Turntide Technologies has been selected for a £17 million matched-funded programme intended to increase the volume and reduce the cost of axial-flux motor production through automation, manufacturing development and expanded validation capability in North East England.
Turntide Technologies has been successful in its application to the DRIVE35 Scale-up Fund for Project SUPREME, although the company stresses that UK government grant funding remains subject to final HMG approval. The 18-month programme is scheduled to run through January 2028.
Manufacturing activity will be expanded at Turntide’s Gateshead production and R&D campus, while a dedicated component and validation facility will be re-established in Cramlington, Northumberland. The programme will target labour-intensive production processes including winding and tooling operations, alongside the validation work needed to prepare motors for higher-volume manufacture.
Axial-flux machines arrange the magnetic circuit differently from conventional radial-flux motors, allowing a shorter package with high torque and power density. Those characteristics are attractive in vehicles and industrial equipment where mass and installation space are constrained, but compact geometry does not automatically produce a cheap or straightforward manufacturing process.
Coils still have to be formed consistently, magnets and structural components positioned accurately, insulation controlled, assemblies joined reliably and finished motors tested against electrical, mechanical and thermal limits. Processes that work well when experienced technicians are producing limited quantities can become expensive or unstable once production volumes rise.
Project SUPREME is intended to address that transition through increased automation. Turntide identifies winding and tooling as particular targets, while the new validation capability is intended to prepare products for volume manufacture rather than leaving test activity as a late-stage development function.
Automation can reduce labour content and improve repeatability, but it also exposes poorly understood processes quickly. A robot will repeat the same operation with impressive consistency, including a bad one. Production engineers therefore need control over winding tension, positioning, joining, dimensional variation and material behaviour before higher automation rates translate into better yield.
Validation becomes more demanding at the same stage. OEM customers need evidence that components will maintain performance across representative duty cycles, temperatures, vibration and production variation before a motor architecture is integrated into a vehicle or industrial system. Higher manufacturing volume increases the importance of detecting drift early rather than discovering problems after complete assemblies have accumulated significant material and labour value.
Turntide serves automotive, commercial vehicle, rail, marine, off-highway and industrial markets, giving the company several potential outlets for higher-volume axial-flux production. Each application imposes different operating requirements, however, so manufacturing scale cannot be separated entirely from product configuration. A motor designed around a premium road vehicle will face a different duty cycle and qualification burden from one used in rail traction or industrial machinery.
The North East location places the programme within an established automotive and electrification manufacturing base. DRIVE35 is intended partly to retain that capability as the UK vehicle industry changes propulsion technologies, supporting companies that need investment between development work and commercially meaningful production.
Turntide is also entering an increasingly competitive UK axial-flux manufacturing landscape. YASA is expanding production capability in Oxfordshire as Mercedes-Benz develops the architecture for series applications. The companies use their own designs and processes, but both programmes expose the same industrial question: whether axial-flux performance can be reproduced economically at automotive volumes.
That question reaches beyond factory automation. Electrical steel, copper, permanent magnets, insulation systems, bearings, adhesives and cooling components all introduce cost, lead-time and quality dependencies. Material variation that appears insignificant to a supplier can alter magnetic, thermal or joining behaviour enough to force changes further along the production line.
Turntide says Project SUPREME will also support new intellectual property, job growth and workforce development in North East England. No specific employment number has been attached to the project, leaving manufacturing performance as the more useful measure of progress once the programme is under way.
The qualification around government approval remains important. Turntide has been selected for funding, but the grant is not yet unconditional, and the planned automation still has to deliver the expected cost and throughput improvements. Axial-flux motors have already demonstrated that they can package substantial performance into a small space; Project SUPREME is designed to find out how efficiently that performance can be repeated on a production line.
