Book Description

Unicla and the Midnight Technician is the story fo Unicla, a small automotive air conditioning company that built evaporators, condensers, electrical components and compressors which, by virtue of their meticulous and innovative design, influenced many of the early pathways to vehicle cooling and refrigeration technology. In the pioneering days of vehicle air conditioning, Unicla built a global reputation on its technology because it always fitted and worked properly The company's design ethos was the result of embracing the plight of engineers and technicians who worked in the field to install and maintain their systems and keep them running. Those days might be long gone, but with the electrification of the transport world, Unicla's new generation eDrive model compressors, released in 2020, were designed with the same consideration of the challenges faced everywhere in the world, late at night, by midnight technicians. This long standing brand, spanning 56 years, has accumulated an almost cult following around the world, from the motor vehicle powerhouses of Germany to the remote fishing fleets of Alaska and the war zones of Afghanistan. This book acknowledges not just Unicla's uinique technological achievements, but the people who worked on them. It is a monumental collection of stories and facts that would have been impossible to record accurately without the input of hundreds of individuals, many of whom are no longer with us. The first Unicla company was formed in 1951 for servicing, importing and selling a number of first-time automotive products, automobiles and motorcycles for the booming post-war Japanese market. The design capabilities and manufacturing techniques crafted by founder Mr Tetsuo Nobata were always ahead of their time and always aimed at making the job of installing Unicla systems and components easier for engineers and technicians. When Nobata died in 2005, Hong Kong automotive industrialist and businessman Peter Yee and Australian air conditioning specialist Mark Mitchell kept the Unicla compressor manufacturing business alive by engineering a renaissance of the business and moving the entire plant to China.