Vehicle engineer
FOR MANY YEARS, CATERHAM CARS WAS based on a modest industrial estate at Kennet Road, Dartford, and we’d go there to meet technical director Jez Coates and go for a blast in the latest version of the Seven that he and his team had created. Today we’ve driven to a modest industrial estate on the outskirts of Coventry to meet Coates, but while the setting has a familiar feel, the company he now works for is rather different. Aurrigo is, among other things, an emerging force in the autonomous EV market and Coates, the firm’s chief engineer, runs a Tesla Model 3. That seems a long way from the lightweight, whipcrack Seven, but the skill set that Coates honed in his 23 years at Caterham matches the requirements of this part of the company remarkably well.
Coates, now 67, was brought up in the small market town of Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria. ‘I’ve always been into cars,’ he says. ‘I remember when I was six or seven on holiday with my parents being driven around Rome seeing how many Fiat 500s I could count before I saw another car.’ His first taste of driving came in an Austin A35 that had belonged to his grandmother and then his brother. ‘It
