Electric Ineos will be off-road ready

Ineos has confirmed that its first electric vehicle will follow in the footsteps of its Grenadier pilot model, offering a serious all-terrain option wrapped up in a zero-emissions package.

The imminent Grenadier has already proven its off-road mettle in an adventure across Scotland’s frozen central Highlands powered by BMW’s silky six-cylinder petrol and diesel engines, but its maker says the first electric Ineos will continue the family tradition of go-anywhere-ability.

Speaking at the international launch of the Grenadier in Scotland, Ineos Automotive's commercial director, Mark Tennant, said capable 4x4 vehicles for adventurous customers are what Ineos is all about.

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“We do see off-road as being a big part of the growing DNA of the Ineos Automotive brand for sure,” he said.

“The page was blank five years ago. We’ve done some quite significant scribbling on that page from a brand point of view that gives us the sort of product we’ve been driving over the last couple of days. That for me will be the cornerstone of what Ineos stands for, for the long term."

Tennant wouldn’t reveal many technical details about the second Ineos model, but confirmed its EV would offer respectable off-road ability, despite significant mechanical differences to the Grenadier.

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“From a battery-electric point of view, it will still have some pretty impressive off-road credentials, it’s not going to be a ladder chassis – it’ll be a skateboard base vehicle, but we’re still pushing our engineers to make sure it can do some impressive things.

“It won’t be by definition quite what the Grenadier is, but it’ll still be pretty bloody good.”

While Ineos is confident of its EV ability when the road comes to an end, critical battery life, towing capacity, and overall range will be just as important to a local audience when it comes to Australian off-road adventures and feasibility, and Ineos is yet to offer a claimed driving range.

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Like the BMW partnership required to bring the Grenadier to life, Ineos will recruit the expertise of third-party engineering specialists to develop and build its electric off-roader, but is not ready to confirm exactly which suppliers will provide the major building blocks including battery, drive motors and power management systems.

However, it can be confirmed that existing macro manufacturing partner Magna would be assigned to assist with development and construction.

“We’re working with Magna for the engineering. That’s the first building block, but it’s a bit premature in terms of the partners beyond that. We’re still a small entity and we bring in the expertise where it’s appropriate.

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“We’re at a stage where we need to build the credibility and we get a lot of imparted credibility from some of the people we’re working with.”

For now, Ineos is only talking about its first two models, but a recent memorandum of understanding with Hyundai resulted in a Grenadier prototype powered by a hydrogen fuel-cell.

This could offer a glimpse at how the company is looking to future-proof its first model while developing a sustainable drivetrain that could find use in others.

“We’re very excited to be doing a battery-electric vehicle, but for this sort of vehicle, the Grenadier and things that are bigger, we think hydrogen represents a really good alternative.

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“There’s still some work to be done on the BEV side, but absolutely it would be great if we could look at broadening the range of what we’re pursuing as our range of alternatives,” said Tennant. “There’s a lot of lessons to be learned – probably good and bad – from that tipping point that EVs are coming to.”

According to Tennant, the future of sustainable transport is not necessarily about one type of drivetrain that will prevail but a combination of all feasible options including battery electric, hybrid and hydrogen depending on the application.

“There’s been massive focus on battery electric and that technology, including infrastructure, is much further advanced than hydrogen, but I think it’s worth keeping the focus on what could be a mixed economy.”