Advanced Electric Machines (AEM), the manufacturer of rare-earth free electric motors, has welcomed the UK government’s recent £50million investment into critical minerals development but warned that the strategy as designed risks entrenching the very dependency it seeks to avoid.
The Critical Minerals package includes £20 million for a national Magnet Hub to scale rare earth magnet manufacturing, £25 million for a Critical Minerals Accelerator, and up to £5 million for a Demand Aggregation Platform. The investment is designed to reduce British industry’s reliance on volatile overseas suppliers and strengthen economic resilience.
Dr James Widmer, CEO of Advanced Electric Machines (AEM), said the government had correctly identified the problem but was applying the wrong solution. “The intent here is exactly right – one region controlling 70% of rare earth mining and 90% of refining is a major chokepoint holding back EV production everywhere. The government is right to treat that as a strategic threat,” said Widmer. “What concerns me is that their response is to build more British infrastructure around rare earths, rather than around sovereign alternatives to them. Securing the supply of a dependency is not the same as ending it. The funding should also directly support this critical innovation.”
Widmer draws a direct parallel with one of the automotive industry’s most cautionary historical examples. “For decades, the industry added lead to petrol because it solved a real engineering problem – it stopped engines knocking. But it was toxic, it blocked cleaner alternatives, and by the time the industry accepted it had to go, we had spent a generation building infrastructure around the wrong material,” he said.
“Rare earths risk following exactly the same pattern. The answer isn’t a more geographically diverse rare earth supply chain. It’s a manufacturing sector that doesn’t need rare earths at all.”
AEM’s reluctance motor technology eliminates rare earth permanent magnets entirely, delivering high efficiency and comparable performance using only abundant, domestically available materials. Its aluminium winding technology provides a further alternative to copper dependency – another critical mineral identified as vulnerable by the government’s own strategy. Both technologies are production-ready and have been validated across multiple sectors
“There is a legitimate near-term case for shoring up supply while the industry transitions,” Widmer acknowledged. “But a strategy focused purely on extraction, processing and stockpiling treats the symptom, not the disease. It also risks locking in rare earth dependency for another generation of engineering decisions, at a time when the technology to break that dependency already exists and is commercially proven.”
