MIRA Ltd.

HORIBA MIRA Ltd. (formerly the Motor Industry Research Association) is an automotive engineering and development consultancy company headquartered near Nuneaton in Warwickshire, United Kingdom. It provides product engineering, research, testing, information and certification services to the automotive sector. Its headquarters are in the MIRA Technology Park Enterprise Zone. On 14 July 2015 MIRA announced that it was being bought by the Japanese-owned testing equipment group Horiba.

MIRA was formed in 1946 and was mostly government-funded. It is based just off the A5 near the junction with the A444 in the parish of Higham on the Hill (also near Fenny Drayton), Leicestershire, where around five hundred staff work, with another establishment in Basildon in Essex. The company dates back to the foundation of the Cycle Engineers' Institute (CEI) in 1898, which became the Incorporated Institution of Automobile Engineers (IAE) in 1906. The IAE became the Automotive Branch of the IMechE in 1946. The IAE and the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders were largely responsible for creating MIRA.

After World War Two, the UK car industry was finding it difficult to export to countries where it formerly had little trouble finding markets for its wide range of cars. It was decided by the government to pool the research resources of UK car manufacturers into one site to reduce costs and possibly find new technological advances sooner that could be incorporated into all ranges of UK vehicle makes. The principal auto-makers were located in the Birmingham area, apart from Vauxhall which had its factory in Luton and Ford which by now was located at Dagenham to the east of London. The Motor Industry Research institution under its director Dr Albert Fogg (who would later become Engineering Chief at British Leyland) therefore looked for a location that was reasonably accessible from all these locations, and the site near Nuneaton fulfilled that criterion. The facilities became available to MIRA member companies in October 1948, though at this stage the test tracks consisted only of disused runways. They were finally opened on the 28th April 1949 by Dr Fogg who used explosives to cut the ceremonial tape. Facilities were nevertheless developed under Dr Fogg and Professor Robert Macmillan who took over the directorship from Fogg in 1964. Such examples include the half mile Belgian Pavé road used in vehicle tests, completed in 1950.