The Tata Group’s former and current chairmen, Ratan Tata and Cyrus Mistry, respectively, unveiled the foundation stone of a £150-million centre, targeting pioneering automotive research, in central England on Tuesday, as part of efforts to enable the UK plug its development skills gap.

Funding for the National Automotive Innovation Centre has come from Jaguar Land Rover, Tata Motors and the University of Warwick, on whose campus the centre will be built, as well as from the British Government.

Once built, it will provide 33,000-metre square space for 1,000 engineers, designers and academics.

Facilities will include a design and simulation space, a laboratory focused on advanced propulsion systems, and a highly advanced drive-in car simulator.

The centre will also be used as part of Jaguar Land Rover and Tata Motors’ research into driverless cars.

The centre would “greatly enhance the ability of academia and industry to work side by side on leading edge research to deliver exciting new innovative products and meet the widely held ambition to deliver exciting new innovative products that will be smarter, lighter and greener,” Mistry said in a statement.

Research into growth

Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya, Chair of the Warwick Manufacturing Group, part of Warwick University, highlighted how the UK had long lagged behind the rest of the world when it came to translating top research into economic and industrial growth, pointing to the fact that unlike countries such as the US, there had traditionally been limited co-operation between the university research centres and companies.

He highlighted two successful examples – Stanford and Google, and MIT and BOSE – of the huge strides that could be made by such a partnership.

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