Horiba MIRA in major expansion

British automotive hotbed to gain several new engineering and manufacturing sites

- STEVE CROPLEY

It's not just the experimental cars constantly circulating Horiba MIRA's secret 60 miles of test track at its 850-acre site in Warwickshire that demonstrate a frequent facility for rapid acceleration.

The Horiba MIRA business itself - already unique for the way it combines a very large, overarching engineering consultancy with an elite community of 40 independent technical centres - is starting a new acceleration phase.

Work will soon begin to develop several new sites beside its existing boundaries, designed to encourage several powerful but as yet unnamed mobility businesses to open large automotive technical centres there, each housing up to 300 engineers. These operations likely to carry well-known names - are far bigger than anything the site currently contains.

Other important aspirations include establishing several advanced manufacturing operations on the estate (which has so far focused on research and development). A "mediumsized" gigafactory could even be a possibility, and in the meantime work is under way on a solar farm that from next year will power an electrolyser to produce green hydrogen.

As Horiba MIRA's CEO of the past 13 years and now chairman George Gillespie explains, the expansion will be very much in character with the aims of the site's original occupant, the Motor Industry Research Association (MIRA), which was established here in 1946 (on the site of the former RAF Lindley) to help British car firms compete for all-important postwar export markets by pooling research to cut costs. The business was gradually commercialised from the 1970s, then bought by Japanese technology company Horiba in 2015.

On Gillespie's watch, MIRA's progress has been impressive. Current turnover of around £75 million is three times what it was when he and his team took over, and has doubled in just five years, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.