CLIP: Why Classic Cars Are the Future of EVs | Founder of Everrati

0:00Olly Fawcett:So you decided to start Everati at some stage. Yes. Where did this initial idea come from? So I am a complete, I'm a recovering petrol head. So I've always, always loved cars. You know, I, yeah, I, from a, I mean, my, my mother, bless her, who, uh, unfortunately not very well, so she can't talk about this anymore. But she always said, yeah, your first word was car, um, as a, you know, whatever. Yeah. A few years old. Um, I was constantly playing with toy cars. I was constantly looking at cars. I was the kid in the back of my parents' car on a dark night saying which car was coming towards us just from their headlights.

0:35You know, I was entirely obsessed. So given the opportunity when I'd sold a business, and by the way, during that journey, I, you know, spent far too much money on cars and, you know, various toys. But actually, a couple of things happened, actually. So I was sitting around thinking about what I should do next. Yeah. Um, I, uh, had my daughter who was then seven had genuinely started worrying about the earth flooding, climate change. Um, she had, she had, uh, which is, you know, a parent to a seven year old was, is kind of, kind of worrying. Um, and then the other thing that happened, which, uh, is, I guess the real thing that really kicked me off was, um, Harry and Megan.

1:16So Prince Harry, uh, and Megan drove away from Windsor castle, uh, in an E-type that had been changed to an EV um so it was a one-off EV uh electric e-type so uh I saw that and thought that's a brilliant idea I started doing the research around that you know my view was I love beautiful cars at the time there wasn't so beautiful EVs and arguably there aren't too many even now so you know driving that passion into uh you know car true car passion into an EV market space is is wasn't happening and arguably still hasn't happened so it's just kind of taking taking a view that actually you can take what's already there bring it into the future bring it to a market and an audience that potentially has never had the opportunity to experience those beautiful shapes these beautiful designs so um that was kind of the thesis and yeah we are now in a place where that's

2:09Olly Fawcett:kind of starting to work out which is great was there ever an idea to build cars from scratch yes And I think I would say never say never. You know, we're getting some really interesting opportunities now where, you know, on my team, I have people who have done exactly that. They've been technical director for a supercar company. They've done full vehicle builds for an OEM. I think the great thing about technology and advancements in technology is that there's actually becoming a place now where you can start to think about doing that at a price point. that is significantly less than the 50 million that it would have cost you to do before.

2:49And actually, therefore, we are looking at a few programs with partners where we will be the power train of choice for some really, really cool stuff that's coming through. And actually, we're not too far away from being able to do it. Whether we do it is another matter, or do we just support others in doing it?

3:06Olly Fawcett:And there's that more of a strategic thing for the business. It is, absolutely. Yeah. Make sure we get that right. Totally. And And when you're day one on a business like this, because, you know, I've started business before, they're mostly service-based businesses and some brands. So there's an element of like, get a few products or start with one service or get your first client, whatever that process normally is. I'm trying to get in my head what your day one or week one looks like for starting a business like this. Can you give me an insight? It was interesting. Not least because, you know, bear in mind, this is 2019, right?

3:37um so did did some research started thinking about okay um what's the being being honest what's the quickest and most efficient way of getting a first car developed um and you know in the same way let's be honest as tesla took an existing chassis from lotus and carried that into an ev which was the original tesla roadster and various other you know business in the past is take what's already there and how can you create something out of that existing vehicle um and of course the poster car for me at the time certainly when i was a kid was a yeah wide body 911 so i was thinking okay how might we create something around that yeah so looking at partnerships you know who's got some of this technology um and then all of a sudden covid hit which was which was interesting so um and i worked out i needed a much bigger team than i kind of had first pictured i thought i know we'll do this just with partnerships and actually you and partnerships basically yeah but you need a head of engineering you need you know ev um you need kind of high-end ev technicians you need um mechanical engineering guys you need a full team so the crazy thing was that i put some things out on linkedin and i'm a bit of a linkedin fiend as i think you've already seen um but actually all of a sudden i started getting people coming to me saying oh i love what you're doing and they'd seen the website and all this sort of stuff.

4:55So all of a sudden I'm getting engineers from Lotus, McLaren, JLR approaching us and saying, you know, we'd love to come on board, which is wonderful. Is this a concept stage, sorry?

5:06Olly Fawcett:So you had to do anything at this point, is that just your vision? It was a concept, we'd built a website, you know, it was really just, people were quite frankly at that point. It was a dream. So that was really fantastic because A, yeah, these people were being let go by the big OEMs and they wanted to get involved in something, you know, different. Secondly, you know, it meant being blind. We didn't have to pay any recruitment fees. The crazy thing was when we eventually met them, because, remember, we were doing all this on teams, because at the time we weren't really supposed to be meeting for anything that wasn't super important.

5:40You know, two or three of them are over six foot three, which doesn't sound bad, but when you're trying to build kind of fairly compact classic cars into EVs, you know, great story, one of our cars, which is the GT40, they'd have to take the entire seats out and sit in it to even do the testing because they couldn't fit in them.