The shift from combustion engines to electric vehicles has moved the hardest engineering problem in a car from the engine bay to the battery. A modern electric vehicle battery is a high-voltage energy system, often operating at up to 800 volts, and it has to work safely for years across extremes of temperature, charging speed and driving load.
That has created a bottleneck the industry did not have to manage before. Every battery design must be validated through months of laboratory testing before it is approved for a vehicle, and the engineers qualified to carry out that work on live high-voltage systems remain in short supply across the UK and Europe. Manufacturers are competing for a small pool of people who combine the electrical knowledge, the test discipline and the formal safety authorisation the work requires.
Ashif Ali Mundanad Shaju is one of the engineers working in that space. He began his career in India after completing a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering at Visvesvaraya Technological University, spending his first years in mechanical design, producing CAD models, manufacturing drawings and design validation work.
Wanting to move into electric mobility while the sector was still taking shape, he came to the UK in 2021 for an MSc in Automotive Engineering at Coventry University, completing it with Merit. His studies covered advanced propulsion systems, battery electric vehicles, vehicle dynamics and finite element analysis, and drew him towards the testing side of the industry rather than design.
He has worked since then in UK battery manufacturing and with a major British vehicle manufacturer, in battery test and validation engineering. The specifics of the programmes he has supported are confidential, but the nature of the work is consistent: commissioning battery systems, running structured test programmes, instrumenting hardware for performance monitoring, and investigating failures until the underlying cause is identified and understood.
Working on live high-voltage systems is not something an engineer can simply be assigned to. It requires formal authorisation, and Ashif holds the Battery Senior Authorised Person qualification for live working, alongside the IOSH Managing Safely certificate. He has added a CMI Level 7 certification in Leadership and Strategic Management and Six Sigma Green Belt training, and works with the standard toolset of the field, including Vector CANalyzer, ETAS INCA, MATLAB and Simulink.
Taken together, that combination is what the industry is currently short of. Battery validation sits between electrical engineering, software, mechanical design and safety management, and it rewards engineers who can move confidently across all four.
Ashif is clear about where the value of the work lies. “Battery testing is where the design meets reality,” he says. “Nothing reaches a customer until it has been proven in the lab. Every fault we trace and every test we complete makes the car that eventually reaches the road safer.”
He puts as much weight on process as on technology. “You cannot cut corners in this field. The safety procedures exist because the voltages involved are genuinely dangerous. Following them properly, every time, is part of being good at the job.”
That discipline matters beyond any single vehicle programme. The testing methods, safety practices and validation standards being established now by working engineers will set the baseline the industry follows for the next generation of electric vehicles.
“The industry is still learning how to test and validate batteries at scale,” he says. “There is a lot of work ahead, and I want to keep contributing to it.”
It is not visible work, and most of it happens in laboratories the public will never see. But without it, no electric vehicle would ever be cleared to leave the factory.
