This month, Horse Powertrain was recognized with Autocar’s Sturmey Award at the magazine’s annual awards ceremony in London.
As Autocar’s award for teams or organizations that are pushing at the frontier of automotive innovation, Sturmey Award winners have historically come from the side of the automotive industry responsible for delivering full vehicles to the public – automotive brands and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). But Horse Powertrain isn’t that sort of company: we’re completely focused on providing combustion and hybrid powertrain solutions to automakers. So, what have we done to break the precedent?
Solutions for a multi-powertrain world
A lot of the answer was provided in the speech by another winner: the CEO of Skoda, Klaus Zellmer, who received Autocar’s Outstanding Leader Award, along with the EV of the Year Award for the Skoda Elroq. During his speech, Zellmer talked about how much of Skoda’s success came down to its focus on meeting customer needs – that meant a commitment to a diverse line-up spanning EVs, hybrids, and traditional combustion vehicles.
Ultimately, this was the thesis that Horse Powertrain was founded on – successful automakers in the coming decades will exist in a multi-powertrain world, with each powertrain addressing a distinct need. And, from the start, we’ve believed that this idea doesn’t have to be at odds with reducing global transport emissions.
In fact, it’s only by developing new combustion and hybrid solutions that automotive can realistically meet global emissions targets. 60% of passenger vehicles worldwide will still feature an engine in 2040, meaning that innovations that improve fuel economy and cut emissions will be critical to cutting automotive’s greenhouse gas footprint. And it’s this thesis that ultimately resulted in us winning the Sturmey Award.
Horse Powertrain CEO Matias Giannini accepted the Autocar Sturmey Award in person
Read more about why hybrids will stay central to global mobility.
A new kind of player in the automotive value chain
Back when Horse Powertrain was conceived, this idea hadn’t crossed much of the industry’s mind. Towards the start of the decade, when it was widely believed that we were moving towards a mono-powertrain world powered by pure-electric vehicles, many initially thought that a venture like Horse Powertrain would be a place where combustion and hybrid technology went to die as it underwent a rapid phase-out.
Our bet was against this: Horse Powertrain was where combustion and hybrid would be reborn.
Our bet was couched in the basics of industrial operations: we could allow OEMs the ability to pool their powertrain investments, freeing up capital and resources for high-differentiation activities to win market share. But our bet was also based on another idea: through integration of expertise and products, we could push the efficiency of combustion and hybrid technology to all-new heights.
By consolidating production, R&D, and intellectual property, Horse Powertrain can create an entirely new kind of player in the automotive value chain. By breaking the rules and straddling the line between OEM and supplier, we could integrate what were once clusters of systems into all-in-one modules that raise the bar when it comes to thermal efficiency, mass, and compactness.
The consequence of this was what ultimately won Horse Powertrain the Sturmey Award – our all-in-one X-Range powertrains that bring together engines, transmissions, motors, and power electronics systems into a single unit. Through this, we can deliver dramatic new opportunities for the industry in terms of mass and volume, allowing OEMs to use their existing pure-electric vehicle models as foundations for hybrid units.
Read more about technology-neutral automotive in Europe and Brazil.
Reimagining and advancing the combustion engine
The reason why Horse Powertrain can develop these solutions is that it challenges many of the old assumptions of automotive production. Our ability to innovate in a way that no other automotive player can is closely tied up with this very idea. Or, in the words of Autocar’s editor Mark Tisshaw:
To read more about Horse Powertrain’s solutions, click here.
