Before joining MIRA, he held a senior role at Mercedes Benz High Performance Engines Ltd, where he led the assembly and testing of engines and kinetic energy recovery systems for top Formula 1 teams. Throughout his career, Declan has been at the forefront of leveraging new technologies to transform engineering, testing, and business operations. As Managing Director, he is steering HORIBA MIRA towards achieving net-zero emissions while maintaining the highest standards of automotive safety. Recognised for his visionary approach, Declan continues to drive significant advancements in the automotive and engineering sectors.
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Transcription
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Dom: Hello, I'm Dom Wetherall, your host of the F5 podcast brought to you by Intercity.
Today, I'm privileged to be joined by Declan Allen.
Declan is the Managing Director for HORIBA MIRA and Declan has held a senior role at Mercedes-Benz High Performance Engines where he was responsible for the assembly and test of engines and kinetic energy recovery systems for a number of years leading F1 teams.
Declan, welcome to the podcast.
Declan: Thanks for having me.
Nice to meet you, Don.
Dom: Likewise, thank you very much for joining us.
Declan, I'll briefly introduce you there in your career.
We'd love to hear more about your career and your journey, please.
Declan: Sure.
Well, my background is mechanical engineering.
I'm an engineer by trade.
My passion throughout that has been engine development.
I'm probably not allowed to say that anymore.
In the age of electrification, fossil fuel engines is not a great claim to fame, but I was with a company called Ricardo Consulting Engineers.
That's where I took that engine development career, moved around that company quite a bit, building up a lot of different experiences technically and operationally.
Ultimately, I concluded I wasn't the designer I wanted it to be, and I moved more into the operations side.
That's really formed the basis of the rest of my career where I've been focusing on building high performance, high technology teams.
One of them was Mercedes, as you've mentioned already.
Then in more recent times, the last 13 years I've been with originally, MIRA joined them to really help reinvent their fortunes.
They're going through a tough time.
I joined them with some long-term industrial colleagues to try and regain their heritage and push them to the front of the technology, primarily in automotive.
That led to an acquisition by HORIBA, who are a Japanese high technology precision measurement company operating right across many, many sectors, making things like blood analyzers, real societal impact from that company.
They bought MIRA as a technical acquisition, technology acquisition to access new technology and automotive that would sustain their products long into the future.
That's where I currently am, and to grow in the business in a number of different directions, not just technically, but as a global location as well.
Dom: Throughout your career, have you seen tech grow its influence and its impact on the automotive industry?
Declan: It's particularly relevant at the moment.
The automotive industry has been around for well over 100 years.
Currently, it's described as the most exciting period in the history of the automotive industry.
You look at the trends, the technology trends within them, we call them megatrends, decarbonization, autonomy, cyber resilience, those types of things.
Any one of them in their own right would be a massive challenge for the industry, but all of them are layered on top of each other at the moment.
It's particularly exciting, but particularly challenging given the macroeconomic situation that we all face.
This real challenge of the direction of travel of the automotive car is driving such technical innovation.
Much of that goes hand in hand with the growth and explosion of the electronics industry.
If you take a modern passenger car, you're looking at somewhere between 100 and 200 microprocessors on board, over 100 million lines of code, which is probably 10 times more than a fighter jet.
It's really just a large phone on wheels, a connected device.
Dom: Which I suppose is a great opportunity, great enabler, but also at risk, as you mentioned there.
Declan: Certainly, every one of those microprocessors and electronic systems is an entry point for the bad guys, as well as looking at the safety of those systems first and foremost, that gone are the days of cables and things joining each other that you could go and have a tinker with and you knew it was always connected.
You can imagine those entry points give the bad guys, as I call them, the opportunity to take control of a vehicle, maybe even a fleet of vehicles.
You can imagine very quickly how that can grind a transport system to a halt.
Dom: Declan, in your early career in Formula One, how important was tech in achieving even marginal gains for competitive advantage?
Declan: The time I spent in Formula One was just a very special time for me because it was joined at a great point in Mercedes history, as they were aiming to step back in and get re-involved in Formula One.
We had a lot to do in terms of catching up on technology, becoming competitive, becoming reliable.
It was a great time with regulations changing.
It's a race, so there's 11, 12 teams all trying to interpret those regulations in the most creative way and the most competitive way.
Yes, you can have occasional big moments of big breakthroughs, but generally it's the sum of lots of little parts.
I really loved that common goal, the ability to make decisions within that.
Dom: And directly see the impact at such a marginal level.
Declan: And see the impact almost every other week on TV, which right across the organisation, innovation and technology was in everything that we did.
Dom: Fantastic example.
Yeah, great collaboration, camaraderie and utilising tech to achieve your goals.
Declan: Yeah, it really is.
I personally see that the Midlands, the UK, is a fantastic place to innovate and develop new technology.
We're not so good at exploiting that.
We've developed, just recently, I've been part of the West Midlands Business Commission to essentially look at that, what are the neighbours for growth?
What do we need to do to be competitive as a nation?
Dom: You can see that programme having a real difference in that aspect.
Declan: Yeah, certainly.
The team interviewed a huge number of stakeholders on all directions of things like clear strategy and enabling process, enabling funding to make that happen.
So there's themes like that that came out of it.
And the other thing we've got to remember is that we're in a global competition.
So we can't just be looking internally, we have to look overseas and there's a huge amount of competition at the moment for our technology.
Dom: Yeah, and just a couple of examples we're talking about, obviously we mentioned Mercedes, I drive past that pretty regularly.
That is a fantastic and ever-growing site.
And I've also visited HORIBA MIRA as well, and that's an incredibly impressive site.
Declan: We're trying to be a global location for innovation and those big megatrends that I talked about earlier.
So really transforming an organisation that the Als found organisation as in MIRA, which was very much known as a testing organisation, to transition that to a company that's now known for technology and testing.
Dom: How is tech playing a role in that innovation and the testing for your organisation and your customers as well?
Declan: Well the technology is, that's what it's all about, it's about developing technology that can be deployed and produced on the roads in a cost-effective way, but also most importantly at the moment in timing.
So we play a role in being able to work with the, we don't manufacture cars or vehicles, we license our technology, but we enable our customers to move quickly.
We play our engineering capabilities and capacity into their requirements, enabling them to move quickly.
So we have to have capabilities that interest them and are relevant to those megatrends.
So it's been a hugely exciting time for us and the support we've had from HORIBA to really commit and develop our virtual engineering capability.
For instance, just recently we opened a driving simulator centre which is a state-of-the-art facility, which is really aimed at driving 80-90% of the development effort out of the physical world into the virtual world, which collapses the time scale.
So way ahead of any physical hardware, you're already set in the architecture of the vehicle, you're setting the key aspects of the vehicle that will drive how it will perform in the future.
Dom: We touched on this earlier, Declan.
Given the sensitive nature of the vehicles and the data gathered at HORIBA MIRA technology park, how do you prioritise security and privacy?
Declan: Well putting your chin out and being a global location formability development, trying to attract hundreds and thousands of customers, we're maybe running two, three thousand projects at a time for global customers.
So how do we prioritise it?
It is the priority.
It is the number one priority because if we don't have confidentiality in physical terms, in data terms, then we're kind of history.
So we've huge amount of effort in terms of the physical segregation and you probably saw my entrance badge, locking down where you can go on our site, segregating all of the, we've got over 40 global customers on site, making sure they can all operate separately and securely and then seeing that through into the whole electronic processes we have, all of the data capturing and data management systems and how we share data with the customers.
It's all driven by data security.
Dom: Do you see that as a cultural thing as well?
Declan: Within, I suppose within that physical and then the technical, there's got to be the people and the culture of the workforce.
And that's certainly one of the main ongoing challenges with transforming what was a physical organisation into very much a data organisation.
It's a constant ongoing challenge and opportunity to really make sure that culture is grasping that and implementing all of the latest protocols, you know, things like cyber essentials plus those type, those things drive protocols that have to be consistently followed across the company.
So there's a huge overhead and on cost to do that from an IT point of view, from a management point of view.
So it's a huge topic for us and one that we can't be complacent about it and it gets increasingly difficult every day of every week.
Dom: I saw a really good, I think it was a graphic, it's very simple but the analogy I think was, it was two jars and it was the company's cybersecurity budget before a breach with a couple of pounds in the bottom and then a full jar post breach.
I think that's the importance.
When it's front and centre, it needs to be prioritised and have the sufficient budget applied to it, an effort.
Declan: Yes, like you see kids riding around in a motorcycle and a pair of shorts, they haven't fallen off yet.
So same thing.
So yeah, absolutely.
We've got, surrounded by some great people that know about this stuff and we've got great advice, particularly with working in partnership with Intercity.
So I think nice plug there from me.
I think it's accepting that you don't know everything.
You need to be robust.
You need partnerships, you need the right advice, you need the right funding and you need the right culture.
Yeah, perhaps on reflection we might have gone down a different course of what we do as a business to make that a bit easier but it's just part and parcel of what we do.
Dom: I wanted to touch on sustainability and the future of tech.
We mentioned it earlier as well but how is tech being utilised by the automotive industry to aid sustainability and reduce environmental impact?
Declan: That's a great question.
Sustainability for us is the environment but it's also mainly society.
So our strap line is all around improving lives through making journeys safer, cleaner and smarter.
It's that kind of ticks or ESG box, that's what we do.
So if you sort of take them and turn, if you look at from an environment point of view, clearly the ban on fossil fuels is driving huge investment in alternative propulsion systems, e-fuels, battery vehicles, fuel cell vehicles.
So first and foremost we've had to go through a huge transition to be supporting that.
So probably 80% to 90% of our business is now electrified.
So developing primarily battery vehicles for passenger car but for bigger vehicles such as commercial vehicles, there's a push there on hydrogen.
The other thing I would say is that we've got to start reducing the number of vehicles as well.
So there's a lot of developments around development of public transport systems.
You know, POD, this takes some PODs as an example where you can develop autonomous electrified PODs as a mode of transport and that's not just great from an environment point of view but it's also a big societal impact because it addresses a big topic which is all around the accessibility of mobility for all of our citizens.
Dom: How do you pair that with driving environmentally friendly solutions and sustainability with that safety element?
Declan: Safety is a huge part of it.
If you look at the introduction of driver assistance systems, for instance, leading right through to full autonomy and what's typically now closed environments or where you've got a fixed route, you can, you're already starting to see fully autonomous vehicles in there and from a technology point, oh you'd love that, the level of tech on board to support these systems development is just huge.
So you just take something like level three lane keep assist system that's just been certified in first autonomous feature that's now in production vehicles.
If you just look at that, you know, that's a system that has to run independently from a sensor decision making point of view from other systems on board.
So it's driving massive amounts of innovation and technology on board making that problem I described earlier even bigger.
But the, what happens, the data from that and how the data is used and the safety benefits of that are huge because the most dangerous element of any vehicle is who's driving it.
And actually the technology whilst it gets some bad press from initial deployment issues.
Just an example of, I read something the other day that if all of the current driver assistance systems were active all of the time on the vehicles on the roads in the UK, there'd be 20 something like 20,000 less accidents here, 20,000.
So you can imagine the impact that would have on insurance premiums and people's safety.
So even with the tech that's been developed already, there's a lot of issues with user acceptance and it's kind of a noise, some inconsistent deployment of it kind of way.
You're like, that's sort of weird shaking of the steering wheel.
Don't quite like that.
I'll turn it off.
So, you know, the industry certainly has got challenges with customer acceptance consistency of these features, but there's no doubt the, what they bring as a level of advanced decision making way above what humans can achieve.
Dom: And of course, the media is always going to pick up on the worst case scenario, right?
Weaponise that and make it seem worse than it potentially is.
Declan: Exactly.
The other stat that coded a few years ago is if you look at the number of road deaths a year from current technology or current vehicles, you know, it's the equivalent of something like 10 747s falling out of the sky every day and everyone dying.
So that's, you take that as a benchmark and then you take some issues with some autonomous vehicles, you know, let's say, you know, that's a relatively small number.
You've got to say, is that ultimately gone to, you know, whilst it's not right, anything happens.
And, but introducing technology will also have, will always have some teething issues, but clearly the potential for safety and also safety and sustainability or environment come together if you look then at the mass transit of traffic.
So if you look at how all of the vehicles interact and how everyone gets to their end destination safely, if that mass transit is managed carefully, then the environmental impact of that is also optimised.
So exciting times from a point of view.
Dom: Certainly is.
Declan, I've got one final question for you.
If you could see another story, another guest on this podcast with the theme of the human side of tech, maybe someone that's influenced or inspired you, who would that person be?
Declan: Well, I can think of someone immediately one of our tenants on our technology park, a guy called Timothy Lyons.
He is the co-founder of a company with Matthew Faulks, a company called Viritech.
They're in the hydrogen space.
So they're developing some cool technology in a, you know, in a rapid time scale.
So I think the background of how that company came about and what they're trying to do in a challenging marketplace is really inspiring.
So I think Timothy would give would be a fascinating lesson.
Dom: A fantastic recommendation.
Brilliant. Thank you, Declan. It's been really interesting to hear about your career, your early days in F1 and then all the fantastic stuff that you're driving, no pun intended, at HORIBA MIRA.
Really interesting. Thank you very much for joining us today.
Declan: It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much.