The Engineer Q&A: Aurrigo CEO David Keene, the man that likes to say ‘yes’

What prompted automotive supplier RDM to diversify into autonomous vehicles with the formation of Aurrigo International?

About 16 years ago, I was contacted by Lord Mandelson who was in the Labour government and had set up the UK Automotive Council. I was invited to go to the inaugural meeting, and I'm still there.

During those sessions, they worked out the strategy for the UK and they got these six pillars of things that we needed to work on. One of those pillars was connected and automated vehicles, and, to be honest, I hadn't really looked at it too hard until we started talking about it and what we needed to do and how was all that going to work, and what does the future look like.

I came back from one of those meetings and thought to myself: well, how hard could this be? And turns out, it's really hard. I always say ‘yes’ to everything, so I came back and said to our guys, look, we're really good at electronics, we're really good at software, we're really good at making things. We're supplying high-quality products to automotive OEMs, [so] why can't we start to get a drive-by-wire platform? Why can't we then get it to self-drive? So the first thing we did was build a vehicle. The project was called EV blue, and the only thing that you needed was a steering wheel and two pedals and an iPad. So you opened it and put the iPad in the centre of the vehicle. That is like the forerunner of how a Tesla looks now, where you've got a centre console and everything's on it. We did that project for about a year, in about 2013, and at the end of that, I said to our guys, okay, you need to take the steering wheel out, and you need to take the pedals out and we're going to make it autonomous.