Key Features
UK registered businesses can apply for a share of up to £10 million for late-stage R&D projects that help accelerate the UK towards a net zero automotive future.
Programme: APC
Award: Share of up to £10 million
Opens: 17th May 2023
Closes: 28th Jun 2023
The Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) provides funding, support, insight and foresight for the development of low and zero emission transport solutions, and automotive technologies. It aims to support the UK’s transition towards net zero product manufacturing and supply chain in the UK automotive sector.
In this competition round APC is investing up to £10 million in the Advanced Route to Market Demonstrator 2 (ARMD2).
The aim of this competition is to develop and realise the demonstration of capability that could lead to further business exploitation, utilising future net zero powertrain technology as a key element in the UK transition to zero emissions for the automotive sector.
Capability demonstration can be through a physical vehicle, a physical sub-system or an equivalent digital demonstrator that can be operated or displayed at the Cenex Low Carbon Vehicle event in 2024, as a key element of the dissemination requirements.
Once successfully concluded these projects can be used to seed future development programmes in the UK or potentially attract overseas investment into the UK. In addition the projects must contribute to the UK’s strategic aims and direction of travel towards net zero transport vision, such as the Automotive Council’s Roadmaps.
The primary application for technologies developed through this competition should be for the automotive sector but cross sector application is valuable.
Vehicle applications in scope can include on and off road, agriculture, heavy duty, mining and zero emission urban goods delivery vehicles, including 2 wheelers.
Your project must demonstrate the advancement of on-vehicle technologies in one or more of the following areas:
You will be required to provide a close out report and case study at the end of your funded project.
You must consider which technology or technologies best represent your project and rank them in order of their significance and impact to your project. The one ranked first must be the lead technology.
The technologies are:
Your lead technology must be at least 50%. You can also rank up to an additional two supporting technologies that can have a maximum of 25% each.
Your percentages must add up to 100%.
Your project must:
You must only include eligible project costs in your application.
Under current restrictions, this competition will not fund any procurement, commercial, business development or supply chain activity with any Russian and Belarusian entity as lead, partner or subcontractor. This includes any goods or services originating from a Russian and Belarusian source.
To lead a project your organisation must:
Academic institutions and research organisations cannot lead projects.
Non-UK registered businesses and research organisations are only eligible to apply for funding if they:
Each partner organisation must be invited into the Innovation Funding Service (IFS) by the lead to collaborate on a project. Once accepted, partners will be asked to login or to create an account and enter their own project costs into IFS.
To be an eligible collaboration, the lead and at least one other organisation must apply for funding when entering their costs into the application.
Your project can include partners that do not receive any of this competition’s funding, for example non-UK businesses. Their costs will count towards the total project costs.
Subcontractors are allowed in this competition.
There are no limits on the number of applications an organisation can be involved in. If you are successful in more than one application you will be asked to confirm you have the capacity to run multiple projects simultaneously.
You can use a previously submitted application to apply for this competition. However you can only submit the same application twice, without a material change.
APC are not funding projects that are:
APC cannot fund projects that are:
Up to £10 million has been allocated to fund innovation projects in this competition. Funding will be in the form of a grant.
A minimum of 70% of your project’s total project costs must be incurred by commercial organisations.
The total grant request in your application cannot exceed 50% of the total project costs. This is regardless of the individual partners’ grant claims.
If your organisation’s work on the project is commercial or economic, your funding request must not exceed the limits below. These limits apply even if your organisation normally acts non-economically but for the purpose of this project will be undertaking commercial or economic activity.
For industrial research projects, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:
For experimental development projects which are nearer to market, you could get funding for your eligible project costs of:
Book an appointment to speak to one of our advisors to discuss your eligibility to apply for this Grant Funding opportunity.