Inside Byton
Ex-Alpine dynamics genius David Twohig ditches sports cars for an EV start-up
David Twohig pauses. He looks up from the vast Mission Control-spec screen that dominates the car we’re sitting in. He turns to me in the spacious, light, uncluttered cabin, and grins: ‘A proper button is still bloody useful.’ That’s why the Byton M-Byte has physical controls for its P-R-N-D drive controls and the hazard warning lights, even though touchscreen, gesture control and voice activation are the beating heart of this car’s user interface. There are some lines you don’t cross. Just as you can take the engineer and car nut 5000 miles away from his last job, and you can surround him with software specialists and AI developers, but you don’t stop him being an engineer and car nut.
And David Twohig, who is leading the development of the M-Byte for Byton, is very much an engineer and car nut. When the man who is now Byton’s chief technical ocer last appeared in these pages he was talking us around the effervescent Alpine A110 sports car, for which he was chief engineer. Now we’re standing in the morning sunshine outside Byton’s HQ on a leafy contemporary business estate in Santa Clara, and Twohig’s enthusing about this prototype M-Byte – an entirely different species from the lithe, lightweight Alpine.
‘I’ll be honest with you, I was a bit sceptical, because I’d previously been tapped on the shoulder by a bunch of EV start-ups. With all due respect, they tended to be a bunch of Silicon Valley tech guys, maybe with some rich dude behind them who wanted to make a car. What interested me about this place was the fact that these guys are car people, they know how hard it is to build a car. But they’re also tech people, and that cocktail was really interesting to me.’
Byton is an electric vehicle company that thinks of its cars as connected smart devices on wheels. The M-Byte, its first model, is an SUV scheduled to reach customers within months. The company is Chinese-funded and will build its cars in a new factory in Nanjing, while its core engineering centre is in Santa Clara. The M-Byte majors on infotainment and connectivity, and the K-Byte saloon, which will follow, will be equipped with lidar sensors for Level 4 autonomous driving capability.
The company was founded by car-industry veterans with glittering CVs. They included Carsten Breitfeld, a former BMW Group vice-president and overseer of the i8 hybrid sports car, who brought with him high-flyers including designer Benoît Jacob (who worked on the i8, i3 and Renault Sport Spider). Co-founder Breitfeld was well aware of Twohig’s pivotal role in creating the A110, but another car on his CV was at least as significant: the Renault Zoe, one of the world’s best-selling electric cars.
In recent months several senior figures have parted ways with Byton. Breitfeld left, first to become CEO of another Chinese automotive start-up, Iconiq Motors, then switching to the embattled Faraday Future. Cause for concern, or inevitable teething trouble? Only time will tell.
The plan to deliver cars to customers in China later this year has shifted to mid-2020, with the USA and Europe now scheduled for 2021 launches. A right-hand-drive version for the UK is all but confirmed, if not ocially at the time of writing. Worldwide, more than 50,000 people have registered their interest in the M-Byte (though deposits won’t be taken until early 2020). You can see why people are interested. The M-Byte is a striking
car, with some unique features, and the prospect that its Twohigapproved dynamics will make it more than decent to drive… when it’s not driving itself.
There are two M-Bytes here today: one show car, close to the real deal in style and layout; the other, in camouflage, an early prototype for the road car, which since our visit has been shown undisguised – and it’s remarkably similar to the car you see here.
Climb aboard and your eyes immediately widen (and perhaps turn rectangular) at the sheer size of the infotainment screen ahead of you. It’s a gigantic curved display 48 inches across – equivalent to seven tablets or a pretty astonishing 24 smartphones.
‘We call it the Shared Experience Display, or SED,’ Twohig explains. ‘A different way of interacting with the car, it’s our foremost USP.’ The display is split into three areas, with shared and private screen space for driver and passenger. In the concept car it’s running through a loop of dummy animations, from video phone calls (stationary use only) to music, photos, contacts and navigation. It’s not a touchscreen; rather, it’s controlled via an eight-inch touchpad between the front seats, and a further seven-inch touchpad at the centre of the steering wheel above the full-size airbag. The pad stays put while the wheel turns, Citroën-style.
We set off for a spin around the block, and it’s hard not to be transfixed by the dash-wide screen as we travel. ‘As you can imagine, we’ve looked into distraction rather deeply,’ Twohig says. ‘Because we know the vehicle’s conditions – if it’s in a geo-fenced area such as a motorway, whether it’s in manual or autonomous mode, the lighting conditions – we can actively control what we show on the driver’s side of the screen.’
The M-Byte has hardware ready for Level 3 autonomous driving, in which the driver can be totally hands-off at times but needs to be ready to take over if required. ‘It’s Level 3-ready but it’ll be an evolution from launch, from Level 2 through 2.3, 2.4, 2.7… The tricky thing about these advanced driver systems is that it’s not binary, it’s a continuum of features, and towards 2.8 and 2.9 you’re still going to have to keep an eye on the vehicle – you’re not going to be reading the paper. But the functions start to get really useful on motorways, for example, or crossing London in heavy trac.’
In addition to the touchpads, Byton also uses gesture control for skipping tracks or controlling volume, for example, and voice control developed in collaboration with Amazon for English-speaking markets. Facial recognition will be used to activate a driver’s individual preferences.
The M-Byte’s architecture means its interior space feels very different from that of a conventional car. The front footwell is huge – you can stretch your legs luxuriantly – and the dashboard is low and slim, to make space for the Odeon multiplex above it. It’s light and airy under the expansive transparent roof (optional on the production car). The front seats can swivel inwards by 10º, to make it easier to talk to rear passengers while in certain autonomous modes.
Pause there for a moment. The detail of how that works illustrates
‘We’ve looked into distraction rather deeply. We actively control what the driver sees’ DAVID TWOHIG
perfectly Twohig’s contention that it’s important to integrate software teams with the traditional mechanical engineering departments. To enable the seats to swivel, the floor has to be absolutely flat. It can only be flat if crucial heating and ventilation hardware goes under the bonnet, not under the floor. Crash-safety requirements dictate that the bonnet needs to be a certain height. That’s only possible if the multi-link suspension and steering componentry are the right size and shape. And the ride and handling need to be extremely well sorted, otherwise the autonomous capability is a non-starter. And so on. There has to be constant dialogue between interlinked teams.
‘The temptation when you set up in Silicon Valley, which some other car companies have fallen into is, to think that because Silicon Valley is all about software, it’s a good idea to hire a bunch of software guys, Stanford PhDs, and do the vehicle engineering somewhere else. It is not a good idea,’ Twohig cautions. ‘You need the whole to come together.’
That face-to-face dialogue wouldn’t be possible without a lot of travel for Byton’s senior staff. Santa Clara is Byton’s global core engineering centre, base for almost 500 people. The second engineering centre is in Nanjing, as is the company’s factory for both cars and batteries.
‘We’ve avoided creating two engineering centres which sooner or later are going to have tensions; rivalry. The price to pay for that is we spend a lot of time in aircraft,’ Twohig smiles philosophically. Meanwhile, in LA, there’s a further oce, ‘A handful of guys who are looking at not the third car, but the fourth and fifth cars to come.’ And there’s Byton’s design centre in Munich…. Very much a global company, then, not just in aspiration but in its daily working.
The Santa Clara base is very much the sort of place your mind’s eye would picture if someone said ‘Silicon Valley start-up’: smart, modern, plenty of glass, metal and standing desks. The atmosphere is studious, the conversations earnest. Some staff have brought their dogs to work – ‘very Silicon Valley’, Twohig grins.
Inside it’s open-plan, without delineation in hierarchy. No private oces, instead a mix of hot-desking and dedicated work stations, all of them clean, wooden-topped and designer-chaired. Twohig’s desk is right in the thick of it, adjacent to ex-Apple man Jeff Chung, who led development for the first-generation iMac Pro and is now responsible for Byton’s user interface. Chassis guys sit nearby, a shock absorber on one desk next to a cup of coffee. Caffeine flows freely here. There are 20 people in the chassis department – 10 here, 10 in Nanjing – led by an ex-Prodrive Brit.
Suggesting the thesis that Byton’s mix of software experts and car guys on the workforce is about right, the motorsports club is the most popular of the company’s extracurricular societies. In the company car park you
Twohig’s desk is right in the thick of it, next to the ex-Apple man who developed the first-generation iMac Pro
can spot a Mk1 Toyota MR2 and a Toyota GT86 alongside various EVs in for benchmarking purposes: Teslas, a Nissan Leaf, a VW e-Golf, a Chevy Volt.
Byton will not be chasing laptimes. The M-Byte will be available in two forms: powered by a single motor with rear-wheel drive, or by a dual motor with all-wheel drive. Buyers choose between 71kWh and 95kWh battery options, with a range of 224 miles and 270 miles respectively, according to WLTP criteria. The rear-drive car will cover 0-62mph in a touch over seven seconds, says Twohig, and the all-wheel-drive version in around 5.5sec.
Brisk enough, I suggest. ‘That’s exactly the right word, brisk,’ Twohig says. ‘We are not falling into the trap of marketing the M-Byte as a sports car. You won’t see us posting videos of drag races. The car is unashamedly pitched as being exceptionally comfortable and quiet with really good ride quality, and that is what we believe this customer wants.’
The name Byton is a contraction of Bytes on Wheels, which to me sounds like someone selling knock-off laptops out of the back of a Transit, but it’s intended to reflect the idea that these cars are an extension of their users’ digital life. Finely honed dynamics are a bonus, not the main selling point.
With the on-sale dates looming, not everything has gone according to plan for Byton, but Twohig emphasises the huge success involved in getting this far, this fast. ‘Building a car and a company from scratch is hard work,’ he says, motioning to the M-Byte prototype. ‘We’ve gone from nothing to building that car over there – it’s not a mock-up – in three years. We’ve a long road to go, we’re very conscious of that, but it’s a hell of an achievement in that time.’
He’s optimistic that it will prove to be worth all the long flights and late nights. Because make no mistake, the target is the mass market. The M-Byte will be priced from around €45,000 in Europe (£40k) and $45,000 in the USA, which translates to around 300,000 renminbi – a sweet spot in China, according to Twohig. ‘That’s the entry price. We’ll offer options; big wheels, leather, so there’ll be a range on top of that. But we’re still on target for $45k. We’re conscious that’s pretty ambitious. But building in China, with a greenfield factory completely optimised to build EVs – we’re not going to build hybrids – we’re confident we’ll get that number.’
But everyone’s building EVs now. How will this stand out? ‘The interaction with the Shared Experience Display is probably our number-one USP, and number two is overkill connectivity,’ Twohig says. ‘This car is 10-gigabits-per-second capable – about the same as this o§ce building. So we have deliberately over-engineered and future-proofed the car.’ Part of the reason for that huge bandwidth is for over-the-air updates to the car’s advanced driver assistance systems, as much as for streaming entertainment. ‘Tesla has shown the way here for regular car makers. Over-the-air updates add value for the car, and we are definitely going to be doing that.’
And again, Twohig pauses, catching himself as he proselytises for a digital future. ‘This is the guy who did the Alpine A110 – I get the driving pleasure thing,’ he smiles. ‘But if you want to get across Shanghai or New York in a car, frankly your 0-60 time is academic. You’re not that interested in ultimate performance, but you want the vehicle you’re in to be comfortable, to have all your music, your data, your films. That’s what our car is aimed at – millions of folks who need that transport.’
‘We are not falling into the trap of marketing the M-Byte as a sports car’ DAVID TWOHIG