A Grantham factory still making engines — and that is the point
Off Syston Lane in Belton, a few minutes outside Grantham town centre, sits a 52,000-square-metre factory that has been making internal combustion engines since the 1970s. It still is. In 2025, with carmakers announcing electrification deadlines and governments legislating new petrol and diesel car sales out of existence within the decade, Autocraft Solutions Group's headquarters produces around 24,000 engines a year, employs 250 people, and turns over approximately £74m.
That looks, at first glance, like a company that missed the memo.
Autocraft acquired the site in 2010, inheriting both its industrial muscle and its specific problem: a large, capable factory built around a technology that much of the automotive industry is publicly committed to leaving behind. The question of what to do with that — wind it down carefully, sell the assets, or find a different answer — is not an abstract strategy exercise. It is a live question playing out on a Lincolnshire trading estate, in a building full of machine tools, test rigs, and working engineers.
The answer Autocraft settled on is less obvious than either exit or denial. The ICE lines are not being run down. They are being deliberately sustained — and that choice, it turns out, is inseparable from how the company is funding something quite different happening on the same site.
The strategic hinge: why carmakers pivoting to EVs need someone to keep making engines
The mechanism behind that choice is straightforward once you see it, though it runs against intuition. The carmakers accelerating hardest towards electrification — concentrating capital on battery supply chains, software platforms, and EV manufacturing — are simultaneously shedding the engine operations they no longer consider core. Someone still has to build those engines. For an OEM redeploying its own engineers and factory floor space towards the electric future, a reliable external specialist is not a fallback; it is a release valve.
Autocraft's position is precisely that specialist. The 24,000 engines produced annually at Grantham are not leftovers from a business standing still — they are outsourced work from OEM customers who have consciously decided not to run it themselves. The faster those customers commit to electrification, the stronger their incentive to hand off residual ICE production rather than maintain it in-house at diminishing volume. Autocraft's ICE revenue is, in that sense, a function of the very transition the company is also building towards.
That revenue is what funds the EV work running alongside the engine lines on the same Grantham site. The two sides of the business are not competing for the factory's future; one is financing the other.
The model extends beyond Grantham. At Autocraft's Wellingborough machining facility — a separate site with 100 employees and £25m turnover — the same retooling logic is visible in the production schedule: EV motor casings and gear casings are now machined on lines that previously handled only engine components.
What REVIVE® actually does inside an EV battery
A typical EV battery pack contains hundreds of individual cells arranged in modules. When a pack underperforms or fails, the default response — from dealerships and recyclers alike — is to replace the entire unit. Most of those discarded packs are, at the structural level, largely intact; it is a minority of cells driving the problem.
REVIVE® starts from that observation. Rather than treating the pack as the unit of failure, Autocraft's process identifies which cells are underperforming and swaps them for healthy ones recovered from other packs. The diagnosis runs through OptEVizer®, a digital twin platform built from thousands of real-world battery tests. It delivers cell-level state-of-health results within minutes and, Autocraft says, can flag deteriorating cells before the fault becomes apparent in normal use — a predictive step that goes beyond conventional diagnostic tools.
Physical reassembly is guided by ARIA® — Augmented Reality Interactive Assembly — which overlays instructions directly onto the work, enforcing what the company calls a no-fault-forward standard at each stage. LiDAR scanning and advanced process control sit alongside it to maintain consistency across every repair.
Autocraft claims a repair success rate above 99%, set against a reported dealership repeat-failure rate of up to 30% within the first 12 months. The company also describes REVIVE® as the first industrialised process of its kind. Both figures come from Autocraft's own published materials; independent verification of either has not been published, a limitation that applies widely to proprietary performance claims in an emerging market.
The company's whitepaper, 'Closing the EV Confidence Gap', draws out the wider argument: battery-health uncertainty is depressing second-hand EV values and slowing consumer adoption, and cell-level remanufacturing is one credible route to correcting it.
The case against throwing away a working battery
The argument Autocraft is making is not primarily environmental — or rather, it is environmental and commercial simultaneously, which is why it holds together.
The problem begins with how failures are currently handled. When an EV battery pack underperforms, most are replaced wholesale and sent for recycling, even though the majority of cells in any given pack remain functional. The failure is typically localised; the write-off is total. For OEMs managing warranty costs, and for consumers facing out-of-warranty replacement bills that can run into thousands of pounds, this is an expensive default.
Cell-level repair changes the arithmetic. If a pack can be restored by replacing its underperforming cells — drawing on healthy cells recovered from other packs — the output is a working, warranted battery rather than recycling feedstock. Autocraft projects that its REVIVE® process avoids up to 12,000 kg of CO₂ per 83 kWh pack repaired, and that each facility processing around 1,400 packs annually saves approximately 1,500 tonnes of CO₂. These are the company's own figures, not independently audited, but they reflect a material-science reality that is not in dispute: remanufacturing a pack consumes far less energy than manufacturing a new one.
The residual-value dimension is where the commercial and environmental cases converge most clearly. A second-hand EV is only worth buying if the buyer can trust what the battery will do. Reliable state-of-health testing and certified remanufacturing turn a depreciating unknown into a documented asset — one that supports a functioning used-EV market rather than suppressing it. The circular economy argument and the market-confidence argument are, here, the same argument.
From Grantham to Arnhem, Scandinavia, and North America
The first external test of whether the model could travel beyond Grantham came in 2023, when Autocraft opened a REVIVE® facility in Arnhem, Netherlands — the first site outside the UK to run the industrialised process developed on Syston Lane. That opening was followed, in April 2024, by a £24m Asset Based Lending facility from HSBC UK: a point at which external financial confidence in the business case translated into structured growth capital.
The projections attached to that facility are significant: turnover up by more than 50%, headcount up by more than 10%. Each new REVIVE® site is designed to process around 1,400 packs per year. The stated rollout covers Scandinavia, Southern Europe, and North America, with a first new location originally targeted for mid-2025 — a milestone that has since passed without a confirmed public announcement of the outcome.
Longer-term, Autocraft's published vision names hydrogen fuel cell recovery as a future propulsion vector alongside battery and engine work. That is a stated strategic direction rather than a product currently in operation; the company has not described an active hydrogen programme in its available materials, but naming it signals a deliberate hedge across propulsion technologies rather than a binary EV bet.
The through-line across all of this is Grantham. The IP, the process, and the proof-of-concept were developed at the Lincolnshire site first — which is the point of the Arnhem comparison. A replication is only meaningful when there is something to replicate.
What this means for Grantham, and what it does not yet tell us
Behind the financial projections and process metrics are 250 people at the Grantham site navigating something genuinely unusual: a working day that moves between diesel engine lines built on decades of accumulated practice and battery remanufacturing equipment that did not exist in this form five years ago. Company announcements do not reach that level of detail — which roles have changed, what new certifications are required, what the shift feels like from the floor — and that ground-level picture remains outside the public record.
What the available evidence does support is a structural argument. Mid-sized specialist manufacturers like Autocraft may be better placed than large OEMs to absorb the transition period precisely because they are not staking everything on a single technology outcome. Ford, Stellantis, and Volkswagen face a genuine choice between their combustion legacies and their electrification futures. A firm of 250 people in Grantham faces no such binary: its ICE work funds the business today and its EV work is a growth bet, and the two currently reinforce rather than compete with each other. The OEM's withdrawal from engine manufacturing is Autocraft's intake order.
That logic is coherent and potentially replicable. Lincolnshire and the wider East Midlands still host a tier of engineering businesses making components across multiple sectors — the kind of industrial base where a hedge-across-propulsion-technologies model could find more than one home. The specific risk is whether the operational discipline required to run two technology generations simultaneously can hold as the business scales. The Arnhem facility and its successors will provide that test — not in company announcements, but in whether the process metrics reported from Grantham survive transplantation.