DRIVE35 hands £47m to 33 projects, with £26.9m to five
The government's zero-emission vehicle programme has made its latest awards. More than half the money goes to five scale-up projects, and the early-stage stream splits £2.7m sixteen ways.
The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK announced on Monday that more than £47m of government funding has gone to 33 automotive projects.
The awards sit under DRIVE35, the £4bn programme launched in July 2025 and delivered by the department with the APC and Innovate UK.
According to the announcement, the £47m will pull in more than £90m of total project investment once private co-investment is counted. That is roughly a pound of company money for a pound of grant.
The money is split across four streams, and the split is uneven.
Five projects took £26.9m from the Scale-up Fund, which backs the move from innovation to manufacturing at scale. That is more than half the round going to fewer than a sixth of the winners.
Ten projects shared £9m through Demonstrate, for real-world testing. Two collaborative R&D projects took more than £8m through Collaborate.
Mobilise, the stream aimed at early-stage start-ups, university spinouts and SMEs, awarded more than £2.7m to sixteen businesses. That averages under £180,000 each.
The projects cover electrification, battery technology, advanced manufacturing, digitalisation, circular economy work and zero-emission mobility. The names of the 33 winners were not published in the announcement.
Industry Minister Blair McDougall said the investment would secure skilled jobs and strengthen manufacturing heartlands, framing it as part of the government's Modern Industrial Strategy and Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan.
Ian Constance, chief executive of the APC, said the programme was about strengthening the UK's capability to design, develop and build vehicle technologies, not about individual projects.
The government also confirmed the latest awards under the CAM Pathfinder programme, which supports connected and automated mobility deployment.
The backdrop is a shrinking production base. UK vehicle production fell 7.5 per cent to 385,979 units in the first half of 2026, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which has called for rapid implementation of the Industrial Strategy.
For a hardware founder, the useful read is the shape of the money rather than the headline figure. Mobilise is where a small company with a prototype competes, and the cheques there are five- and low six-figure sums, not transformative ones.
The other read is the match. If a round is expected to draw more than £90m against £47m of grant, an applicant needs its own capital lined up before it applies, not after. Dates and criteria for the next competition round have not been announced.