The takeover of Iveco Defence Vehicles by the Italian defence giant Leonardo has, in the view of the managing director of IDV UK, transformed its British uncrewed vehicles business by finally handing it the muscle to move from prototypes into real production.
Speaking to the UK Defence Journal at the company’s site in Nuneaton, Dr Geoff Davis said the deal, which completed in March, had given the UK operation “a grown-up parent who manufactures several thousand vehicles a year”.
The difference, as Dr Davis put it, is a blunt one, because the company can now build at a scale that was simply beyond it before. “If you ordered tomorrow, we’d be able to build them. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to build them without the acquisition,” he said of the firm’s Viking uncrewed ground vehicle, explaining that Leonardo brings the experience of mass production that a team which began life as a small research unit inside HORIBA MIRA simply did not have.
That British team, which was carved out as IDV Robotics in 2023 before the wider Leonardo deal, keeps design authority over the Viking, and its software effort is now split roughly evenly between engineers based in the UK and others working remotely. “We’re after quite specialist people, so being in location isn’t ideal, and being able to spread out a little bit to attract people is quite useful,” Dr Davis said, describing an effort to take “the best bits of both” the British and Italian work and fuse them into a single technology stack.
Dr Davis was open about where the new ownership might lead, noting that Leonardo’s uncrewed work has so far been concentrated mostly in the air, including the Proteus uncrewed helicopter, and that he is already in conversation with the group’s central research arm about its autonomy programmes. “I’m sure it opens up lots of doors, and we haven’t had those conversations yet, but I know Leonardo are very interested in uncrewed technology and uncrewed systems,” he said.
Some of that thinking is already turning into hardware, with a counter-drone version of the Viking fitted with a Leonardo weapon station due to be shown at Eurosatory, and with the two sides in discussions that span weapon stations, command and control software, surveillance payloads and electronic warfare, an area in which Andrew Maloney, the head of technology and chief engineer at IDV Robotics, said there was “very strong synergy.”
Dr Davis was equally firm that Italian ownership does nothing to make this any less of a British operation, insisting that the work, and the people doing it, remain rooted in the United Kingdom. “We’re British-Italian. There’s UK jobs, UK capability, UK tech,” he said, adding that any British order would see “a high percentage of the build content” manufactured here, with the parent company’s supply chain used to push the cost of components down.
There is money to be made, too, in converting existing fleets to optionally uncrewed operation using the very same technology, and Dr Davis pointed to the British Army’s Panther, which began life as an Iveco design, as an obvious candidate for exactly that kind of work. “If the UK customer is interested, IDV can get involved and convert those,” he said.
