Andy Palmer’s bumpy ride: from supercars to battery buses
When Andy Palmer left school at 15 to become an apprentice draughtsman – helping design car gearboxes – he quickly caught the automotive bug.
“By the age of 21, when I came out of my apprenticeship, I wanted to be the CEO of a car company, which was extraordinarily arrogant,” he recalls as we talk in a London hotel restaurant. Four decades on, he made it, taking over in 2014 as chief executive of one of the UK’s truly world-famous brands: Aston Martin, sports car maker to James Bond.
What happened next was probably not part of Palmer’s dream: after organising a successful turnaround plan he led the company through a flotation that quickly turned sour, pushing the carmaker to the brink of its eighth bankruptcy in 105 years, even as it boldly launched a new SUV. He was unceremoniously pushed out in May 2020 following a financial rescue led by the fashion billionaire Lawrence Stroll.
Palmer could have laid low and licked his wounds, using the pandemic as cover. Instead, he used the time to do something fairly startling: stepping in to lead an unheralded Yorkshire bus manufacturer and quietly turning it into a $1.6bn (£1.2bn) business. The company, Switch Mobility, formerly known as Optare, says it is now aiming to be the “Tesla of buses and vans”.
Palmer grew up in the West Midlands, the UK’s traditional automotive heartland, and says his interest in carmaking was piqued when his father, a manufacturing engineer, gave his son a knackered old Mini engine to take to pieces. After his apprenticeship, he moved to British Leyland, from where he was headhunted by Nissan UK.
He thought he would stay there a few years and return to work in a British company, but after the breakup of British Leyland there was no home industry to return
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