The Engineer Q&A: Aurrigo CEO David Keene, the man that likes to say ‘yes’

What prompted automotive supplier RDM to diversify into autonomous vehicles with the formation of Aurrigo International?

About 16 years ago, I was contacted by Lord Mandelson who was in the Labour government and at the time and had set up the UK Automotive Council. I was invited to go to the inaugural meeting, and I'm still there.

During those sessions, they worked out the strategy for the UK and they got these six pillars of things that we needed to work on. One of those pillars was connected and automated vehicles, and, to be honest, I hadn't really looked at it too hard until we started talking about it and what we needed to do and how was all that going to work, and what does the future look like.

I came back from one of those meetings and thought to myself: well, how hard could this be? And turns out, it's really hard. I always say ‘yes’ to everything, so I came back and said to our guys, look, we're really good at electronics, we're really good at software, we're really good at making things. We're supplying high-quality products to automotive OEMs, [so] why can't we start to get a drive-by-wire platform? Why can't we then get it to self-drive? So the first thing we did was build a vehicle. The project was called EV blue, and the only thing that you needed was a steering wheel and two pedals and an iPad. So you opened it and put the iPad in the centre of the vehicle. That is like the forerunner of how a Tesla looks now, where you've got a centre console and everything's on it. We did that project for about a year, in about 2013, and at the end of that, I said to our guys, okay, you need to take the steering wheel out, and you need to take the pedals out and we're going to make it autonomous.

That moment aligned with when I was in those government endeavours, and I suddenly thought, actually, that's the eureka moment, because if we could make a case for our company to be the number one place to go in the UK, then we've got a really good business here, on top of the business we've already got. 

Then we bid for the first ever program, which was the Lutz Pathfinder program, and we were very fortunate and won the bid to make the vehicle, but somebody else was doing the software. I looked and I thought, well actually, why don't we do the software? Why don't we do everything? And that's what I did.

We then went into the UK Autodrive Program, where we delivered 10 of our four-seater auto pods. From that, we really started to learn how to do it.

How did you go from road vehicles to airside logistics vehicles?

Getting into aviation was just absolutely by chance. We'd been doing all the passenger vehicles, and I had a telephone call from a guy called Harvey Tate who is head of innovation at Hangar 51, International Airlines Group (IAG)’s accelerator programme. He phoned me up and said, we love what you're doing on passenger vehicles, but what we really want to ask is: can you move a container around Heathrow Terminal 5? And I said, yes, of course we can. In about a year we designed, developed and hacked and we got this vehicle [an autonomous baggage dolly] to run at T5.

I owe everything to Harvey on aviation, because if he hadn’t had made that phone call - I'd have made the link at some point - but I was accelerated because he was thinking that we needed, as a group, to hasten this…and we were fortunate to make that connection.

Any plans to develop vehicles outside of airports? 

The answer is yes, but we're a relatively small company trying to keep super laser-focused. This opportunity is a really big opportunity for us in airports and even our passenger vehicles… can be used to move crew around, or dispatchers or engineers or any employees. For now, we're going to focus pretty much on aviation, but there's no doubt that if we could partner with another company, or if an opportunity arose in ports or warehousing, or automotive warehousing - for instance, moving parts around big automotive sites - then we'd look into it.

How important is collaboration?

When I first started the company, 32 years ago, I was on my own, so you've really got to start collaborating if you want to do anything.

Doing collaboration right from day one has been absolutely the top thing that we've always done, and we've built not just collaborations, but also great supply chains that can operate as fast as we can.

The way that the programs run, the Innovate UK and Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV)’s programs, is absolutely ideal because you can have a collaboration of two parties, like us and UPS, but with the UK Autodrive Program, we had 13 partners. One thing we've learned is, first of all, that we've made good friends, we've made really good working colleagues. We've then started to say, well, okay, could you make that for us, or supply that to us? So we built supply chains out of the partnerships and the collaborations, and we've exchanged ideas, and it's been a melting pot, really, for how you become successful.

Even today, we continue to reform those partnerships to do other programs, and so I think it helps to bring companies on, because in those partnerships, we've grown and expanded, and our partners have too. We wouldn't be without it, and we've benefited tremendously.