Lunaz to build UK’s largest electrification facility
Vehicle electrification company Lunaz will grow its manufacturing footprint by 400% and create 300 highly-skilled jobs for technicians and engineers at Silverstone in 2022 – making it the largest facility of its kind in the UK.
The new facility, located on the Silverstone Technology Park, part of the wider Silverstone Technology Cluster will be the global Headquarters and R&D Hub for Lunaz Applied Technologies which upcycles and re-engineers specialist industrial fleet vehicles to factory new standard and converts them to the Lunaz proprietary electric powertrain.
The new facility has capacity for 1,110 remanufactured and electrified vehicles per year. According to the company, this will save 44,000 tonnes of Co2 per year.
This significant investment follows the signing of an agreement to explore the remanufacturing and electrification of Buckinghamshire Council’s fleet of diesel refuse trucks. This agreement was signed by Council Leader, Martin Tett and Lunaz Founder, David Lorenz at the Green Wheels in Motion Event – part of a series of regional activations surrounding the COP26 UN Climate Conference in Glasgow.
David Lorenz, Founder and CEO of Lunaz, said: “Ours and previous generations built billions of vehicles. Now is the time to realise the potential of remanufacturing to break the replace-with-new cycle by electrifying them for future generations. Lunaz’ commitment to establishing the UK’s largest remanufacturing and electrification facility is just the start. We look forward to many more globally as we plot a more sustainable course to vehicle decarbonisation.”
Cllr Martin Tett, Leader of Buckinghamshire Council, said: “As a council we are fully committed to doing all we can do to cut our carbon emissions and we know that converting our diesel and petrol vehicles to electric power as soon as we can, would be a giant step towards doing that.
“We are delighted to be working with Lunaz, industry leaders in this field. Together we hope to explore the best ways for converting our existing fleet of vehicles to electric. Rather than scrapping them and buying new, the innovative technologies being developed and employed by Lunaz will help us to use a much greener option, to effectively upcycle and rejuvenate our current fleet to fully electric vehicles.”
According to Lunaz, remanufacturing and electrification plots a dramatically more sustainable course to the decarbonisation of industrial and passenger vehicle fleets. It also saves significant capital over buying new electric vehicles with remanufactured electric refuse trucks costing councils broadly the same as their diesel equivalents.
Every vehicle that undergoes this process is overhauled to a standard which means that it can be warrantied ‘as new’. Lunaz employs a remanufacturing approach because it preserves nearly 80% of the embedded carbon within a vehicle, therefore breaking a replace-with-new cycle which sees millions of tonnes worth of functioning vehicles end up in landfill every year.
This approach, in line with the principle of the circular economy, has been proven by the Lunaz Group’s ‘Lunaz Design’ division through its leadership of the rapidly growing passenger car electrification sector. Indeed, Lunaz is the first to market with production electric Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar, Range Rover and Rolls-Royce cars. In doing so, validating the viability of its modular proprietary electric powertrain in the most quality-sensitive market in the world.
The new home of Lunaz Applied Technologies in Silverstone will have capacity to deliver 1,100 remanufactured, re-engineered and electrified heavy-industrial vehicles per year.
Lunaz has recently seen high-profile interest from the likes of David Beckham, who joined the Barclay, Reuben and Dellal families, in investing in the rapidly growing vehicle electrification company.
Image courtesy of Lunaz.
