Smart Battery Production Pilot Facility Launched

IONETIC has revealed the first details of a £5 million smart battery production pilot facility in the UK. Called Arc Fab Pilot, the phase one battery pack manufacturing plant in Brackley is set to be brought online in 2025 and has been designed to significantly slash the time-to-market and development costs for electric vehicles – reducing risk for automakers needing custom battery packs and providing a local approach to battery-pack manufacture in light of ongoing uncertainty affecting the EV sector. 

The 5000-sq-ft facility will also serve as IONETIC’s global HQ and industrialisation centre, creating 30 high-skill jobs in its first phase. The £5 million Arc Fab Pilot facility will be fully-operational by Q3 2025, having opened in Q4 2024, marking a key step in IONETIC’s mission to provide specialist OEMs – such as those producing trucks, buses, off-highway and commercial vehicles – with a rapid, cost-effective route to high-quality, customised EV battery packs.  

With an initial investment of £5 million in 2025, Arc Fab Pilot underscores IONETIC’s commitment to making battery production faster, more flexible, and more affordable. 

The Arc Fab system can produce a variety of battery pack designs on a single line. IONETIC’s Arc technology stack can create optimised designs in days, a process that typically takes months, reducing upfront setup normally associated with custom EV battery pack development and production, slashing time-to-market by over 80%, enabling multi-million-dollar savings for OEMs. The Arc Fab Pilot Facility will use industry-leading automation hardware and integrated control systems from Rockwell Automation, as well as software such as Emulate3D™ platform to build comprehensive digital twins of IONETIC’s production facilities. 

IONETIC’s technology creates a new middle ground in the EV battery market, bridging the gap between off-the-shelf solutions with compromised performance, and costly custom solutions viable only for the world’s biggest OEMs. IONETIC makes custom battery packs affordable and accessible for specialist manufacturers, a sector that generates £7 billion annually in the UK alone.  

IONETIC is committed to building sustainability into the core of its business. Both the pilot facility and future Arc Fab 1 are scheduled to use certified zero-carbon electricity, as part of IONETIC’s strategy to achieve net-zero operations by 2030. This approach allows IONETIC to meet the needs of smaller, low-volume OEMs looking for affordable custom solutions while keeping their environmental impact low.