Why would you leave Alpine to work at Byton?

You’ve just finished developing the sports car story of the last few years. It’s getting rave reviews. And then you get a call from an Chinese start-up asking you to head up the development of an electric SUV. What do you do? If you’re David Twohig, you move from Paris to California. From Alpine to Byton.

“It was 2018,” he tells us. “I’d finished the A110 project and that was going to be a hard act to follow, I’ll be honest with you. I’d been in contact with one of the guys who set up Byton – Carsten Breitfeld – and he basically said ‘the revolution is not coming, the revolution is here, Dave’.

“I could either fight against it, or join the revolution. And at 48 years old it felt like now or never. So I sold up lock, stock and barrel in Paris and came across to California and jumped off the cliff, basically, into this crazy world of an EV start-up. I even brought my old Porsche 911 with me to California, which is a very stupid thing to do as it costs quite a lot of money and causes quite a lot of trouble and paperwork. But I just couldn’t leave it behind or sell it!”

So he’s an enthusiast, at least. But one with a history in electric cars, having developed the Renault Zoe before moving across to cousins Alpine to work on the A110.

“I was lucky, because not too many people have the luck to engineer an electric car from A to Z and I was one of the first ones to do it in 2007,” he says.

“There were only a few other people in the world working on them at the time; my buddies at Nissan working on the Leaf, and this crazy cat in California called Elon Musk messing around with old Lotus roadsters and batteries. Everyone else was laughing at us, and I mean laughing. Some of the big names that have done EV launches here at Frankfurt were mocking us.”

Bringing the Zoe to fruition gave him a base knowledge that allowed full concentration on the Byton M-Byte’s big selling point: it’s incredibly techy interior.

“My experience means I can really dedicate myself to the software challenge, which is huge. The complexity of the user interface, the software stack, the high levels of autonomy – it’s all bloody hard. But luckily because I already know the oily bits, I can concentrate on that.

“So what’s not the news on the M-Byte is the basics – they’re all there, we’re just not making a song and dance of it. The performance is what you’d expect for a premium SUV. We’re not saying to folks ‘buy our car because it’s got 10km more range than the other bloke’s’ or ‘buy our car it accelerates to 60mph 0.1secs quicker’. The big selling point here is the user interface and experience, the big screen across the dashboard and the ability to watch movies or stream music on a long journey.”

Is connectivity to Byton what handling is to Alpine? “Exactly. It’s absolutely horses for courses, two different audiences completely. The enthusiast market who want to go out driving on a weekend will always exist, but for another set of people who use their car for day to day transport, it’ll be the digital content that sets it apart.

“It’s not sexy but it’s a reality for a lot of people. Not every day is a beautiful sunny day in the Alps at the wheel of an Alpine. Sadly!”

How does it feel seeing every mainstream manufacturer suddenly unveiling EVs – particularly at the 2019 Frankfurt show – when he, Renault and Nissan got there first?

“It’s highly satisfying, though I’m surprised it took them 12 years. But there’s no great sense of competition. The EV community is different to the traditional car industry, where competition is ferocious. When I worked for Nissan I just wanted to take down Toyota, to eliminate our rivals.

“At Byton we’re Tesla fanboys. What Lucid are doing is fantastic, and Nio have done a great car right out the blocks. There is so much opportunity out there for everyone that while there’s competition, it’s friendly competition. And the more the merrier, actually. The more EV players there are, the better it is for us and the consumer, driving down the cost of batteries and all that good stuff. I’m very laid back and I no longer want to just kill the competition, I’ve got over that.”

So would he ever consider channelling his passion into a Byton sports car? “I’d never say never, but it’s absolutely not our thing in the short- to medium-term. We’re not trying to be a sports car brand – plenty of other folks are willing to do that.

“I don’t want you go finding some ride and handling holy grail, we aren’t going chasing records on the Nordschleife. I want exceptional ride comfort.”