Byton’s chief vehicle engineer is Irishman David Twohig, who formerly worked for the Renault-Nissan Alliance and won the Mundy Award for Engineering at the 2018 Autocar Awards for his work on the Alpine A110. We caught up with Twohig at the Pebble Beach Concours event to find out more about Byton’s ambitious plans.
Where is Byton in terms of products?
“Getting close. Launch is committed for China in 2019, we’ll do North America a few months later and we’ll be in Europe at the back end of 2020. The plant at Nanjing is going ahead at a speed I’ve never seen in 26 years in the car industry. We’ll be building the first off-tool prototypes early next year.”
Will all Byton vehicles sit on the same platform?
“Yes. It’s not a sandwich construction like the Chevrolet Bolt, for example. We are very much leaning on established technologies — that’s why they hired guys like me, an old soldier from existing OEMs. We’re relying on technology you can scale with minimum investment, and the plant in Nanjing is set up to do that, to do different wheelbases with all vehicles built on a single line.”
Why stick with ‘three-box’ design when you don’t have engines up front?
“I’d say we’ve made a bit of a rupture with the K-Byte. It looks like a three-box but it’s really not, we’ve got a completely open space in front of the driver and passenger, which is why we’ve been able to create the idea of seats that swivel 12 degrees when the car is running autonomously. It’s clever packaging.”
You are committed to having partial autonomy from launch, but how quickly will you be able to deliver true ‘eyes off’ autonomy?
“We are autonomous driving optimists or I wouldn’t be standing in front of this vehicle. Yes, there have been some over-optimistic claims, but we do believe it’s going to happen very quickly. The key with Level 4 is whether we are talking all the time and everywhere, in which case it is still a very big ask. But if we’re talking about Level 4 most of the time and most of the world, certainly where you don’t have extreme weather conditions. We think it will be very soon, within the life of this vehicle.”
