Surrey-based EV motor developer Protean has its roots in a firm called PML Flightlink, which made headlines in 2006 when it fitted four in-wheel motors (IWMs) to a Mini Cooper to give 640bhp, a sub-5.0sec 0-62mph time and a £200k price.
The outfit was later acquired by NEVS, the Chinese-owned successor to Saab, before EV tech specialist Bedeo took it over in 2019 and began using its innovative IWMs as part of a range-extender conversion package for diesel vans.
Today, Protean – winner of this year’s Innovation Award – has around 120 stars spread across four global facilities: the UK engineering centre in Farnham, a factory in Tianjin, China, a supply chain office in Shanghai and a new production site in Istanbul. Last year, Protean built 1500 motors, around a third of which went to parent company Bedeo for use in the RE100 van.
But CEO Andrew Whitehead says it could make 10,000 units as things stand, before scaling up to 20,000 and then, 18-24 months later, 100,000.
Unlike many an ambitious tech start-up, though, Protean’s growth plans are not founded entirely on enthusiastic optimism and unbridled self-belief but rather a demonstrable appetite from key industry players to embrace disruptive new technologies and explore different ways of designing and engineering vehicles.
Whitehead says the company is already in discussions with a number of “major, well-established, global OEMs”, and he estimates the worldwide market for IWMs could be worth more than £15 billion by the middle of the next decade.
It’s moving fast, too: the first production car to use the technology is Renault’s crazy new 5 Turbo 3E hyper-hatch, due on the road as soon as 2027. Whitehead won’t say whether or not it’s Protean’s motors behind those mammoth monoblock wheels, but he does hail the 3E as an exciting showcase of what can be achieved with IWMs.