A Grantham site that never stopped, never chose
On Syston Lane in Belton, on the southern edge of Grantham, workers are currently assembling internal combustion engines and dismantling electric battery packs — sometimes in the same shift, on the same campus. There is no clean break between an old factory and a new one. There is just the one site, doing both.
Autocraft Solutions Group's Grantham headquarters has been making engines continuously since the 1970s, formally established in 1980 as South East Lincs Engineering to produce and remanufacture Ford Transit diesel units under Elbar Group. A management buyout in 2010, led by Mike Hague-Morgan, reoriented the business as Autocraft Drivetrain Solutions; turnover grew from roughly £6m to more than £60m, and the site now covers 52,000m² with 250 employees producing around 24,000 engines a year. The same campus has since launched Autocraft EV Solutions, handling EV battery triage, repair, and remanufacturing.
This is not a factory that picked a side in the combustion-versus-electric debate. The more interesting question is what it means — industrially and for the people who work there — that it didn't have to.
Why Autocraft is doing both at the same time
The commercial rationale here is more precise than 'adapting to change.' Two distinct forces are at work, and Autocraft is responding to both at once.
The first is a structural shift in what major car manufacturers want to own. As OEMs redirect capital toward electric vehicle development, medium-volume production of niche combustion engines becomes an operational liability rather than a core competency. The assembly lines, trained staff, and institutional knowledge required to build these engines in relatively small runs are expensive to maintain alongside a simultaneous EV programme. Outsourcing to a specialist resolves that tension. Autocraft absorbs the displaced work — and, with it, the accumulated process knowledge OEMs are actively choosing not to carry forward. It is not competing with Ford or Stellantis on ICE volume; it is becoming the place those manufacturers send the work they no longer want responsibility for.
The second force is earlier-stage but pointed in the same direction. As the first significant wave of EV fleets ages, battery repair and remanufacturing capacity will be needed at industrial scale — and very little of it currently exists. Autocraft EV Solutions is building that capability now, on the same Grantham site, while the revenue from outsourced ICE work funds the operation. The dual-track is not indecision. It is a deliberate hedge against a transition whose pace nobody controls.
What decades of precision engine work actually means for a town
Long before Autocraft existed, Grantham's engineering identity was shaped by firms that expected workers to stay for decades. Aveling-Barford — maker of road rollers, dumpers, and front loaders — ran a formal '25 Year Club Dinner' at the George Hotel, where employees completing a quarter-century of continuous service received an individually engraved, gold-plated Buren watch. The ritual was a cultural signal as much as a reward: knowledge here was accumulated slowly, handed between generations, and expected to remain in one place.
That model produced what researchers describe as 'a residual bedrock of tacit mechanical knowledge embedded within the local demographic — a highly specialised workforce capability that cannot be easily replicated.' Multi-generational families of engineers, machinists, welders, and fabricators built embodied understanding of tolerances, assembly sequences, and diagnostic instincts that no training programme can compress into months. The same culture, it is worth noting, also produced rigidities: workforces that were deeply site-specific sometimes struggled when those sites closed or changed direction without them.
At Autocraft's machining subsidiary in Wellingborough — a separate site within the group — a parallel dynamic is now visible. Precision knowledge built on machining cylinder heads and engine blocks for ICE production is being redirected toward EV motor casings, gear casings, and structural body-in-white components. The underlying capability transfers: holding close tolerances, reading material behaviour, understanding how a component fails. But transfer is not automatic. It requires processes, equipment, and an institutional willingness to treat older skills as a foundation rather than a relic.
ARIA® and REVIVE®: what happens when you try to write down expertise
Repairing an EV battery pack is not like replacing a fuel filter. Inside a single pack, hundreds of individual cells are grouped into modules; when a pack 'fails,' the cause is typically localised to a small number of those cells, not the whole assembly. Autocraft's patented REVIVE® process is built around that reality: rather than scrapping the entire unit, technicians isolate the fault, extract the affected modules, and restore the pack to working specification. Up to 92% of modules in a standard failed pack are, on the company's own figures, suitable for continued automotive use. The CO₂ saving compared with conventional replacement reaches up to 12,000 kg per 83 kWh battery — roughly a 93% reduction.
The complication is that this work requires high-voltage safety skills for which nothing in the combustion engine tradition prepares a technician. Working safely around live battery systems is a different discipline, with its own failure modes and serious consequences if misjudged. Autocraft's answer is ARIA® — Augmented Reality Interactive Assembly — which guides technicians through disassembly, testing, and repair using step-by-step visual overlays, with LiDAR and camera verification at each stage. The system re-encodes what experienced engineers know into a structured procedure that a broader workforce can follow reliably.
This is, deliberately, a move from tacit to explicit knowledge — the kind built up over years of floor-level observation, accumulated through repeated exposure to things going slightly wrong. Rendering it as a guided sequence is practically impressive. The open question is whether that translation is lossless. Procedure-following and adaptive problem-solving are related skills, but they are not the same one. A technician who has internalised why each step matters can improvise when a battery anomaly falls outside any logged pattern; a technician following an AR overlay may not know when the overlay has run out of answers.
What we don't actually know about the people doing this work
None of the above tells us what any of this has actually been like for the people on the factory floor. The commercial and technical picture is relatively clear; the human one is not. Whether the ICE-trained engineers and machinists who have spent careers on combustion engine assembly are moving into EV battery work — or whether the EV operation is being staffed with an entirely different cohort — is not established in any publicly available source. Whether ARIA® feels to those using it like a practical aid or like a system that has removed judgement from the job is similarly unrecorded. And how Autocraft manages the movement of knowledge between its experienced and newer workforce — whether seasoned hands are formally paired with incoming technicians, or whether that transfer is informal, partial, or still being figured out — remains opaque.
These are not footnote questions. Who stays, who moves across to a different production line, and who finds that a guided AR overlay has made their accumulated instinct feel beside the point: that is where the industrial transition actually lives, and it is the part of this story that the available evidence does not reach.
What Grantham's dual-track factory suggests about industrial towns
The Autocraft model at Belton reframes industrial transition as accumulation rather than substitution. The site is not being converted; it is being extended — holding combustion and electrification work simultaneously, growing its capability set rather than trading one era for another. The real resource is not the machinery or the patents but the workforce's demonstrated ability to move precision skills across material domains.
That portability was not designed in at the point of hiring. It accumulated through decades of close work at tight tolerances, through firms like Aveling-Barford embedding mechanical precision as a local habit long before Autocraft existed. The firm absorbed that inheritance and leveraged it deliberately — redirecting cylinder-head machining expertise toward EV motor casings at Wellingborough is one visible expression of the same underlying logic.
What the case does not show is whether the conditions that made it possible are being renewed. The model makes a specific institutional demand: not retraining from scratch, but extended technical education that builds genuine domain-portable precision over years — the kind that requires a coherent pathway from school-level engineering through to manufacturing apprenticeship and beyond. Autocraft's own success tells us that the supply of transferable technical skill in this part of Lincolnshire was sufficient for one firm to build on. Sustaining that supply is an institutional task — one that falls to South Kesteven's colleges and training commissioners, not to the factory on Syston Lane.