more than one some most of the older stuff a lot of
Archive information with photographs and information on the cars they made the people involved and what happened to them