Happy New Year!
2022 was a busy year for Eloy and we’re excited about the coming year and building on what we achieved and learnt last year.
Happy New Year!
Here are some of the highlights 0f 2022 and the achievements we’re most proud of:
Innovate UK - electric vehicles
ETSI compliant in-vehicles communications
We completed 2 projects for ETSI compliant driver communications. We worked with Vodafone and their Safer Transport for Europe Platform (STEP) to display IVIM messages to drivers (speed limits) and create Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) and Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages (DENM) to be shared on STEP. The DENM feature allowed a driver to use voice commands to share road accidents, road works and other alerts with STEP. These could then be broadcast to other users of STEP.
We also worked with Yunex Traffic to created IVIM directly from their Stratos traffic management system. This included text messages and audio alerts so speed limits could be displayed to drivers in vehicle.
Rees Jeffreys Road Fund competition
In May, it was announced that we were one of the one of the 2 winners of the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund competition to mark 150 years since the birth of their founder William Rees Jeffreys. The aim of the competition was to develop ideas that would be applicable to how roads could be improved over the next 50 years.
Our entry was a proposal to develop a connected vehicle platform that would enable partners to create their own services, reducing R&D costs and complexity.
We won!
In the first round of the competition, Phil Carey had been shortlisted with Wistle, an idea to help improve how drivers can pass each other on single-track lanes using vehicle-to-vehicle communication.
Wistle was ideally placed to sit on Eloy’s connected platform, so it made sense for us to combine our efforts, with Eloy focussing on the technology and Phil providing deep expertise as a roads and transport professional.
Over the previous months, Eloy had been edging towards more use-case deployments after completing many different pilots and small projects and this award gave us our first clear runway to bring our first connected vehicle technology to market.
TTF demonstration day
In October, Eloy took part in a showcase day at UTAC Millbrook’s proving ground organised by the Transport Technology Forum.
It was our first chance to show our single-track lane technology working in front of both the public and private. We completed 24 successful tests – you can see a video of our technology in action below and read more about the day here.
Single-track lane technology demonstration at UTAC Millbrook
Zenzic CAM Scale-up winner
Zenzic launched its 3rd annual scale-up programme which gives start-ups and SMEs the opportunity to test and verify their connected and automated mobility (CAM) solutions.
The competition offers government grant funding and access to testing facilities, as well as business and investment support from corporate partners. It was a natural next step for Eloy after the work we had done as part of the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund project and we were delighted to be selected to be part of 2022’s cohort.
We have already completed one of our test days, again at UTAC Mlllbrook, where we showed the narrow rural road passing place software working with 10 vehicles around a 1 mile loop. In the first quarter of 2023 we plan to complete 3 further days with up to 20 vehicles.
Intellectual property
A moat is a business’s ability to maintain competitive advantage to protect market share and therefore revenue and profits, and in the start-up world your moat is incredibly important. To create our moat, we needed to be able to defend our technology, becuase although we think we’re onto a winning idea, other organisations, possibly with far more resources, may attempt to replicate our ideas.
To do this, we have started building out a portfolio of pending patents. 2022 was a good year for developing this side of the business and we have been lucky enough to identify several areas of technology where we can obtain patent protection.
2023 - what's next?
As mentioned, we will continue to work on the Zenzic CAM Scale-up programme, with the fantastic support from the Zenzic team. We have more intellectual property to consider, and although we can’t say too much at the moment, we are talking to some pretty big players in the communications and transport industry about how we can use our connected technology to solve other real-life problems that drivers experience on the roads every day.
But we’re kicking off the year with our first external capital raise. This will be a friends, family, angels, and crowdfunding round and more information can be found here.
