CHARGED Electric Vehicles Magazine - Issue 51 SEP/OCT 2020

ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE

ISSUE 51 | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 | CHARGEDEVS.COM

NISSAN ARIYA AND VOLKSWAGEN ID.4 BRINGING EV DRIVE TO COMPACT CROSSOVERS…CHASING TESLA MODEL Y

p. 48

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE DC LINK

Q&A WITH PROTERRA CTO DUSTIN GRACE

CHARGEWAY DATA: MORE EVS SOLD WHEN CHARGING IS UNDERSTOOD

NEOCHARGE SMART SPLITTER REDUCES CHARGING BARRIERS

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THE TECH CONTENTS

22 A closer look at the

22

DC Link

28 Proterra beefs up its battery expertise

28

Q&A with CTO Dustin Grace

current events 12 14

Tesla’s Battery Day unveils cost reductions worth waiting for Li-Cycle to build battery recycling hub in upstate New York Inmotive introduces new two-speed EV transmission

12

15

Allison Transmission’s new eGen Flex hybrid system Linear Labs raises $6 million to expand EV motor manufacturing in Texas

16

Soteria licenses battery tech designed to eliminate thermal runaway BorgWarner to build integrated drive module for Ford Mustang Mach-E

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17 18 19 20 21

Solid Power introduces all-solid-state lithium metal batteries FEV addresses battery safety with thermal propagation optimization process Battery pack maker Romeo Systems to go public in $1.33-billion SPAC deal GM to debut wireless EV BMS NH Research’s Enerlab software streamlines battery test lab management

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THE VEHICLES CONTENTS

48 Nissan Ariya and Volkswagen ID.4

Bringing EV drive to compact crossovers... chasing Tesla Model Y

48

58 New Tesla Book Excerpt

“A combination of thousands of heroic feats that no one knows about”

current events 38 39

58

Amazon reveals first of Rivian electric delivery vans Rental platform Fluid Truck orders 600 Lightning Electric trucks California Governor issues order to ban the sale of ICE vehicles by 2035

40 41 42

Lucid Motors releases pricing, performance specs for its upcoming EVs Tesla Model 3 refresh adds more range and a few handy features Former Volvo Trucks exec launches electric truck startup Lordstown finalizes SPAC deal, starts trading on NASDAQ

43 44 46 47

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Luxury travel trailer features solar panels, EV charging, battery storage Honda ditches diesels, plans to phase out gas-only cars in Europe in 2022 New Volta Zero electric truck designed for safety and sustainability Proterra’s ZX5 next-generation electric transit bus

IDENTIFICATION STATEMENT CHARGED Electric Vehicles Magazine (ISSN: 24742341) September/October 2020, Issue #51 is published bi-monthly by Electric Vehicles Magazine LLC, 2260 5th Ave S, STE 10, Saint Petersburg, FL 33712-1259. Periodicals Postage Paid at Saint Petersburg, FL and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to CHARGED Electric Vehicles Magazine, Electric Vehicles Magazine LLC at 2260 5th Ave S, STE 10, Saint Petersburg, FL 33712-1259.

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

CONTENTS

72

72 Chargeway Data

Shoppers buy more EVs if they understand charging, and now there’s proof

76 NeoCharge’s Smart Splitter

76

Reducing barriers to Level 2 home charging

current events 66

ABB to deploy its new bi-directional charging technology for V2G kiosks ChargePoint to go public in $2.4-billion deal

67 68

66

Electrify America creates new business unit for its home charging products Oil giant Total acquires London charging network i-charging’s new blueberry range of fast chargers for light- and heavy-duty EVs

70

SAE publishes Wireless Charging standard Virtual Peaker and Fermata Energy aim to bring V2G technology to utilities

71

Porsche Digital spins off e-mobility loyalty program as &Charge ABB and Lion Electric partner on charging solutions for heavy-duty vehicles

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Publisher Associate Publisher Senior Editor Associate Editor Account Executive Technology Editor Graphic Designers

Christian Ruoff Laurel Zimmer Charles Morris Markkus Rovito Jeremy Ewald Jeffrey Jenkins Deon Rexroat Tomislav Vrdoljak

Contributing Writers Jeffrey Jenkins Michael Kent Tom Lombardo Charles Morris John Voelcker

For Letters to the Editor, Article Submissions, & Advertising Inquiries Contact: Info@ChargedEVs.com

Cover Images Courtesy of Nissan, Volkswagen Special Thanks to Kelly Ruoff Sebastien Bourgeois

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, AND CIRCULATION. 1. PUBLICATION TITLE: CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE. 2. PUBLICATION NUMBER: 18170. 3. FILING DATE: SEPTEMBER 29, 2020. 4. ISSUE FREQUENCY: BI-MONTHLY. 5. NUMBER OF ISSUES PUBLISHED ANNUALLY: 6. 6. ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION PRICE (IF ANY). 7. COMPLETE MAILING ADDRESS OF KNOWN OFFICE OF PUBLICATION: CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE, 2260 5TH AVE SOUTH, #10, ST PETERSBURG, FL 33712. CONTACT PERSON: CHRISTIAN RUOFF. TELEPHONE: (727) 522-0039. 8. COMPLETE MAILING ADDRESS OF HEADQUARTERS OR GENERAL BUSINESS OFFICE OF PUBLISHER: CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE, 2260 5TH AVE SOUTH, #10, ST PETERSBURG, FL 33712. 9. FULL NAMES AND COMPLETE MAILING ADDRESSES OF PUBLISHER, EDITOR, AND MANAGING EDITOR: PUBLISHER, EDITOR, AND MANAGING EDITOR: CHRISTIAN RUOFF, 2260 5TH AVE SOUTH, #10, ST PETERSBURG, FL 33712. 10. OWNER. FULL NAME: CHRISTIAN RUOFF. COMPLETE MAILING ADDRESS: 2260 5TH AVE SOUTH, #10, ST PETERSBURG, FL 33712. 11. KNOWN BONDHOLDERS, MORTGAGEES, AND OTHER SECURITY HOLDERS OWNING OR HOLDING 1 PERCENT OR MORE OF TOTAL AMOUNT OF BONDS, MORTGAGES, OR OTHER SECURITIES: NONE. 13. PUBLICATION TITLE: CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE. 14. ISSUE DATE FOR CIRCULATION DATA BELOW: #50, JULY/AUGUST 2020. 15. EXTENT AND NATURE OF CIRCULATION. A. TOTAL NUMBER OF COPIES (NET PRESS RUN). AVERAGE NO. COPIES EACH ISSUE DURING PRECEDING 12 MONTHS: 10667; NO. COPIES OF SINGLE ISSUE PUBLISHED NEAREST TO FILING DATE: 10500. B. LEGITIMATE PAID AND/OR REQUESTED DISTRIBUTION (BY MAIL AND OUTSIDE THE MAIL): (1) OUTSIDE COUNTY PAID/REQUESTED MAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS STATED ON PS FORM 3541: 8775; 8790. (2) IN-COUNTY PAID/REQUESTED MAIL SUBSCRIPTIONS STATED ON PS FORM 3541: 0; 0. (3) SALES THROUGH DEALERS AND CARRIERS, STREET VENDORS, COUNTER SALES, AND OTHER PAID OR REQUESTED DISTRIBUTION OUTSIDE USPS: 0; 0. (4) REQUESTED COPIES DISTRIBUTED BY OTHER MAIL CLASSES THROUGH THE USPS: 0; 0. C. TOTAL PAID AND/OR REQUESTED CIRCULATION (SUM OF 15B (1), (2), (3), AND (4)): 8775; 8790. D. NON-REQUESTED DISTRIBUTION (BY MAIL AND OUTSIDE THE MAIL): (1) OUTSIDE COUNTY NONREQUESTED COPIES STATED ON PS FORM 3541: 0; 0. (2) IN-COUNTY NONREQUESTED COPIES STATED ON PS FORM 3541: 0; 0. (3) NONREQUESTED COPIES DISTRIBUTED THROUGH THE USPS BY OTHER CLASSES OF MAIL: 55; 40. (4) NONREQUESTED COPIES DISTRIBUTED OUTSIDE THE MAIL: 823; 808. E. TOTAL NONREQUESTED DISTRIBUTION [SUM OF 15D (1), (2), (3) AND (4)]: 878; 848. F. TOTAL DISTRIBUTION (SUM OF 15C AND E): 9653; 9638. G. COPIES NOT DISTRIBUTED: 1014; 862. H. TOTAL (SUM OF 15F AND G): 10667; 10500. I. PERCENT PAID AND/OR REQUESTED CIRCULATION (15C DIVIDED BY 15F TIMES 100): .9090; .9120. I CERTIFY THAT 50% OF ALL MY DISTRIBUTED COPIES (ELECTRONIC AND PRINT) ARE LEGITIMATE REQUESTS OR PAID COPIES. 17.

PUBLICATION OF STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP FOR A REQUESTER PUBLICATION IS REQUIRED AND WILL BE PRINTED IN THE ISSUE OF THIS PUBLICATION: ISSUE 46, NOVEMBER/ DECEMBER 2019. 18. I CERTIFY THAT ALL INFORMATION FURNISHED ON THIS FORM IS TRUE AND COMPLETE. CHRISTIAN RUOFF, PUBLISHER, SEPTEMBER 29, 2020.

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How times have changed since we first began writing about EVs! In 2011, when we published the first issue of Charged, the Tesla Roadster was the king of the EV scene, the Chevrolet Volt and Nissan LEAF were just going into production, and public charging, at least outside of California, was almost non-existent. If the mainstream press wrote about EVs at all, it was to explain why they had no hope of displacing gas burners.

Nowadays, things look quite different. There are dozens of EV models available, public chargers number in the tens of thousands, and the eventual transition to electromobility is considered a foregone conclusion even by the most cautious of media outlets.

There’s still a long way to go—in most of the world, EVs are still a rarity on the roads. However, in the past couple of months we’ve witnessed a number of events that, taken together, make it clear that the end of the ICE Age is in sight.

In September, Tesla reported the latest progress in its ongoing quest to reduce the cost of its vehicles. The general public was slow to grasp the significance of Battery Day, but observers of the EV scene immediately got it. The company says it’s on a 3-year track to sell an EV (and not just any EV, but a Tesla) in the economy price range. As anyone who’s driven an EV understands, at that point there will no longer be any reason to buy an ICE vehicle, other than dwindling misinformation about EVs, a stubborn resistance to change, or perhaps a sincere love of gasoline.

Just a few days after Tesla’s revelations, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order requiring all new passenger vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission by 2035. Some 15 countries around the world have already announced plans to phase out ICEs (including the UK, which recently brought its proposed ban forward to 2030).

In Europe, which is rapidly becoming the center of the global EV industry, plug-in vehicles reached a market share of 8% in the first half of this year, according to a new report from Transport & Environment. T&E is recommending that the EU set a date of 2035, at the latest, to end the sale of ICE vehicles.

There’s much more going on. Over the next couple of years, the first pure electric pickup trucks will hit the streets—a catalytic event for the US auto market.

Electric buses can now offer a lower cost of ownership than legacy diesels, and they’re spreading far beyond the early-adopter cities of California and Europe.

See this issue’s interview with Proterra CTO Dustin Grace, who predicts that in 2025 e-buses will represent half of all new transit bus orders.

Electric utilities are emerging as champions of electrification. In this issue’s Charging Forward column, Charles Morris explains why the advent of vehicle-to-grid technology is creating a powerful incentive for utilities to encourage EV adoption.

These trends are proceeding in parallel, but they reinforce each other in various ways, and the massive amount of EV-related research that’s going on around the globe is both a cause and effect of the new business opportunities.

Entrenched interests and the politicians who represent them will continue their efforts to keep the old order in place, but ultimately, they won’t be able to hold back the technological tide.

However, we can’t deny that there will be losers as well as winners. Policymakers must not listen to misguided calls to prop up outdated industries, but they also must not abandon the workers whose livelihoods are at risk.

Christian Ruoff | Publisher

EVs are here. Try to keep up.

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Image courtesy of Tesla

THE TECH

Tesla Battery Day: a raft of tech advances will deliver cost reductions worth waiting for We’re used to extremely ambitious (not to say unrealistic) timelines from Tesla—a new Terafactory in a few months, a fleet of Robotaxis before the end of the year— so Elon Musk’s measured, conservative predictions at the long-awaited Battery Day event caught the mainstream press on the wrong foot.

“In three years…we can do a $25,000 car that will be basically on par [with], maybe slightly better than, a comparable gasoline car,” said the uncharacteristically cautious Musk. Three years? Slightly better? As one analyst put it, to be a “long-term investor” these days means looking ahead one year. This wasn’t the blockbuster news the masses were expecting, and TSLA stock got hammered.

It may just be that Musk has matured, and adopted a new policy of under-promising and over-delivering.

Another thing that’s going on here is that, as usual, our colleagues in the general-interest and financial media have missed the real implications of Tesla’s news. How fortunate that we more tech-savvy EV journalists are here to enlighten them, and you, dear readers.

So, to sum up the message of Battery Day in plain language: The Oil Age is ending.

The main event was the unveiling of Tesla’s new, inhouse battery cell, dubbed the Tesla 4680 cell in honor of its dimensions (46 mm by 80 mm). The larger cell offers five times the energy capacity, and six times the power capacity of Tesla’s previous cells (capacity, not densi-

ty—Tesla did not reveal the amount of improvement in energy density).

Simply making the cell larger allows an increase in capacity and a reduction in cost. Tesla claims that the larger form factor will increase vehicle range by 16%, and reduce cost per kWh by 14%. However, making the cell larger makes thermal management more challenging, which Tesla has dealt with by creating a new tabless cell design that offers much less resistance compared to existing designs.

The new cell design is only part of the story. Elon Musk and Drew Baglino, Tesla’s Senior VP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering, described important innovations in at least four other aspects of battery production: • a new type of silicon that will allow more Si to be used in the anode in place of graphite, reducing costs by 5% • a new cathode production process that eliminates wastewater and uses nickel more efficiently (12% cost savings here) • a new battery pack that forms a structural part of the vehicle, linking the large underbody castings, which could reduce overall vehicle mass by 10% • improved and simplified manufacturing processes, including the dry coating electrode process pioneered by Maxwell, which Elon Musk said is “close to working,” and a super high-speed assembly process that is supposed to increase production-line output sevenfold By combining all these innovations, Tesla hopes to cut the cost per kWh of battery packs in half within the next three years or so. Will that get us to the Grail? Absolutely.

Industry observers are predicting that the EV industry will breach the holy $100/kWh number by 2023, but some believe that Tesla is already very close to that figure. The new, more circumspect Musk didn’t specify an exact price target, but he did say that Tesla’s three-year plan will bring the price below Grail level.

Napkins covered with scrawled math are all over the table. The Verge predicts Tesla’s $25,000 EV will have a $6,000 battery pack (a reduction of almost 100% from current costs in the industry). Electrek’s Fred Lambert, a keen Tesla-watcher, is more sanguine—he believes Tesla’s current pack-level cost is around $110/kWh, so halving the cost would put the price of a 50 kWh pack at only

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$2,500—a tenth of the cost of the original Model S pack.

How would a $25,000 EV (which the rumor mill is calling Model 2) affect the global auto industry? The numbers represent some sweeping generalizations and a large dose of uncertainty, but if Tesla comes anywhere close to reaching its announced goals, we should start to see gas cars sitting out in the rain with the last of the cathode-ray-tube TVs sometime in 2023.

Tesla will build the next-gen batteries in Fremont. The company hopes to be producing 10 GWh per annum within about a year, 100 GWh by 2023, and 3,000 GWh by 2030.

Massive vertical integration is the order of the day. Tesla is talking about mining its own lithium (and, naturally, making production of the light white stuff more efficient, cheaper and greener).

Every Tesla event has to have a bit of lagniappe, and this time around it was the Model S Plaid, which will be the highest-performance Model S yet.

In fact, the tri-motor, all-wheel drive sedan will be the quickest production car ever, with a 0-60 mph time of less than two seconds, as well as a 200 mph top speed, over 520 miles of range, and a starting price of $139,990. The super-Tesla isn’t at the top of the priority list, however—Musk confirmed that production is expected in “late 2021.”

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THE TECH

Battery recycling specialist Li-Cycle will invest over $175 million dollars in a lithium-ion battery recycling “Hub” at Eastman Business Park in upstate New York. The new facility will work in conjunction with Li-Cycle’s “Spoke” facility, which is already located at the Rochester site.

Li-Cycle plans to begin construction on the Hub facility in 2021.

Li-Cycle’s Spoke and Hub operations will complement each other. There will be several US-based Spokes that aggregate and refine spent Li-ion batteries, separating the materials. Li-Cycle’s Rochester Spoke, due to open this fall, will be capable of shredding up to 5,000 tons of used batteries per year. Ultimately, the Hub operation in Rochester will receive battery materials from the Rochester Spoke and similar operations across the US, and process them further for use as raw materials in future manufacturing, including for new batteries.

Li-Cycle claims that its process recovers 80 to 100% of all materials found in Li-ion batteries, with no wastewater discharge. Recovered materials are either processed to the point of being reusable in battery production or other applications, or sent for further processing to other recyclers (e.g. steel and plastics). The company processes all types of Li-ion batteries used in electronic devices, EVs and energy storage.

Li-Cycle co-founder Tim Johnston said, “We are excited to be able to announce Rochester as the location of Li-Cycle’s first commercial Hub refinery. This facility will enable sustainable closed-loop production of critical materials for the battery industry, such as cobalt, nickel and lithium, right here in North America, supporting the development of EVs and other sustainable energy applications. We deeply appreciate the continued support of the local community, government agencies and Kodak in the development of this project.”

“This international partnership with Li-Cycle will foster the supply chain of lithium-ion batteries, which are in high demand, and will further expand the thriving energy storage industry in the region,” said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Inmotive introduces new twospeed EV transmission Canadian automotive supplier Inmotive has launched a new twospeed transmission.

The new Ingear features a simple and durable design that’s designed to enable a more efficient powertrain, with extended range, at a lower cost.

Typically, an EV has two reduction gears between the electric motor and the wheels, with the motor turning about nine times for each revolution of the wheels. The Ingear replaces the second reduction gear with a continuous chain drive and a morphing sprocket. To shift, an actuator directs sprocket segments into place during a single revolution of the wheels, effectively increasing or decreasing the gear ratio. The Ingear’s patented geometry keeps the motor and wheels in sync, enabling continuous torque flow throughout the shifting process.

Designed to wrap around the differential, Ingear is slightly larger than a typical single-speed transmission.

Because it shifts in less than a single revolution of the wheels, the motor is kept in constant contact with the wheels, and can continuously apply torque even during the shift. Gear ratios change gradually.

“This next-generation transmission offers an entirely new way of looking at multi-speed transmissions for EVs, and extends significant benefits to a wide range of other market segments as well,” said Inmotive CEO Paul Bottero.

Inmotive says that by integrating Ingear into high-volume integrated drive units, OEMs can save more than $1,500 per passenger vehicle, through smaller battery capacity and less expensive motors and inverters, while maintaining the same range and improving acceleration.

The company says fleet owners will save about $2,000 in electricity costs over three years.

Inmotive recently completed its pre-production testing of the Ingear, has integrated it into a demonstration vehicle, and is ready for full market implementation. Test units are available to qualified OEMs.

Image courtesy of Allison Inmotive

Li-Cycle to build battery recycling hub in upstate New York

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Image courtesy of Allison Transmission

Allison Transmission has launched its new zero-emission vehicle (ZEV)-capable system, the eGen Flex, as the initial product offering under its new Allison eGen brand.

The eGen product family will include Allison’s portfolio of hybrid and fully electric products, including electric axles. eGen Flex provides bus fleets with fully electric, engine-off propulsion and accessory power operation capability—ideal for zero-emission zones and depot operation.

The eGen Flex system features a new drive unit, inverter and battery pack. The drive unit includes a disconnect clutch that enables engine-off capability. The smaller and lighter inverter package, which is now water ethylene glycol (WEG) cooled, eliminates oil lines. The company says the new package decreases installation complexity, reduces maintenance expense and increases uptime.

The battery pack incorporates the latest lithium titanate (LTO) technology, which increases energy density, allows for faster charging, and enables pure electric (engine-off ) extended range capability.

Allison will offer two distinct models: eGen Flex and eGen Flex Max. The eGen Flex will be similar in features and capabilities to the Allison H 40/50 EP electric hybrid propulsion system, but with the package enhancements summarized above. eGen Flex Max will offer fully electric propulsion for up to 10 miles, dependent upon duty cycle and accessory load requirements. Both models will be offered in CertPlus configurations for sale in CARB-compliant states. Similar to the existing H 40/50 EP nomenclature, eGen Flex and eGen Flex Max will also be available in “40” and “50” configurations based on fleet torque requirements. Increased Accessory Power 2 will be available with eGen Flex, and will be required with eGen Flex Max. This capability electrifies vehicle accessory systems such as air conditioning and electric heat. Allison is engaged with transit OEMs and transit fleets to support a scheduled 2021 commercial release of eGen Flex.

Image courtesy of Linear Labs

Allison Transmission’s new eGen Flex hybrid system

Linear Labs raises $6 million to expand EV motor manufacturing in Texas Electric motor manufacturer Linear Labs has raised an additional $6 million in funding to further develop manufacturing capabilities and grow its employee base.

The new capital raise comes shortly after the announcement of a $68.9-million partnership with the City of Fort Worth, Texas, which includes an incentive package for Linear Labs’ plans to develop an advanced manufacturing facility in the area.

The new funding will be used to expand manufacturing expertise, supply chain infrastructure and logistics, as well as advanced automation and robotics engineering, in order to meet the current signed customer needs of producing 100,000 units in 2021, with a target of 1,000,000 units the following year. Clients for these motors include global OEMs in automotive, micro-mobility and industrial pump applications, as well as residential and light commercial HVAC. Linear Labs says its patented HET motor technology is a new class of electric machine, that produces up to twice the torque of competing motors—or the same torque in half the size. It can be made using rare earth or ferrite magnets. The design is based on a magnetic flux tunnel featuring both dual axial flux and dual radial flux rotors tied together around one stator—effectively four motors working as one.

The next phase of production will include the 200-series motor, which provides 108 Nm of torque with bursts up to 140 Nm. The company says the 200-series motor is 1.7 kg lighter than its competitors, with average efficiency over the rpm range of 88 percent (92 percent peak) versus the competition’s average of 59 percent.

SEP/OCT 2020

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Soteria licenses battery tech designed to eliminate thermal runaway Soteria Battery Innovation Group has exclusively licensed and optioned a technology developed by the DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) designed to eliminate thermal runaway in Li-ion batteries due to mechanical damage. The technology complements Soteria’s existing battery safety technology.

Soteria Battery Innovation Group is a technology development and licensing company that has formed a consortium to promote a light, safe and cost-effective architecture for Li-ion batteries.

The licensed technology is for electrodes and foils that are designed to break in a pre-defined geometry when the battery is physically damaged, effectively isolating the damaged part. Soteria says this can minimize the associated generated heat and avoid thermal runaway, or uncontrolled increasing temperature, thus rendering the battery safe.

“This technology can dramatically improve battery safety upon mechanical, thermal and electrical damage,” said ORNL Principle Investigator Jianlin Li. “This can simplify battery design and lead to higher energy density and lower cost.”

Image courtesy of BorgWarner

Image courtesy of Soteria

THE TECH

BorgWarner to build integrated drive module for Ford Mustang Mach-E BorgWarner has announced that it is building an Integrated Drive Module (iDM) for Ford’s new all-electric Mustang Mach-E SUV. The iDM comes complete with a BorgWarner thermal-management system and a gearbox integrated with a motor and power electronics from other suppliers.

“Our knowledge of system integration, paired with our gearing proficiency, allows us to design iDMs that are easy to assemble and operate as quietly as possible, which is even more important in electrified vehicles,” said Dr. Stefan Demmerle, President of BorgWarner.

Unlike other BorgWarner eGearDrive units, the gearing incorporated within the iDM does not utilize parallel axis gearing. Instead, it features a concentric design with outputs on the same axis as the electric motor, which results in a more compact package. The gearbox can handle 4,278 Nm of axle torque and input speeds up to 13,800 rpm. Also, BorgWarner designed and packaged an integrated park module, along with a cooling and lubrication solution to provide thermal management to the whole iDM system, all within one compact assembly.

The iDM will power the Mustang Mach-E’s rearwheel-drive and all-wheel-drive configurations. For the all-wheel-drive GT version, BorgWarner will supply the secondary drive unit to power the front wheels as well.

Production is slated to begin this year.

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Solid Power has announced the production and delivery of the company’s first-generation multi-layer, multi-ampere-hour (Ah) all-solid-state lithium metal batteries.

Solid-state batteries have long been thought of as the “Holy Grail” of EV battery technology, as the lithium metal anode provides more energy and range than today’s Li-ion design, and the solid electrolyte increases safety by eliminating the flammable liquid electrolyte, which also simplifies battery cooling.

Solid Power says the major benefit of a sulfide-based solid electrolyte is its compatibility with Li-ion production and equipment, meaning the cells can be built in Gigafactories operating today. Sulfide-based solid

FTF-HV

Image courtesy of Solid Power

Solid Power introduces allsolid-state lithium metal batteries

electrolytes also eliminate expensive cell formation steps in manufacturing.

Solid Power’s first-generation 10-layer, 2 Ah pouch cells were manufactured using the company’s MWhscale, roll-to-roll pilot line, which mirrors Li-ion production lines. More than 250 prototype all-solid-state cells have been shipped, and Solid Power plans to produce and deliver several hundred additional cells to key strategic partners by the end of the year.

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FEV addresses battery safety with thermal propagation optimization process

Image courtesy of FEV

THE TECH

German battery specialist FEV has developed a combined simulation and testing process for the optimization of thermal propagation behavior in automotive battery packs.

The company claims the process can help to reduce the risk of injury and damage from battery cell thermal runaway, while also saving development time and cost.

Thermal runaway is a key safety aspect for hybrid and electric vehicles. The first thermal propagation regulation is expected in January 2021. The GB/T 38031 standard in China will require that vehicle passengers be warned at least five minutes before a fire from a thermal event extends beyond the battery pack, or battery venting gas enters the cabin. Other markets and regulatory bodies are expected to follow.

The simulation-based approach begins after key CAD dimensions and pack geometries are defined in the base development phase. FEV has created two customizable models for this purpose. Multiphysics simulation produces a model to evaluate and optimize thermal runaway of one cell and propagation between battery cells, as well as between battery modules. This model and its customization for specific customer requirements allow for design optimization and introduction of countermeasures such as heat barriers. In parallel, a second, fluid-based venting gas model is customized, which is used to assess and optimize the design of the venting paths, dimensioning of venting valves as well as the indication of critical busbar routing inside the battery pack.

The thermal and venting gas models are developed and then customized separately. Each model is validated further using physical test data.

This testing approach is based on a step-by-step validation of cell to module to pack, whereas at the pack level, different dummy packs are used to evaluate thermal propagation behavior. The cascaded testing approach can be optimized if any data (e.g. cell data) are already available. Experimental data can be collected early in development, without building a fully functional battery pack.

After the models are validated with physical test data, they are combined into a comprehensive coupled model, containing the thermal battery model as well as local heat transfer coefficients and fluid/gas temperatures from the venting gas model. Finally, the design is tested and validated as a complete battery pack.

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EV battery pack manufacturer Romeo Systems plans to go public through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called RMG Acquisition in a $1.33-billion deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2020. The combined company will be listed on the NYSE under the symbol RMO. The transaction is expected to raise $384 million for Romeo Systems (aka Romeo Power Technology). The company plans to use the proceeds for capacity expansion and R&D to further develop battery technologies for commercial vehicles.

Romeo Systems is a five-year-old company based in the Los Angeles area. It provides batteries, in partnership

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Image courtesy of Romeo Systems

Battery pack maker Romeo Systems to go public in $1.33-billion SPAC deal

with Tier 1 supplier BorgWarner (which owns 20% of Romeo), mainly to commercial truck manufacturers in North America and Europe.

Romeo has raised $123 million in venture funding from BorgWarner, the Heritage Group and others.

11/1/20 12:21 PM

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THE TECH

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General Motors will use an almost completely wireless battery management system (wBMS)— the first of its kind, according to GM—for production EVs. This wireless system, developed with Analog Devices, will allow GM to power many types of EVs from a common set of battery components.

The wBMS is expected to drive GM’s Ultium-powered EVs to market faster by cutting the time needed to develop specific communication systems or redesign complex wiring schemes for each new vehicle. The system was designed to ensure the scalability of Ultium batteries across GM’s future EV lineup.

“Scalability and complexity reduction are a theme with our Ultium batteries—the wireless battery management system is the critical enabler of this amazing flexibility,” said GM Executive Director Kent Helfrich.

Software features can be updated in the field using GM’s Vehicle Intelligence Platform. The wBMS includes cybersecurity measures, such as hardware and software components that protect wireless communications.

GM says the wBMS will help EVs balance chemistry within the individual battery cell groups for optimal performance. It can also conduct real-time battery pack health checks and refocus the network of modules and sensors as needed, helping to safeguard battery health over a vehicle’s lifespan.

This wireless system also provides a repurposing capability for battery reuse in secondary applications. When the wireless packs are capacity-reduced to the point where they are no longer ideal for EVs but still functional as consistent power supplies, they can be combined with other wireless battery packs to form clean power generators.

“General Motors is paving the way toward an all-electric future, and Analog Devices is proud to work with this highly respected automotive leader on the next generation of EVs,” said Analog Devices VP Greg Henderson. “Our collaboration is aimed at accelerating the transition to EVs and a sustainable future.”

The wBMS will be standard on all GM vehicles powered by Ultium batteries.

Image courtesy of GM

GM to debut wireless EV BMS

contact-energy@serma.com

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11/1/20 12:23 PM

NH Research, a provider of power electronics test solutions for the automotive, aerospace, energy storage and renewable energy industries, has announced a new enterprise battery test lab management solution.

Enerlab is a top-level enterprise software solution that monitors, controls and manages battery test systems using Enerchron. It is designed to improve productivity, utilization and efficiency while ensuring safety by providing real-time control and access to lab and test information. Key capabilities include live camera views and full control of test programs, as well as customizable dashboards and

reporting tools.

Enerchron is a test executive created to simplify and accelerate battery test automation. It provides a variable-based test sequence editor, and allows integration and control of external software and hardware.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many employees are working from home. Enerlab provides a way to remotely manage all battery test stations within a facility, on a single dashboard, from one browser.

“Enterprises need a way to streamline battery testing across R&D labs and production lines,” said Product Director Martin Weiss. “Today, it has become even more important to have secure, remote access. Enerlab provides a convenient and effective way to monitor, control and manage all test stations in real time.”

Image courtesy of NH Research

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THE TECH

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE

DC LINK 22 Iss 51 pg 18-37.indd 22

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Mersen’s Fischerlink low-inductance busbar/ capacitor assembly for SiC DC-link

By Jeffrey Jenkins

EGB’s non-inductive thick film power resistors

The term DC link has traditionally referred to the junction between two power conversion stages where an energy storage element (almost always a capacitor) acts as a buffer for each.

A classic example is the capacitor placed between the rectifier and the voltage source inverter in a mains-supplied variable frequency drive (see Fig. 1). This capacitor accepts relatively low-frequency pulses of current from the rectifier while the inverter draws much higher frequency pulses of current from it, and the incoming and outgoing current pulses rarely coincide in time or magnitude. The capacitor not only allows for these pulses to happen at different times and at different frequencies—this is the energy buffer function—it also smooths the pulses out into more of a triangle or sawtooth shape, reducing the amount of peak-to-peak ripple in the process. The more capacitance in the DC link, the more energy can be stored, and the lower the ripple, but what if the energy source is already DC—like a battery, fuel cell, solar panel, etc? It might seem that no DC link capacitor would then be needed, but that’s only true if there are no parasitics to contend with in the source loop (that is, resistance and inductance). In the real world these parasitics are always pres-

SEP/OCT 2020

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THE TECH AC Mains

Rectifier

DC Link

Inverter

Motor

V3

V2

V1

present to the battery a current waveform that is D1 D3 D5 mostly DC with a bit of M1 M3 M5 D D D NMOS NMOS NMOS triangular ripple on top.

L1 Now it is only the stray L inductance of the bus C1 L2 structure between the DC 1000µ L link capacitor and switchL3 es that will give rise to L spikes at each transition, M2 M4 M6 and with care this inducNMOS NMOS NMOS D4 D6 D2 tance can be reduced to D D D 20 nH (i.e. by 50x) or less.

In regenerating mode, a similar situation applies, except this time the Figure 1 inverter is operating as a DC LINK: Capacitor between the rectifier and the voltage source inverter boost converter, presenting a relatively low ripple current load to the motor while delivering sharp, rectanent, and while drawing (or supplying) pulsating current gular pulses to the battery. The DC link capacitor performs through a resistance only gives rise to more ripple voltage the same functions and needs the same basic specifications, (similar to reducing the amount of capacitance, in fact), just with the direction of the current reversed. doing the same through an inductance causes voltage Obviously the DC link capacitor must itself have low spikes at the beginning and ending of each pulse, because inductance if it is to be effective, but it also needs to have inductors resist any change in current through them by low internal resistance (or ESR, for Equivalent Series creating a voltage to oppose such a change (according to Resistance), otherwise the AC component of the current the classic inductor equation, -V = L * [dI / dt]). waveform (i.e. the ripple) will cause it to overheat from I2R Putting things into a more concrete context, a modern traction inverter using SiC MOSFETs can switch from losses. In the bad old days, the only real choice of capacitor fully on to off, or vice versa, in less than 50 ns, and if that for high-power applications was the can-style aluminum inverter didn’t have a DC link capacitor and was drawing electrolytic, which features an extremely high capacitance 100 A pulses of current from per unit volume, but with the battery, then a mere 1 uH rather unimpressive ESR of inductance in the wiring specs due to the relatively (equivalent to about 1 m of high bulk resistance of its wire in free space!) would electrolyte. This made (and give rise to spikes of 2,000 still makes) “elkos” ideal V at every transition (to for mains-supplied applicaparaphrase the most famous tions, because considerable line from the movie Jaws, capacitance is needed to you’re gonna need a bigger smooth out the low-freswitch…). With the DC link quency ripple from mains capacitor in place, however, rectification, and that all the inverter will supply the but assures that there will rectangular pulses of current be a sufficiently low ESR to drawn by the switches and keep heating from both the

If that inverter didn’t have a DC link capacitor and was drawing 100 A pulses of current from the battery, then a mere 1 uH of inductance in the wiring would give rise to spikes of 2000 V at every transition.

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low- and high-frequency ripple components under control. For the traction drive in an EV, however, there is no low-frequency ripple from mains rectification, of course, so relatively little capacitance is actually needed—just enough to decouple the battery loop inductance and filter the high-frequency ripple reflected from the inverter, in fact. Capacitors with a plastic film dielectric (especially polypropylene), however, feature extremely low ESR (because current does not have to pass through an electrolyte), while their much lower capacitance per unit volume is not much of a downside when the source is already DC. Furthermore, there is a practical upper limit on the voltage rating for elkos of around 450 V (higher is possible, you just pay dearly for it), whereas the opposite situation applies to film capacitors—the dielectric strength per unit thickness is so high for most plastics (15-40 kV/mm) that it is impractical to go below a certain voltage rating.

The extremely low ESR of film capacitors is mostly a plus for DC link applications, but one potential issue is the exacerbation of resonance effects, especially in multi-drive systems. Any time an inductor (e.g. the battery loop inductance) meets a capacitor (e.g. the DC link capacitance), a resonant network is formed, and this can resonate (or “ring” in the argot) when hit with a steeply rising pulse of current. However, there needs to be a reasonable balance between the inductance and capacitance for resonance to occur, and the LC network can’t

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THE TECH

Customized DC-link capacitors for HV traction inverters by TDK Electronics

be loaded down too much (or “damped” in the argot). The relatively high ESR of elkos actually helps them dampen out any ringing, while the very low ESR of film capacitors has the opposite effect. In some cases, one is forced to resort to the rather perverse solution of intentionally increasing the ESR of some or all of the film capacitors in the DC link to effectively form a parallel damping network. The resistance in a parallel damping network must have extremely low self-inductance to be effective (e.g. something like a disc of resistive material in between the capacitor studs and bus plates) and it will get hot in normal operation, which the capacitors won’t like one bit, so this presents what the military likes to euphemistically call “an opportunity to excel.”

Another major consideration is the pre-charging of the DC link capacitance. At relatively low voltages (<36 V or so), turning on a switch which directly feeds a capacitor might be okay, but at the >350 V typical of most EV traction batteries, that’s just asking for trouble. The issue is inrush current, which can be estimated with Ohm’s law as I = V / R, where V is the difference between the supply and capacitor voltage and R is the total loop resistance, including the ESR of the capacitor as well as the internal resistance of the battery. Unlike with resonance effects, however, the additional ESR of aluminum electrolytics is unlikely to be of much help here—after all, if the battery loop resistance is 100 mΩ then inrush will be on the order of 3500 A! Modern hydrogen-filled contactors are good at handling high peak currents, yes, but not that good. This

extreme amount of inrush can also excite resonances when there otherwise wouldn’t be enough inductance present (because energy stored in an inductor is proportional to I2).

The solution is to slowly charge up the DC link capacitance via a resistor before closing the main contactor, or pre-charging, and while it seems fairly straightforward at first glance, implementing it in the real world can be a real headache, starting with the deceptively difficult question of the power rating for the resistor.

If subjected to a continuous voltage, a resistor must be rated to dissipate at least as much power as determined by Ohm’s law (P = V2 / R), but the current through a resistor charging a capacitor decreases as the voltage on the capacitor rises, and the time to complete charging is estimated as 5RC (that is, five RC time constants). For example, if a 500 uF DC link capacitor needs to be brought up to 350 V within 2 seconds (storing 30.6 J in the process), this requires a resistance of 800 Ω and the ability to withstand a peak power of 153 W (and a peak current of ~0.44 A).

The average power dissipated by the pre-charge resistor depends on how often this cycle is repeated, however, and coming up with a reasonable estimate of that is where the headache begins. Let’s assume that our EV customers won’t try cycling power more often than every 10 seconds (though my experience tells me otherwise…), then the average power dissipated in the pre-charge resistance will be a mere 3 W. That would seem to suggest that a 5 W resistor should suffice here, but that very much depends on the specific construction of said resistor. More specifically, wirewound resistors are renowned for handling high peak powers and brief overloads compared to other constructions, so they excel at pre-charge duty (though metal oxide resistors are very suitable as well). The types that don’t do so well here are the various spiral or serpentine resistive film constructions, whether through-hole or surface-mount. One possible exception is the planar thick film type, in which a sheet of resistive material is deposited onto a ceramic surface, as it should have a very high peak-to-average-power rating.

Regardless of the construction, if the resistor datasheet

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■

■■■

Elektro-Automatik

gives a short-term overload rating, then it is possible to evaluate it for pre-charge duty. For example, one datasheet for a metal oxide resistor gives both a short-term overload rating of 2.5x the working voltage for 5 seconds, and a pulse power rating of 4x working voltage for 1 second with 25 seconds rest (where “working voltage” is also from Ohm’s law, V = [PR]0.5). Converting both overload ratings into energy (watt-seconds/Joules) gives ~156 J for the 5 s overload, but just 80 J for the 1 s pulse, hence one should be very wary of extrapolating the peak power down to shorter periods of time than given in the datasheet. The benefit in going with wirewound over metal oxide is clearly exemplified in one datasheet covering both types of resistors from the same manufacturer. It states that the wirewound versions can withstand 10x rated power for 5 seconds, while the metal oxide versions can take 5x rated power for 5 seconds, or half as much. That suggests that a 3 W wirewound resistor from this series could be used—the energy rating is 3 W * 10x * 5 s, or 150 J, which far exceeds the 30.6 J stored in our example—but keep reading the fine print, because the 3 W size is limited to 250 V max, while the 5 W size could just scrape by on its 350 V max rating. Likely the 5 W size would be okay here, but I can’t help but be reminded of another classic movie quote, this time from Dirty Harry: “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well do ya, punk?”

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Iss 51 pg 18-37.indd 27

Tel. +1 858-836-1300 • sales@elektroautomatik.com www.elektroautomatik.us/psb

11/1/20 12:26 PM

THE TECH

BUILD IN-HOUSE OR SOURCE AND INTEGRATE? Images courtesy of Proterra

PROTERRA BEEFS UP ITS BATTERY EXPERTISE

By Charles Morris ince its founding in 2004, Proterra has grown to become North Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s largest supplier of electric buses. The company has sold some 950 buses to transit agencies, airports, universities, national parks and private companies in 43 states and provinces. Under its Proterra Powered program, the company provides powertrains to other vehicle makersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; school buses for Thomas Built Buses, coach buses for Van Hool, delivery trucks for Daimler subsidiary Freightliner Custom Chassis. The Proterra Energy division offers a turnkey electrification solution for fleets, including financing, charging infrastructure and maintenance.

Like a certain California EV-maker, Proterra has found it expedient to develop many components in-house. The company builds its own battery packs, and has a current

S

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Q&A with CTO Dustin Grace production capacity of 500 megawatt-hours per year.

It uses NMC cylindrical cells, which are sourced from many different suppliers.

For vehicle OEMs, however, it’s not always so simple to decide which EV systems to design from the ground up internally and which to source from suppliers and integrate into their platforms. It takes a lot of time and capital to recruit the right team and then design, validate and produce high-quality systems at scale.

To learn more about Proterra’s heavy-duty EV system development, Charged recently spoke with Chief Technology Officer Dustin Grace.

Q Charged: Tell us more about the components that

you build in-house.

A Dustin: The battery is the most vertically integrated.

We take cells, and then we do custom-developed battery modules of various shapes and sizes, and build those into various shapes and sizes of ESS. [Builders of heavy-duty EVs tend to use the term energy storage system, or ESS, which may consist of more than one battery pack.]

On the drivetrains, we’re more of an integrator of components. Critical components such as the motor we source through a third party, which completely develops the motor to spec for us. Likewise, the gearbox was a custom development that we [previously] sourced through Allison Transmission, but that’s since been transitioned back under our roof. The inverter, we also work with a third party on that.

DuoPower, which is a new drivetrain offering that goes into our transit buses, is sort of an amalgamation of

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Images courtesy of Proterra

THE TECH

different components that we’ve selected or made to spec using industry partners. We developed that into an integrated eAxle package, and then we do our own software and controls for that unit.

Q Charged: It sounds like you use a mix of strategies.

You’re buying components from other suppliers, but you’re working closely with them to customize the stuff to your specifications.

A Dustin: Yeah. It’s still sort of an early part of the

industry, so it’s not so easy to just go out and buy what you need. We have looked at vertical integration of drivetrain systems, similar to what we do with batteries, and determined that this integration strategy is more appropriate for us at this time.

Q Charged: Tell me about that process of deciding

what’s appropriate. If you’re looking at a particular component, how do you decide whether to build it in-house or get somebody to build it?

A Dustin: There’s no rule book on that one. We certainly have a lot of internal strategy debate, whether it’s at the technical level, or the leadership level, or even the board level, trying to understand where Proterra is going to offer the most value in this commercial vehicle space.

Certainly, in the battery space, [we made] the decision to

In the battery space, [we made] the decision to bring that internal. We went full vertical. It was really all about performance. bring that internal. We went full vertical. It was really all about performance.

We wanted to make sure that we had a volume on the bus where we knew we could package our battery packs.

It was below the floor, in between the axles, about 1,700 liters of space, and going out into the industry and either asking somebody to do a custom design, or buying whatever was off the shelf at the time, certainly proved not to be the best way to maximize the energy and, thereby, the range on the bus. That one was pretty simple. It certainly required a lot of capital and recruiting a world-class team here in Silicon Valley to be able to bite off something that big, but if you’re trying to penetrate a new electrification industry, range is certainly going to be the top metric that you’re weighed against.

Secondarily, on that battery decision, I think we looked a lot at cost. We made that decision four-and-a-half or five years ago. To buy a battery pack in that mid-decade era was extremely expensive. When you’re trying

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to package as much energy onboard a vehicle as we were, that dollar per kilowatt-hour measure is very, very critical. Internalizing that and taking a component that was almost one third of the volume cost of the bus and reducing that as much as possible was critical [in order to make] a competitive product.

Likewise, in the drivetrain space, there really hasn’t been a Class 8-capable drivetrain that would work on a transit bus. Back in 2010 or 2011, we took the approach of working with a third-party motor inverter manufacturer and a third-party transmission manufacturer. Then we did all the mechanical integration of that transverse axle and built a software team around that to develop the controls to make sure we were going to be able to operate that system efficiently and smoothly in our vehicles.

That one happened a bit more naturally at the outset of Proterra becoming a bus OEM. Then, we kicked off our battery strategy in 2015, 2016.

We were obviously focusing on range with the battery, but we needed to focus on efficiency with the drive system to maximize the range, to really get to the razor’s edge of how efficient our vehicle could be. It became clear very early that we needed to develop a bespoke system. Range and efficiency are the two most critical metrics for an EV. That’s why we embarked on such difficult missions.

Q Charged: How do your heavy-duty battery packs

compare to passenger car packs? They’re bigger, but are there some other technical differences?

A Dustin: Obviously, we’re in a market where we’re not

trying to get people to buy our product because it’s sexy, or anything like that. We’re trying to sell them a product

Taking a component that was almost one third of the volume cost of the bus and reducing that as much as possible was critical [in order to make] a competitive product.

because it should save them money over the life of the vehicle. A really big part of that is starting with a cell and developing a battery pack that can survive the entire life of rigorous use. That goes all the way down to cycle life of the cell.

We want to make sure our cells can safely cycle over 4,000 cycles. That means that you’re going to be able to charge and discharge it once a day for every single day of the year for 12 years or more. If you were to do that on a passenger vehicle, that’s where you get into the million-mile battery topic. But that’s table stakes in our industry. We have to have a battery that can cycle that much. Beyond that, transit buses going down the road 40,000 miles a year are going to see a lot more vibration abuse and environmental exposure. We’ve got to make

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THE TECH

Transit buses going down the road 40,000 miles a year are going to see a lot more vibration abuse and environmental exposure. We’ve got to make them very robust.

We’ve got to make them at a very high level of quality. them very robust. We’ve got to make them at a very high level of quality. We’ve got to make all the interconnections in a heavy-duty spirit rather than a light-duty spirit.

Q Charged: Some of the testing you do—temperature and vibration, and stuff like that—is pretty standard in the industry, but you’ve also developed some of your own proprietary tests. Can you tell us a little more about those?

A Dustin: We probably spend most of our time figuring out Proterra requirements by focusing on a safety topic. It’s one thing to make a vehicle go down the road as expected, but we’re putting 77 souls aboard our transit bus. They could be elderly or disabled. Our school buses carry 81 kids.

There’s another layer of safety prognostication of what could go wrong, and then testing—a big-time focus on safety.

It starts with passive propagation resistance (PPR), and that’s basically assuring that if there was ever a cell defect, if there was ever anything that made its way through a cell supplier’s quality check process, and Proterra’s quality check processes, and if there was ever a latent failure, at any corner case, a single cell failing will not cascade to a neighboring cell and cause a safety event outside of the bus.

That’s very unique to Proterra—it’s something we’ve adopted. There’s a couple of UL certifications, UL 2580 and UL 1973. We’re working to get that into the industry. It’s very important, obviously, to be as safe as possible. Then, beyond that passive layer of safety, in terms of the pack, there’s just the ruggedization of the battery.

New York City Transit came to us a few years ago and said, “What happens if a manhole cover explodes out of the ground? Because it’s happened here. It happens all the time.”

We said, “We don’t know, but we’ll figure that out. We’ll make it part of our testing review.” Now, we have a giant manhole cover hanging in our test facility so that every new material or type of base plate that we offer on a battery pack goes through this internal testing. It drops a manhole cover with about two megajoules of energy onto the battery.

Q Charged: So, that’s not a theoretical scenario? That’s something that really does happen, at least in New York?

A Dustin: That’s right. There’s a phenomenal video of a

manhole cover that shot through the floor of a diesel transit bus, and actually impacted the passenger’s legs. The passenger was okay. But you can imagine that’s why they asked the question and why we answered it.

Q Charged: Permanent magnet versus induction

motors. Which do you favor? Or are you using both?

A Dustin: I think both are great systems, and you’ll continue to see both in various EV applications. You’ll primarily see permanent magnet machines in heavy-duty vehicles. A lot of that has to do with the torque capabilities and efficiency it needs, and the capability, I would say, to absorb some of that cost that you’re going to get from that system.

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Images courtesy of Proterra

Q Charged: We read a lot about

batteries and motors, but what are some other components that people don’t tend to think about that are important?

The biggest impact is none at all.

A Dustin: Charging infrastructure is often overlooked—it’s definitely the least sexy part of the business, but it’s also one of the most critical. We recognized very early on that if you deliver a bus and you don’t have a reliable means to charge that bus, it reflects poorly on the bus.

For the last few years, we collaborated with a third party who developed inverter gear for microgrids, and basically built an industrial charger with a custom dispenser for that product. I think reliability matters whatever market you’re in, but when it comes to fleet vehicles, there’s certainly a higher demand for getting to that 99.9% uptime requirement. Developing that gear, even off-board the vehicle, is hypercritical to hit those types of reliability targets.

Q Charged: That chimes with

what we’ve been hearing from a number of companies—fleets want to go electric, so they start buying some EVs, but they soon realize that there’s a lot more to charging than they thought, and they need some help. You have a separate division that takes care of that, called Proterra Energy.

A Dustin: I joined Proterra in September 2015. We spent about 18 months developing the first battery pack, and went to production with that vehicle around May 2017. At the time, our plan was to

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leverage a lot of the light-duty chargers that you might see in shopping malls, and other consumer outlets, but we very quickly discovered that that type of charger, with those power levels, and with those reliability ratings, was just not going to cut it for our industry. Relying on the commoditization of those was a poor strategy for us, so we quickly realized we had to bring that in-house. The initiation of the Proterra Energy business unit was around late 2017.

Along with the hardware, Proterra Energy is very, very focused on the end-to-end integration of that hardware.

It’s an infrastructure project with project managers, with folks that are well-connected with utilities and construction firms. There’s a financing element as well. Proterra is partnered with Mitsui, who is one of our investors, for a credit facility, so we’re actually capable of providing financing for those systems.

Aside from that, there are other pieces in Proterra Energy, like our software. APEX, our connected vehicle platform, is basically a software interface. Our customers can not only look up their vehicles and understand how they’re performing or where they’re at, but they can engage in charge management functions to minimize the demand of their fleet charging on the grid.

There’s a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) side of that as well, which we’re currently developing and launching with Dominion Energy next summer. We’re taking a similar approach to our fleet infrastructure business, and applying it to make our vehicles stationary batteries when they’re parked.

Q Charged: How far along are we with V2G? Is that

still pretty much in the pilot stage?

A Dustin: I would definitely consider it pilot stage.

There’s a lot of clickbait out there on it—we recognize that, but there’s definitely a handful of systems that are coming to fruition, in the next, say, 6 to 12 months. I think Proterra’s is probably the most real, and exciting, and scaled deployment of it. I think you’re going to see a lot more of it—the whole model for purchasing a school bus, in this decade, is going to change drastically if utilities catch on to this.

Q Charged: You build transit buses in-house, but

you’re working with other companies on the school buses.

Images courtesy of Proterra

THE TECH

We recognized very early on that if you deliver a bus and you don’t have a reliable means to charge that bus, it reflects poorly on the bus.

A Dustin: That’s right. The school bus project is kind of the perfect way to imagine how our business unit Proterra Powered is going to function with our partners. For the school bus, basically, we took all the systems out of our bus. It was our battery system, our transverse axle drive system, our vehicle controller, all the software, the high-voltage componentry—even our telemetry unit and our APEX system are being employed for that system. We partner with Thomas Built Bus, and we’re working with them to integrate our entire system into their vehicle.

Then they manufacture and sell the vehicle.

Q Charged: What are the specific differences between

electrifying a transit bus versus a school bus?

A Dustin: They’re two very different industries. Definitely different in size. There’s probably, on average, 6,000 transit buses sold in the United States per year, and 40,000 school buses. The assets themselves also cost significantly different amounts. A school bus, you might say, is roughly one third of the cost of a transit bus. That

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probably holds true whether it’s EV or diesel for this rough math.

The vehicles are quite a bit different. Transit buses are far more sophisticated. They’re developed to withstand rigors for a longer life cycle. I think your average transit bus wants to drive about 40,000 miles a year, whereas your average school bus wants to drive about 12,000 miles a year.

Typically, you’ve got most of your school bus fleet parked over summertime, at least in the US, and that’s where the really interesting opportunity for V2G comes in.

In the transit space, V2G will have maybe less of an identifiable application right out of the gate, because most of those buses are being used all the time, all year. In the school bus [segment], you’ve got this mega-fleet that’s just parked, especially during the months that you need it [in much of the US, electricity usage tends to be not only heavier, but more variable, during summer]. There’s a really, really good synergy right there.

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THE TECH Images courtesy of Proterra

Q Charged: How does this affect the relative business

cases for the two types of buses? Does that mean that school buses represent an even better candidate for electrification?

A Dustin: Maybe on paper, it’s a bit more obvious, but

I wouldn’t necessarily say one is better than the other, because I think they’re both prime candidates. It makes absolute sense for both of them to be electric, but certainly, it’s an easier task, and arguably just as important. They’re hauling around kids in these [school buses], and protecting their lungs from diesel soot is probably one of the most important things we could be doing right now for our country.

Q Charged: How many customers are you working

with on your Proterra Energy service?

A Dustin: Pretty much every transit agency that we sell buses to, our Proterra Energy business unit gets involved with. If you end up with a 12- or 18-month wait time for transit buses, our infrastructure team on the Proterra Energy side usually engages just a few months later to start the planning process.

The Edmonton Transit Service project, I would venture to say, is probably the most sophisticated e-bus infrastructure project operating in the world right now. It’s got a lot of the new technology that we had to pioneer, and they were an awesome customer that frankly drove us to do something that complicated. Some of our more involved projects are the Chicago Transit Authority, and also Foothill Transit, which was our very first customer.

They’ve been with us as we’ve evolved the bus and the charging infrastructure over time.

Q Charged: Tell us a bit about your new H Series

battery pack.

We often cite a Frost & Sullivan report...that new transit bus orders will be 50% EV in 2025.

A Dustin: Proterra is pretty well understood as a transit bus OEM. Now we’re trying to increase awareness in the industry that we’re focusing on penetration of other heavy-duty EV markets: fleet vehicles, machines for construction, rail projects, all that kind of stuff. In those industries, there’s a very specific package that you often see in these vehicles, which is a classic ladder-frame chassis rail. For this we developed the H Series battery pack. It’s based on very similar architecture to our S Series, which goes in our transit bus, but it changes a critical dimension: the width of the pack. We’ve also baked the capability to change the voltage of the module inside of it to four different levels.

We end up with a very well-sized battery pack that can be energy-matched to our customers’ needs, and also voltage-matched. It packages really nicely within the frame rails of a typical vehicle—or rotated 90 degrees, kind of in a saddlebag architecture, outside the rails, while still providing ground clearance.

Q Charged: How far away are we from seeing buses electrified all over the US? How many years before diesel buses are on their way out?

A Dustin: I think you’re seeing the chinks in the armor

today, if you look at the statistics. In our investor decks, we often cite a Frost & Sullivan report, just because it’s third-party public. The forecast there is that new transit bus orders will be 50% EV in 2025. If you want to call that the tipping point where majority market share has moved to [electric], we’re pretty confident that in 2025, at least half of the buses sold should be EVs. Today, it’s probably 10%, maybe 12%.

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THE VEHICLES

Amazon is pursuing a multi-track strategy to electrify its delivery fleet. The company already operates hundreds of EVs worldwide, including e-cargo bikes in New York City and Europe. It plans to add 1,800 electric delivery vehicles to its European fleet this year, and 10,000 in India by 2025. The retail/delivery/IT conglomerate has ordered electric vans from Mercedes-Benz and trucks from Lion Electric.

However, the news that really turned up the voltage was last September’s announcement that Amazon would order 100,000 electric delivery vans from Michigan-based startup Rivian. These are not off-the-shelf vehicles—the two companies have been working closely together to develop a custom van that’s optimized for Amazon’s delivery operations.

Now Amazon has given us a brief peak at the new vehicle in a short video.

The van, built on Rivian’s “skateboard” platform, is expected to have a range of 150 miles. Innovations include a large windshield to enhance driver visibility, a full suite of sensors, exterior cameras that give the driver a 360-degree view outside the vehicle, and a menu of driver-assist features.

“When we set out to create our first customized electric delivery vehicle with Rivian, we knew that it needed to far surpass any other delivery vehicle,” said Ross Rachey, Director of Amazon’s Global Fleet and Products.

“We wanted drivers to love using it and customers to feel excited when they saw it pulling up to their home. We combined Rivian’s technology with our delivery logistics knowledge, and the result is what you see here—the future of last-mile delivery.”

“We prioritized safety and functionality to create a vehicle that’s optimized for package delivery,” said Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe. “We thought through how drivers get in and out of the van, what the workspace feels like, and what the workflow is for delivering packages.”

This is one of three different models that Amazon has developed with Rivian. The company hopes to have

Images courtesy of Amazon

Amazon reveals first of Rivian electric delivery vans

10,000 of the custom EVs on the road in 2022, and all 100,000 by 2030.

“We hope our custom electric vehicle helps create a sense of urgency in the industry to think big about embracing sustainable technology and solutions—whether you’re a package delivery company, a logistics company, an ice cream manufacturer, or almost anyone else with vehicles on the road,” said Rachey.

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Image courtesy of Fluid Truck

Rental platform Fluid Truck orders 600 Lightning Electric trucks Fluid Truck, a national truck rental platform, plans to add 600 Lightning Electric vehicles to its offerings, beginning in Q4 2020.

Fluid Truck allows businesses to rent vehicles through the company’s web site or mobile app, and pick them up from locations in major cities across the US at any time.

Fluid Truck’s 600-vehicle order includes an assortment of Lightning Electric Ford Transit 350HD delivery vans, Lightning Electric Ford E-450 Class 4 trucks, and Lightning Electric Hino 268 Class 6 trucks. The all-electric vehicles will be deployed in several US urban areas.

“We have been impressed with Lightning Systems’ capabilities and innovation in the EV space,” said James Eberhard, CEO and founder of Fluid Truck. “We believe that electric vehicles will be a great solution for businesses to get the job done sustainably.”

“This partnership provides a footprint for our commercial electric vehicles that will be available to vehicle operators on demand, across the US,” said Tim Reeser, CEO of Lightning Systems. He notes rising demand for EVs from commercial customers, as more cities around the world designate zero-emission zones. “We see that trend continuing, which will further increase the demand for commercial EVs, including rental vehicles, in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago.”

California Governor issues order to ban the sale of new fossil fuel vehicles by 2035 California Governor Gavin Newsom has issued an executive order requiring all new passenger vehicles sold in the state to be zero-emission by 2035. Some 15 countries have announced proposals to phase out legacy vehicles (and the UK recently brought its proposed ban forward to 2030), but California will be the first US state to do so.

The California Air Resources Board will develop regulations to mandate that all sales of new passenger cars and trucks be zero-emission by 2035. For medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, the deadline will be 2045 “where feasible,” except for drayage trucks, which must go zero-emission by 2035. CARB has already approved new regulations requiring truck manufacturers to begin the transition to zero emissions in 2024.

To ensure the needed charging infrastructure to support zero-emission vehicles, the governor’s order requires state agencies, in partnership with the private sector, to accelerate deployment of affordable fueling and charging options.

The executive order will not prevent Californians from owning gasoline-powered cars or selling them on the used car market. “We’re not taking anything away. We’re providing an abundance of new choices and new technology,” said Newsom during a news conference, where he signed the executive order on the hood of a Ford Mustang Mach-E. The San Francisco Chronicle noted that imposing the ban by way of an executive order could allow Newsom to avoid a pitched battle in the state legislature, where the oil industry commands plenty of influence.

The order includes several other anti-pollution measures that oil companies may not like. According to the governor’s office, it calls for new health and safety regulations to protect workers and communities from the impacts of oil extraction, supports companies that transition their oil production operations to cleaner alternatives, and directs the state to make sure taxpayers are not stuck with the bill to safely close and remediate former oil fields. The Governor is also asking the legislature to end the issuance of new fracking permits by 2024.

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Image courtesy of Lucid

THE VEHICLES

Lucid Motors releases pricing, performance specs for its upcoming EVs From raw material extraction through second-life applications, AVL offers a comprehensive battery solutions portfolio.

Lucid Motors has revealed more details about its upcoming Lucid Air model range.

The base model, called the Lucid Air, will start at $77,400. It has a single-motor powertrain (an optional dual-motor, all-wheel drive configuration is also available) with 480 horsepower and a projected EPA range of 406 miles. All Lucid models feature a 900-volt electrical architecture and DC fast charging capability. Customers who reserve now will receive three years of complimentary charging from the Electrify America network.

The Lucid Air features various luxurious appointments, including PurLuxe animal-free interior trim, the 34-inch Lucid Glass Cockpit curved display, and what the company says is the largest frunk ever fitted to an electric sedan. The Lucid Air model is also available with DreamDrive, Lucid’s advanced driver-assistance system.

The Lucid Air Touring model, which starts at $95,000, has a dual-motor, all-wheel-drive drive configuration, with 620 horsepower and a 406-mile range. Options include a Glass Canopy Roof and a wide range of choices for interior materials and finishes.

Following the example of Tesla, Lucid is beginning with a luxury vehicle, and hopes to introduce more affordable models in the future.

“The Lucid Air is a vehicle that thrills me personally because it delivers a level of performance, efficiency, and luxury that is currently unseen in today’s EVs,” said Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson. “What drives this company is creating the world’s best EV technology while making it progressively more attainable over time. We are setting the stage for broader adoption of the latest, game-changing EV technology.”

Reservations for the Lucid Air and Lucid Air Touring, as well as the Grand Touring ($139,000) and Dream Edition ($169,000) versions, can now be made at the Lucid Motors web site, or at the company’s recently opened Beverly Hills Studio and service center. Deliveries are scheduled to begin in early 2021.

www.avl.com

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Continuous improvement is the name of the game at Tesla, so the appearance of a new and improved version of Model 3 is welcome news, but no great surprise. After days of rumors and sneak peeks, Tesla officially added the refreshed Model 3 to its online configurator.

The new version includes several innovations that Tesla first introduced on Model Y, as well as (of course) more range and more acceleration.

As we reported in our recent cover story on Model Y (in our May/June issue), the crossover features a new thermal management gadget called the Octovalve, a heat pump system that’s far more efficient than the resistive heating system used in previous Tesla models.

This is now included on the refreshed Model 3, and it’s not unreasonable to speculate that it may have enabled

part of the increase in range. A source told Electrek that the range boost was enabled by a new “efficiency package.”

It’s a respectable range ramp-up: between 13 and 30 miles, depending on the variant. The Standard Range Plus now gets 263 miles, the Long Range achieves 353 miles, and the Performance reaches 315 miles.

A couple of other handy features have also appeared: a motorized trunk hatch (first seen on Model Y), a new center console, a heated steering wheel and an auto-dimming mirror. There are also several new wheel options and various aesthetic changes.

And now for the most useful improvement of all: faster acceleration across the board. The Performance model will now get you to 60 mph a full tenth of a second quicker!

Image courtesy of Tesla

Tesla Model 3 refresh adds more range and a few handy features

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THE VEHICLES

Former Volvo Trucks exec launches electric truck startup Patrick Collignon, former COO for Volvo Trucks North and South America, has launched a startup called Trova Commercial Vehicles. The new company, which is located at a business incubation center in Fairlawn, Virginia, offers customized engineering and manufacturing expertise for electric trucks. TrovaCV will offer its industrial model and manufacturing capability to other commercial vehicle OEMs, and also develop its own fully electric vehicle.

Collignon has more than 30 years of international experience in the commercial vehicle industry with GM and the Volvo Group. He has incubated several companies, and held board positions in economic and industry federations. In 2007, he was instrumental in making the Volvo plant in Ghent, Belgium, a carbon-neutral automotive plant.

“This is an exciting time, as the electric commercial vehicle market is being reshaped,” says Collignon, founder and CEO of the new company. “While technology and innovation have made it possible to convert fuel-powered commercial vehicles into electric vehicles, we haven’t seen a production model capable of producing the required volume of fully electric commercial vehicles to meet the demand. We believe that our engineering approach will offer OEMs the opportunity to build a higher volume of electric vehicles at a lower cost. At the same time, we will utilize our chassis design experience to achieve a complete EV build design from the ground up.”

Lordstown Motors has completed its business combination with DiamondPeak Holdings, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

For those of you who haven’t been following the EV “stock market frenzy,” a merger with a SPAC is the currently fashionable way for a startup company to go public—it’s quicker and involves less paperwork than the traditional IPO. Lordstown Motors’ Class A shares will now trade on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker symbol RIDE. Lordstown unveiled the prototype of its Endurance pickup truck in June 2020, and it remains on pace to begin production in the second half of 2021. The Endurance, which is aimed at the commercial fleet market, uses an innovative in-wheel hub motor design.

In 2019, General Motors sold its former auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio to the startup automaker, which grew out of the Workhorse Group, an EV builder that’s been around since 1998. The compelling story of a shuttered plant resurrected by the growing clean energy economy has attracted a lot of positive press coverage.

GM is naturally happy to see some of its former employees find new positions. “GM is excited about the progress Lordstown Motors is making, because we believe they will help create more good-paying jobs in Ohio and especially in the Lordstown community,” said a company spokesperson. GM and LG Chem have announced plans to invest up to $2.3 billion in a battery cell assembly plant in the area that some are now calling Voltage Valley.

“We have a near production-ready plant and approximately $675 million in proceeds from this transaction, which is more than enough funding to get us through initial production,” said Lordstown founder and CEO Steve Burns. “We look forward to combining our EV startup culture with the infrastructure and assets we already have in place in order to successfully achieve our production milestones.”

Images courtesy of Lordstown

Lordstown finalizes SPAC deal, starts trading on NASDAQ

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Volta Power Systems is providing a lithium-ion battery system for its 2021 Living Vehicle luxury travel trailer.

The Living Vehicle system offers up to 3,080 watts of solar power and 47.6 kWh of energy storage. Living Vehicle owners can also charge their EVs using optional 240-volt exportable power.

Living Vehicle’s luxury trailers (which start at $229,995) are designed to enable owners to maximize their time off-grid. They feature energy storage, redundant generation and water conservation technology to preserve and extend utility resources for days or weeks while still supporting high-power amenities such as air-conditioning, appliances and entertainment.

Image courtesy of Volta Power Systems

Luxury travel trailer features solar panels, EV charging, battery storage

Living Vehicle is releasing three different models for 2021, all with Volta systems and solar power systems.

The Volta system can charge from shore power, solar panels, an optional alternator (installed in a gasoline or diesel tow vehicle), or an optional Cummins generator.

These layers of redundant power supply can also provide backup power in severe weather or natural disasters.

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Honda ditches diesels, plans to phase out gas-only cars in Europe in 2022

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Honda has long been considered an electromobility laggard, but tightening emissions regulations in Europe are forcing its hand. According to The Times, Honda has brought its previously-announced 2025 deadline for phasing out non-hybrid cars in the European market forward by three years.

“Honda has accelerated its plans for all its European mainstream car models to be electrified from 2025 to 2022 and our hybrid technology will play a key role in achieving this goal,” a spokesperson told Auto Express.

“We plan for European production of diesel powertrains to cease by the end of 2022. However, on a local level in the UK, we have now stopped selling diesel cars.”

“Regulations are becoming clearer in Europe and we’re responding to that challenge,” Tom Gardner, Honda’s Senior VP for Europe, told Sky News. “Honda is the world’s largest engine manufacturer, and we are committing to ending all mainstream non-electrified petrol and diesel production for Europe by the end of 2022.”

Earlier this year, Honda shuttered its Swindon factory in southwest England. The plant, which was producing some 100,000 Civics per year, and employed 3,500 people, was the company’s only factory in the EU. Hondas bound for Europe will now be imported from Asia, where the company has an established supply chain for its electric powertrains and batteries, as Mr. Gardner explained.

“Unfortunately, we’ve had to make a tough decision, and similar decisions are being made across the industry,” he said. “We have to optimize our resources, our capabilities and our production systems to deliver these new vehicles. Electrification has a number of challenges for the powertrain, the battery supply and all of those things, for us, are optimized in the Japan and Asia region.”

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New Volta Zero electric truck designed for safety and sustainability Startup Volta Trucks has revealed its first vehicle, a purpose-built fully-electric 16-ton commercial vehicle designed specifically for inner-city parcel and freight distribution.

The new Volta Zero will begin trials with European parcel delivery and logistics companies in the first half of 2021. The company has secured several orders for customer-specific vehicles, which are to be delivered when production starts in 2022.

“By removing the traditional internal combustion engine that has always sat high in the front of a truck, we had a clean sheet of paper to design the commercial vehicle suitable for the 21st century, rethinking the layout and design of the truck,” said Volta Zero Lead Designer Carsten Astheimer. “We had three main priorities for the design of the cab. We wanted it to be best in class for safety, ease and efficiency of ingress and egress, and the best driver environment of any truck on the market.”

“Safety is at the heart of the Volta brand,” said Volta founder Carl-Magnus Norden. “In London, as an example, 23% of pedestrian fatalities and 58% of cyclist deaths involve an HGV, yet large trucks only account for 4% of road miles. This is clearly unacceptable and must change.

The Volta Zero completely reimagines the commercial vehicle, ensuring it can operate safely with all road users and become a friend of the zero-emission city.”

“The driver of a Volta Zero has a wide 220 degrees of direct vision around the vehicle,” says Volta. “This panoramic view of the surroundings through a glasshouse-style cab is designed to deliver a Transport for London five-star Direct Vision Standard rating for optimum visibility and the reduction of blind spots. The driver sits far lower than in a conventional truck, with their eye-line at around 1.8 meters. This mirrors the height of pedestrians and other road users nearby for easy visual communication between the driver and others around.”

The Volta Zero will offer an array of driver assistance systems, including Active Steering, Road Sign Assist, Reversing Assistant, Lane Change Assist and Lane Departure Warning.

Image courtesy of Volta Trucks

THE VEHICLES

The truck’s exterior body panels will use a sustainably sourced natural flax material and biodegradable resin.

The high-tech flax weave was developed by supplier Bcomp of Switzerland, in collaboration with the European Space Agency. The lightweight fiber matting is designed to be almost carbon-neutral over its lifecycle.

The Volta Zero will offer a range of 150-200 km (95125 miles), sufficient for daily use as a last-mile delivery vehicle. It features an e-axle driving the rear wheels, rather than a conventional electric motor and driveshaft.

The e-truck has a payload of 8,600 kg, and is designed to accommodate 16 Euro pallets. Gross vehicle weight is 16,000 kg. A refrigerated cargo box will also be available.

Volta has chosen Lithium Iron Phosphate battery technology, which it considers well suited to a large commercial vehicle. LFP cells deliver “long cycle life, robust cell design, and good thermal stability, enhancing safety.”

The battery pack, which has a capacity of 160-200 kWh, is located between the chassis rails, “as far away from an accident as possible.” A modular battery system will enable Volta to adapt the vehicle to an operator’s specific requirements.

Under Volta’s Truck as a Service offering, fleet managers can pay a single monthly fee that includes servicing, maintenance, insurance, training, and even a replacement vehicle when needed.

“Volta Trucks is redefining the perception of the large commercial vehicle, and how it operates in and integrates with the zero-emission towns and cities of the future,” said Volta CEO Rob Fowler. “This is made possible by the three pillars that define both Volta Trucks as a business and the Volta Zero: safety, sustainability and electrification. Add to that our unique Truck as a Service proposition, which reimagines a fleet manager’s business model.”

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Image courtesy of Proterra

Proterra’s ZX5 next-generation electric transit bus Proterra has sold electric buses to over 120 customers in North America— more than any other manufacturer, the company claims. Now Proterra has introduced its fifth-generation battery-electric transit vehicle, the Proterra ZX5 electric bus.

The ZX5 is available in 35-foot and 40-foot versions, and with a battery capacity of 220, 440 or 660 kWh. The 660 kWh option (40-foot version only) delivers up to 329 miles of range.

Compared to Proterra’s previous generation, the new ZX5 features a more streamlined body design, a lower vehicle height, new shocks and enhanced ergonomics designed to provide riders and drivers with a smoother riding experience. There’s also an additional front charging port for greater flexibility.

The ZX5 also offers faster acceleration and greater horsepower than earlier Proterra models. It can be configured with Proterra’s standard ProDrive drivetrain or its dual-motor DuoPower drivetrain. Proterra says its DuoPower drivetrain delivers nearly twice the horsepower and five times better fuel efficiency than a standard diesel engine. The DuoPower drivetrain’s two electric motors deliver 550 hp, accelerating a ZX5 bus from 0-20 mph in under six seconds. The DuoPower drivetrain can also propel a bus up a 25% grade, making it a good option for routes with steep hills.

Proterra’s battery systems are designed and manufactured at Proterra’s California battery manufacturing facility, and have logged over 13 million miles in mass transit service.

“A decade ago, Proterra delivered its first battery-electric transit bus. We were at the start of the transportation electrification revolution in North America,” said Proterra CEO Jack Allen. “As more cities and states make the commitment to 100% zero-emission fleets, Proterra is introducing new vehicle and battery technology to meet the needs of our customers. Our fifth-generation electric transit vehicle, the Proterra ZX5, is designed to tackle the toughest routes and terrains across North America.”

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THE VEHICLES

By John Voelcker

NISSAN ARIYA AND VOLKSWAGEN ID.4 BRING EV DRIVE TO COMPACT CROSSOVERS...CHASING TESLA MODEL Y

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Image courtesy of Nissan

Image courtesy of Volkswagen

NOTE: The information in this article was current as of late September 2020. Given the uncertain course of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it is always possible this article will have been superseded by breaking news. For the sake of our readers and their businesses, we hope not.

Can new electric entries in a hugely popular segment convince US buyers to buy EVs from Nissan and VW as family vehicles?

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THE VEHICLES

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wo new battery-electric models from major global car brands are about to bring electric cars into a category where they’ve been notably absent: family crossover utility vehicles. The 2021 Volkswagen ID.4 and 2022 Nissan Ariya will join the Tesla Model Y that’s already on sale to bring EV transport to tens of thousands of new US buyers who’d never consider a compact hatchback for a family car. At least, that’s the goal.

The VW ID.4, recently unveiled globally after months of leaks, is already in early production in Zwickau, Germany. It will be exported to the US for roughly two years, until it goes into production at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which now builds larger VW crossover models.

The Nissan Ariya, which made its global debut in July, will be built only in Japan. It will serve as Nissan’s “halo” car, the fi rst of many vehicles on all-new battery-electric underpinnings to be shared by Nissan and its partners Renault and Mitsubishi.

The Tesla Model Y, also a five-seat crossover, went on sale early this year. Other entries in the segment include the 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E, which is to go on sale within months, and future models from Hyundai, Kia, and probably a few General Motors brands.

T

Why crossovers matter Compact crossover utility vehicles have become the default vehicle choice for couples and small families. They’re roughly as popular as full-size pickup trucks, and have supplanted sedans and wagons in driveways and parking lots all over the US. Since they first launched in the mid1990s, crossovers have brought the advantages of larger, truck-based sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) to vehicles built on car platforms—giving them better handling, more comfortable rides and competitive fuel economy.

With five seats, a capacious load bay, optional all-wheel drive, and a high seating position, these crossovers are practical, affordable, and hugely popular. Four million were sold to US drivers last year, and the average price paid for one in August was $30,263, according to sales transaction data collated by Kelley Blue Book.

Multiple makers, led by Tesla, see five-seat crossovers as the way to bring mass-market buyers to EVs. Offer a familiar type of vehicle, with a more spacious cabin than its gasoline equivalent, the same cargo space, and more than 200 miles of range, and car shoppers

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Multiple makers, led by Tesla, see five-seat crossovers as the way to bring mass-market buyers to EVs. will start to consider a car that plugs in—which they wouldn’t when the only EV available was a hatchback.

Or so goes the argument.

Volkswagen ID.4: VW’s most important new EV Among automakers, the Volkswagen Group has by far the most aggressive goals and highest volumes planned for the dozens of electric models it will launch under multiple brands by 2025.

The new crossover EV is the linchpin of that strategy—

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THE VEHICLES Images courtesy of Volkswagen

the company says it will sell half a million ID.4 electric crossovers a year by 2025, fully one third of the 1.5 million EVs it expects to deliver annually. It will be built not only in Germany and the US, but also in China.

In previews for media held in September, VW of America executives underscored their belief that the ID.4 can compete head-to-head with the most popular compact crossovers in the country. Those include the Ford Escape, Honda CR-V, Nissan Rogue, Subaru Forester and Toyota RAV4.

Volkswagen believes the ID.4 will sell on its merits: the company’s internal tests show the electric utility is faster, quieter, and handles better than the most popular gasoline entries. Asked if the ID.4 would cannibalize sales of its own compact crossover with a combustion engine, the VW Tiguan, VWoA CEO Scott Keogh suggested it would bring new buyers to VW, including drivers of vehicles like the Subaru Forester—which comes from a brand that lags significantly in EV offerings.

For US buyers, the 1st Edition launch version of the VW ID.4 will feature an 82-kilowatt-hour liquid-cooled battery pack, a 150-kilowatt (201-horsepower) motor producing 228 pound-feet of torque that drives the rear

VW's internal tests show the ID.4 is faster, quieter, and handles better than the most popular gasoline entries. wheels, and an estimated EPA range of 250 miles. It will offer towing capacity of 2,700 pounds, an important capability for some buyers—though towing will cut into range substantially.

All-wheel drive will arrive during 2021 as an option for ID.4s in the US, with a second motor rated at 75 kW (101 hp) to power the front wheels. VW did not comment on projected EPA range for the AWD version.

All versions of the car will offer DC fast charging at up to 125 kW through a CCS connector. Just two days before the ID.4’s global launch, Volkswagen announced it would provide ID.4 buyers with three years of unlimited fast charging on the Electrify America nationwide network.

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How well the EA network will function for drivers new to EVs as ID.4 sales accelerate in 2021 remains to be seen; the ease of use and ubiquity of the Tesla Supercharger network is a high standard to match.

For simplicity, only seven basic build configurations of the ID.4 will be offered to US buyers. All versions will include adaptive cruise control, lane centering, and a variety of other advanced electronic safety and infotainment systems. VW says more than 90 percent of its 650 US dealers have signed up to offer the ID.4.

Prices for the low-end Volkswagen ID.4 Pro will start at $39,995 before national, state and local incentives. (VW says that in two years, once local-

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Images courtesy of Nissan

ized ID.4 production starts in Chattanooga, the base price will fall to roughly $35,000.) A $399 monthly lease is also available with a $3,300 down payment for buyers driving only 10,000 miles a year.

Once a $7,500 federal tax credit, state purchase incentives, and savings from driving on electricity versus gasoline, are factored in, VW says the effective price of an ID.4 can fall below $30,000—making it competitive with the high-volume crossovers.

Whether buyers do the math that way remains to be seen.

Ariya: Nissan’s Take 2 on EVs It’s been almost 10 years since the first Nissan Leaf electric car rolled off the production lines in October 2010. In July, the Leaf’s successor was formally revealed.

It’s the 2022 Nissan Ariya (pronounced “aria”), a compact crossover utility vehicle with a promised 300 miles of

Nissan will walk away from the CHAdeMO system it pioneered in the US, though Ariya will use it in certain Asian markets. range in at least one version, available all-wheel drive, and the lines of a sleek SUV. First previewed by a patent filling in April 2019, the Ariya Concept broke cover at the Tokyo Motor Show in October 2019. For a concept vehicle, it looked remarkably ready for production, including actual door handles and real side mirrors—two things often missing from concept cars. It had very large, very extravagant wheels, but that

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was about it. Indeed, the production car is all but identical.

Nissan says the Ariya will be offered with two battery capacities in the US: 65 and 90 kilowatt-hours. Both packs are liquid-cooled, meaning Nissan has learned its lesson about battery durability after using passive air cooling in the halfmillion Leafs it has built over the past 10 years.

While the Ariya won’t reach North America until late in 2021, Nissan has taken the unusual step of estimating its EPA range ratings already. The smaller 65 kWh pack will be rated at 210 miles or more in front-wheeldrive form, Nissan says, and at least 200 miles with all-wheel drive (which Nissan labels e4orce). The larger 90 kWh pack will deliver 300 miles in FWD form, and 270 miles with AWD. As for charging, the Ariya will CM

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Nissan will pitch performance as one of the Ariya’s main attractions. The highspec AWD 90 kWh model accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in 4.8 seconds. use the Combined Charging System (CCS) standard in North America, in both 125 and 350 kW versions. That means Nissan will walk away from the CHAdeMO system it pioneered in the US, although that will remain the charging standard for Ariyas sold in certain Asian markets.

The company will pitch performance as one of the Ariya’s main attractions—the high-spec AWD 90 kWh model will accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 4.8 seconds. Expect to see that compared to the same specification for Nissan’s legendary Z car, which goes from 0 to 60 in 4.7 seconds.

US pricing for the 2022 Nissan Ariya will start “around $40,000,” according to company officials.

Compact footprint, mid-size cabin While the Ariya looks big, it’s actually shorter than either the Ford Mustang Mach-E or the Tesla Model Y. It’s the length of the Nissan Rogue conventional crossover, but the company says it’s a compact vehicle with mid-size cabin space—making it “the most spacious vehicle in the class,” according to Nissan.

That’s possible thanks to a short nose and a long cabin, the same formula used by the far pricier Jaguar I-Pace. Like the Volkswagen ID.4, the Ariya has no front trunk under the hood. But by putting all the cabin heating and air-conditioning gear under there—along with a drive motor and power electronics—Nissan avoided having to connect the console between the seats to the dash. The resulting open area, it says, adds to the cabin’s sense of spaciousness.

The interior has a big 12.3-inch landscape touchscreen display stretching from behind the steering wheel to the center of the dash. Nissan has largely eliminated physical buttons, except for a knob that lets users alter vehicle settings and use the infotainment system. Climate controls are touch-sensitive icons with haptic feedback at the bottom. Tesla can pull that off—can Nissan?

Electronic systems are a necessity, and the Ariya will recognize each driver’s smartphone and adjust presets for that individual. The new EV will also pioneer the next generation of the company’s ProPilot driverassist technologies.

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THE VEHICLES

Battery-Electric Crossover Utility Vehicles SPECS COMPARISON Vehicle model

Rated/estimated ranges

Starting price (before delivery)

Fast charging spec

2020 TESLA MODEL Y (on sale now) Long Range

316 mi

$49,990

up to 250 kW, Tesla

Performance

291-315 mi

$59,990

up to 250 kW, Tesla

2021 FORD MUSTANG MACH-E (late 2020) Standard Range

230 mi (RWD), 210 mi (AWD)

$44,995

up to 115 kW, CCS

Extended Range

300 mi (RWD), 270 mi (AWD)

$56,700

up to 150 kW, CCS

GT

235 mi (AWD)

$61,00

up to 150 kW, CCS

$39,995

up to 125 kW, CCS

2021 VOLKSWAGEN ID.4 (Q1-2021) Pro

250 mi (RWD)

2022 NISSAN ARIYA (late 2021) Standard

N/A

$40,000

up to 130 kW, CCS

Long Range

300 mi (RWD)

NA

up to 130 kW, CCS

Developing the Future of Safer & More Efficient EV Technology • High capacity electrical contactors and fuses • Precision motor position sensors • Battery runaway detection

A slew of coming crossovers Ten years into the electric-car transition, a few things have become clear: • More than 200 miles of range is the price of entry, and a 300-mile version is probably needed to reassure nervous shoppers and attract attention; • Fast charging at 125 kW is the minimum for the next few years, and 350 kW charging is coming on quickly; • $40,000 is the entry price point for an EV crossover, but it still takes convoluted math to produce an “effective price” that’s as low as the highest-selling entries; and • Electric pickup trucks may get the buzz, but compact crossovers are where automakers see EV volume coming.

Tesla offered the first entry in the electric compact crossover segment, but unlike its other vehicles, the Model Y has less than a year of lead time on competitors such as the Ford Mustang Mach-E and the Volkswagen ID.4.

Nissan has chosen to sell the Ariya first outside North America—the US won’t get its electric SUV until the 2022 model year.

Today, no large global maker can offer the mix of long range, seamless fast charging and general cool factor that Tesla does. Will any of them be able to catch and surpass Tesla in this crucial volume segment? It will be a fascinating fight to follow.

www.sensata.com

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THE VEHICLES

TESLA’S

SUCCESS IS “A COMBINATION OF

THOUSANDS OF HEROIC FEATS THAT NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT” A new excerpt from Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Remade the Automotive and Energy Industries Edition 4.1.

By Charged Senior Editor Charles Morris Images courtesy of David Havasi

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An inside look at the early days David Havasi was a car guy from birth. He grew up near Auburn Hills, and his dad worked in the auto industry.

“My childhood was steeped in Detroit auto culture,” he told me. “That’s what we talked about at the dinner table.

My dad would bring home lab cars—like a library book, but it was a car. He worked on minivans, K-cars, a lot of projects that were revolutionary for their time, so I really got to appreciate innovation. His last project was the PT Cruiser, which basically invented the crossover segment.”

As did Tesla co-founders Marc Tarpenning, Martin Eberhard and Elon Musk, Havasi felt the conflict between his love of speed and his concern for the environment. “I loved performance cars like the Viper and the Stealth—I learned how to drive on those cars. For me having a car was not utilitarian, and still isn’t. It was rec-

reational—every drive is recreational. But there was this inner conflict—usually the more fun a car was to drive, the worse it was for the environment. It was a dichotomy that I really struggled with.”

Havasi started following the EV scene very early in the game. He was excited about AC Propulsion’s tzero, the vehicle that inspired the Tesla Roadster. He loved GM’s ill-fated EV1, and was heartbroken when the cars were removed from the market and crushed.

“I’d heard about Tesla, and I always thought the way I’d support them was by being a customer—if they build something, I will buy it. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. I was just outraged by it, the fact that we were running these crazy experiments with the environment, and the geopolitical games being played over petroleum. I thought, I can’t just be a consumer, I have to actively participate, to grab people and pull them into the fold.”

“In summer 2010, I started reaching out to Tesla. Tesla was really small at this point—about 1,000 people—so I started data-mining people who worked there (an elegant way of saying ‘cyberstalking’). I started looking for employees that I could contact.”

One of these was recruiter Rik Avalos. David sent him a Facebook message describing his background. “I never expected a reply, but he replied immediately, and said, can we talk?” After some back-and-forth, David flew out to Palo Alto and met with the Tesla team. This was in October 2010, before the launch of Model S. “They said, let’s keep in touch, because when we launch Model S, we’ll have to start [sales and delivery] programs from nothing.”

Havasi stayed in touch with Avalos, and his persistence paid off in 2012, when he scored a job on Tesla’s delivery team (see below). At the time George Blankenship, who famously developed Tesla’s innovative sales and marketing operation, was in charge of sales and delivery. “I consider him a mentor. We really hit it off. They called him Uncle George.” In 2013, Havasi joined Asset Lite, an expeditionary unit of Tesla’s sales team. To business gurus, an asset light model means that a business owns few capital assets relative to the value of its operations. This loosely describes Tesla’s marketing operations, which relied on the initiative of individuals, who were not furnished with offices or expense accounts. “The marketing department at the time was referred to as KASM, which stood for Kick Ass Sales and Marketing. It was basically, here’s an iPad and a car. Go get ‘em, tiger,” says Havasi. “Tesla in the early

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THE VEHICLES days was about ‘How much blood can you squeeze from a rock—how effective can one person be, if given a task?’”

Havasi was sent to Florida to drum up sales, but also to spread the word, raise awareness and make converts for the company’s mission. He was following in the footsteps of a fellow named Will Nicholas, who became a legend at Tesla. “He used to drive a Roadster up and down the main drag in South Beach, offering people rides,” said Havasi.

“He almost single-handedly created Tesla’s presence in Florida.” Nicholas finalized some of Tesla’s earliest sales sitting in a Roadster, imprinting a buyer’s credit card using one of those old-fashioned ka-chunk gadgets.

Havasi saw himself as one of the Johnny Appleseeds of Tesla, a small group of self-starters who fanned out around the country. “There were only a handful of us—for the Roadster, they had just the major markets, under a dozen.

Same for Model S in the beginning. It was very much an open feedback loop—there was a general plan, but they were open to ideas. We partnered with Inside Sales out of Palo Alto—they acted as kind of a booking agent. They data-mined all the people who had expressed interest in Tesla on the web site, and they would start reaching out to those people, saying, ‘We now have test drive capability in your region, do you want to schedule a test drive?’”

In the early days, getting a test drive was a big deal—at the time Model S was launched, you had to put down a $5,000 deposit just to drive one. By the time Havasi came on the scene, Tesla had two stores on Florida’s East Coast (Dania Beach and Miami), but the West Coast beat was all his. “Inside Sales would book drives, and I’d go conduct test drives at peoples’ homes. We’d go in the living room and order the car right there. There was one test-drive car, and we just made it work.”

Havasi decided to move to Sarasota (where he still lives) because of its central location on Florida’s West Coast. He used guerilla marketing techniques, such as parking his Model S in high-traffic areas, where it invariably attracted attention. The marina in newly-hip St Petersburg was a favorite spot, because there was a lot of foot traffic. “I called it ‘parking like a pimp.’ I’d pull the car up on the sidewalk, pop the frunk and sit in it like it was a hammock with my iPad [Havasi coined the term frammock to describe this application of the frunk]. I’d have the door open, and people would walk by and see the display, and they’d say ‘What?’ That was where I could start the conversation, and then I’d do a hot lap with them, serve the Kool-Aid and start planting that seed, and people that were in the

market would say ‘I need to start looking into that.’”

Downtown St Pete (coincidentally, the headquarters of Charged) had the perfect demographic for Tesla sales. People around the country were rediscovering the coolness of downtown areas, lots of new condo towers were going up, and the people moving into them were first-mover, early-adopter types. “It was a neat kind of convergence, where the market was ready for it, plus the city leadership was very progressive when it came to environmental initiatives, so whenever we did any kind of drive event, we had really good cooperation. It sold the city as being on the cutting edge.”

“We had to be really creative about how to stretch the dollars. We couldn’t spend a dime. It was very much guerilla tactics.” As more demo vehicles became available, Havasi and his team started doing test drive events at hotels. “We’d bring a few Model S to a hotel parking lot, and Inside Sales would book people. We had one person in the lobby with a laptop configuring cars. That was really the core strategy of the marketing campaign.”

“Auto companies spend millions and millions of dollars

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on these very artsy, vague commercials and billboards, but the most valuable thing you can do with a Tesla is to get a butt in the seat. You get ‘em in the seat, you have ‘em hit the accelerator—I call the accelerator the believer, because once you hit it you become a believer. You could be the most staunch critic, but when you hit the accelerator, it’s an IV of Kool-Aid. You’re done. The spell is cast. I was a big advocate [of the Asset Lite approach]. Keep it light and tight. Give me a Tesla flag, a car and an iPad. That’s all we needed. The car is the star. You have them drive the car, and you address objections. ‘Doesn’t the battery die in a year? No. How do you take a road trip? Superchargers.’

Then you see the light bulb go off.”

Havasi had a long run at Tesla, and did many different things. “I’d fly to different parts of the country and help out with product launches, marketing events, delivery support—you name it.” 2018 and early 2019, when Model 3 hit the streets, was a wild time—it was Production Hell at the factory, and Delivery Hell in the field. For the Canadian Model 3 launch, Havasi’s team took over the Convention Center in Toronto, and delivered 1,800 cars in 2 weeks. Havasi did a 20-minute orientation talk on a loop for 12 hours every day. “New owners could listen to my guided tour of the car, and if they needed to hear it again, they could just stay another 20 minutes. We used to give big hour-long orientations with Model S, but we did not have that luxury with Model 3.”

Havasi learned much from the George Blankenship school of marketing. “He didn’t want us to sell it, he wanted us to celebrate it. I call it applying the superlative approach. You find out what the person values, then you show them how the Tesla meets that value proposition in a way that no other product could ever possibly meet it.

They value efficiency? This thing’s double the efficiency of the Toyota Prius. They value performance? It’s the quickest production vehicle ever made. They value safety? Lowest probability of occupant injury ever. Storage? Almost double the storage of other cars in its class. On and on and on.” Once Havasi learned which metrics a particular buyer used to value a great car, he would explain the absurdity of buying anything else. “You want a car that’s slower? Louder? Less efficient? Less storage? Harder to maintain?”

“Then that brings out the objections. Knowing that it’s the superlative in all these things, what is holding this person back? And I knew that the only thing that holds people back from a Tesla is a misperception. Most of the objections are based on misinformation. They’re easy to

I knew that the only thing that holds people back from a Tesla is a misperception.

Most of the objections are based on misinformation.

They’re easy to eliminate, because they’re not based on fact. eliminate, because they’re not based on fact. I’ve heard them all. I lived, ate and breathed this stuff for seven years. I could write a book just on the objections, and how to counter them.”

“I encouraged them to test-drive other cars on the same day. One woman test-drove an Audi A7, and the salesman found out she was going to drive a Tesla. This was in 2014. He said, the company’s going bankrupt.

They’re going to be done in a month. And also, Teslas break down in the rain. When it rains, they stop working.” It was a typical summer afternoon in Florida, which meant there was a torrential rainstorm just as the lady arrived to test-drive the Model S. So much for that objection—she ordered a Model S. Back in the early days, nothing at Tesla seemed to be set in stone, and things could change from one day to the next.

“There needed to be an asterisk after every Tesla protocol e-mail. They’d say, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and there should be an asterisk that says, ‘*for now.’ It could change eight times in one year. There were always these big internal debates about how things should be run.”

“One debate for a long time was about ‘effective cost of ownership.’ Elon was a big advocate of [publicizing the] effective cost of ownership—the overall operational cost of the product over time, which is a very abstract way of thinking about ownership of a product. But most people are brass tacks, bottom dollar, what am I paying right now.

In the stores, when we’d have on the touchscreens how much the cars cost, they were factoring in EV tax credits,

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THE VEHICLES gas savings, all these things, and it showed that price.”

For a while, this got a bit ridiculous—the prices quoted on the web site were factoring in things like the time saved by not going to gas stations—at $100 per hour! People started talking about the silliness of this in the media and on online forums, and Tesla eliminated the dubious calculations. Today, when you price a car on the web site, you have the option of seeing the actual purchase price, or the price “including potential savings,” which at this point includes only savings on gas, as the federal tax credit is no longer available.

“It was a huge battle, and just in the latter years finally there was some give. We would scream from the field. We were saying, ‘This doesn’t have value. It’s a bait-and-switch.’”

Of course, this sort of disingenuous marketing blarp is standard fare in the auto industry, but it seemed out of character for Tesla, which customers like to believe eschews the more unpopular practices of other automakers.

“What they finally did was the best solution. Now, if you go on the web site, you can toggle [between] ‘effective cost of ownership’ and what it actually costs.”

The years of person-to-person sales gave Havasi a lot of insight into how potential buyers think, and allowed him to develop a very streamlined and predictable “customer journey.” He later applied this expertise to the company’s web site. “For every person that walks into a Tesla store, there are 10,000 who will never walk into a store, that only experience Tesla through the web site, so we have to take that secret sauce that we have in our best stores, the stores that are applying the superlative approach, and have people go through that customer journey on the web site, and come to those same conclusions.”

Havasi left Tesla in July of 2019, when a friend offered him an opportunity to join a medical tech company that was in the process of commercializing a new product.

It was an amicable split, and Havasi remains an enthusiastic supporter of Tesla. “I loved working at Tesla. I liked being out in the field, improvising and creating something out of nothing. It wasn’t easy, and many times it was not fun—there were some very, very difficult situations, but it was the thrill of finding a way out, of finding a solution, that was appealing.”

As the company grew from a feisty startup into a major automaker, the freewheeling, let’s-put-on-a-show atmosphere inevitably dissipated. “The real innovations started happening at headquarters, more than in the field. The role of Tesla employees in the field transferred

The real innovations started happening at headquarters, more than in the field. The role of Tesla employees in the field transferred from innovation to administration. from innovation to administration. There was still an open feedback loop, but it became very administrative, which is not my forte. I was accustomed to being out in the field and improvising, and the role became being behind a desk with a headset on, talking with banks, in a back office with no windows. Weeks would go by without driving a Tesla. I wasn’t doing what I joined Tesla to do, which was to serve the Kool-Aid.” Havasi also wanted to stay in Sarasota, which limited the jobs available. He spent just a few months at the medical

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firm before deciding that he wanted to devote more time to spreading the word about EVs. One day he met CleanTechnica Director Zachary Shahan by chance at a Supercharger station, and he is now writing articles and doing a podcast called Tesla Inside Out for CleanTechnica.

DIY deliveries Whenever I talk to a former Tesla employee, I always ask for anecdotes from the early days (in a music star’s biography, they’d be called “road stories”). David Havasi, who worked for Tesla from 2012 to 2019 in various delivery and marketing roles, called the Tesla story “a combination of thousands of heroic feats that no one knows about.”

One of these edifying episodes occurred during Havasi’s first year at Tesla, when he worked with delivery chief Neil

Joseph to develop the company’s delivery program. The team came from “all walks of life. We had Alpine skiers, former military, broadcast journalists, oil commodity traders, a guy who was in the pit crew of a race team...”

“I remember in a huddle at Fremont, Neil said, ‘What’s really great is there are no rules—we can make it whatever we want it to be, it’s a clean slate. The good news is, no one’s ever done this before. The bad news is, no one’s ever done this before.’” Havasi told me a great story that illustrates this get-it-done-yourself attitude. During the summer of 2012, Tesla ordered a fleet of Ford F-250 Super-Duty pickup trucks and 22-foot aluminum trailers, to be used for delivering Model S to customers. Manufacturer Featherlite shipped the trailers from Ohio to Fremont, but Havasi’s team hadn’t quite grasped that, like Ikea furniture, the trailers came in pieces, and had to be assembled.

“Fremont was a trip back then,” said Havasi. “Now they’ve packed it to capacity, and there’s no parking—they have to shuttle employees from off site. At the Fremont I remember, you could pull right up to the door. Only a sliver of the factory was being used at that point. 90 percent was vacant—it looked post-apocalyptic, with [motionless] robots and massive areas that looked like a convention center between shows. There were several football fields of parking lots, almost all vacant.”

“So, we were in this back lot at Fremont, this big truck shows up with the trailers, and they’re stacked on the back of the truck like pallets. We said, ‘Cool, let’s get ‘em off of here and we’ll hook ‘em up to the trucks.’ And the truck driver said, ‘What do you mean?’”

The Tesla team hadn’t realized they were expected to unload the trailers themselves. “Luckily two out of the 12 guys on our team were licensed forklift drivers. Now we needed forklifts. This is a factory, there’s got to be forklifts somewhere. Probably the receiving end of the factory. So, let’s go to the other side of the factory, and see if we can Bogart some forklifts. At Fremont, you ride bicycles from one side to the other—it’s this huge building. So, me and this other gentleman hop on two bikes and we’re riding through the factory. That was the first time I saw Elon—he was sitting on a folding chair on the factory floor.”

“The thing is, one forklift couldn’t take one trailer off the truck, it was too long. What we had to do was—it was like synchronized swimming—we had to synchronize the forks of two forklifts, move them in under the trailer, lift them simultaneously, then move together and lower them down, and then repeat several times—

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it was this real nail-biting thing—don’t drop ‘em!”

They did manage to unload the trailers without mishap, but now they had to assemble them. The team didn’t have any tools, so they sent a couple of guys to the nearest Home Depot to buy a grocery cart full of screwdrivers and wrenches. “We were calling back and forth and saying, ‘Hey, take a picture of that bolt and text it,’ so we knew what kind of tools to get.”

“We assigned three guys to each trailer, and from 9 am to 9 pm in the back lot at Fremont, we installed the brake lights, the winch systems, the wheel hubs, the air dams, the hitch housings. Early the next morning we had to make a seven-hour run from Fremont to the Costa Mesa service center to deliver a truck and trailer and a couple of customer cars—the first cars to be delivered out of Costa Mesa.”

By the time they built the trailers, and loaded up the cars, which had just rolled off the assembly line, it was pitch-black outside. “We were using our cell phones as flashlights to tighten the last bolts on the trailers and do final inspection of the cars—we didn’t think to buy flashlights. It was 11 at night and the factory was still bustling. Not with assembly people on shifts. No, these people had been there since that morning, and that was the normal thing.”

“We needed to strap the Model Ss onto the trailers that we had just built, and we came to the conclusion that we didn’t have enough straps to do it, and everything was closed. I’m pretty sure we bought every store

in the area out of lockdown straps anyway.” The guys distributed what straps they had as strategically as possible. “We put them on the front driver-side tires.

We had chains and cords and lanyard clips—some bungee cords were in there too, even knowing that that was completely futile to stop a five-thousand-pound car bouncing off the back of the truck.”

“We needed somebody to sign off on it, so we got a guy called Yost, who was the head of manufacturing at that time. He was about to head home, but he said he’d pull around and take a look at it. So, it’s pitch-black, and Yost pulls up in a white Performance Model S. He rolls down the window, peeks out and says, ‘This is very dangerous,’ then zips out into the night.”

Havasi and his team had a laugh at the absurdity of the situation, then spent some more time tightening things down before they set out. In an apt metaphor for Tesla’s many unlikely successes, they made it to Costa Mesa without losing any cars.

This article is an expanded version of material that appears in the new edition of Tesla: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Remade the Automotive and Energy Industries, Edition 4.1. This history of Tesla, written by Charged Senior Editor Charles Morris and originally published in 2014, has now been completely revised and expanded, with new chapters on Model Y, Cybertruck, the Chinese Gigafactory and the events of 2020. www.teslamotorsbook.com

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ABB to deploy its new bi-directional charging technology for V2G kiosks in France Image courtesy of ABB

Swiss electronics giant ABB will supply its brand-new 11 kW bi-directional charging technology, specially designed for V2G, as part of a contract with France’s DREEV, a joint venture between Électricité de France (EDF) and intelligent charging specialist Nuvve.

ABB’s solution, integrated with DREEV software, will enable EV drivers to export surplus power back to the grid. It’s estimated that customers could earn up to 20 euros per month in rebates from their local utility.

Under the partnership, ABB will supply bi-directional V2G kiosks in France, followed by installations in the UK, Italy, Belgium and Germany.

The compact 11 kW charger is fully compatible with current and future EVs. Few EVs currently support V2G, but ABB expects it to become a dominant technology within the next five years. ABB sees V2G technology as a natural fit for the company, which is not only a major EVSE provider, but also works closely with electric utilities.

“We are delighted to have the opportunity to support DREEV in its mission to actively participate in making the grid more resilient with V2G technology,” said Frank Muehlon, Head of ABB’s E-mobility Infrastructure Solutions. “Our cooperation with DREEV is one of the leading efforts worldwide to deploy real V2G technology to the field.”

“V2G is a technology that requires both innovation and industrial capabilities,” said DREEV CEO Eric Mevellec. “This cooperation with ABB is key to bring our solutions to the next level. We are now ready to accelerate commercial development.”

EVSE manufacturer and charging network operator ChargePoint plans to go public via the trendy vehicle of a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

ChargePoint will merge with Switchback Energy Acquisition Corporation (NYSE: SBE) to form a company called ChargePoint Holdings, which will be listed on the NYSE. The boards of both companies have unanimously approved the transaction, which is expected to close by the end of this year. The deal values ChargePoint at an enterprise value of $2.4 billion. The company plans to use the proceeds to expand its reach in North America and Europe, further enhance its technology portfolio and scale up its commercial, fleet and residential businesses.

Founded in 2007, ChargePoint operates in just about every segment of the charging business. Its capital-light business model is based on providing site hosts with everything they need to electrify their parking spaces: networked charging hardware, software subscriptions and support services. The company’s network includes over 115,000 public and private charging points, as well as access to an additional 133,000 public chargers through network roaming arrangements.

“For thirteen years we have been singularly focused on our vision to move all people and goods on electricity, and that has never been more relevant than it is today,” said ChargePoint CEO Pasquale Romano. “We’ve pioneered networked charging and are resolute in our aim to usher in the transition to mass EV adoption by electrifying one parking spot at a time. Today, we are a charging market leader thanks to a winning business model, a complete portfolio and thousands of brands that have realized that EV charging is essential, good for business and aligned with their corporate and sustainability goals.

Our technology charges all EVs, from passenger vehicles to delivery fleets, so there is no need to choose winners in electric mobility. We see ourselves as an index for the entire category.”

Image courtesy of ChargePoint

ChargePoint to go public in $2.4-billion deal

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Image courtesy of Electrify America

Electrify America creates new business unit for its home charging products Electrify America is on a 10-year, $2-billion mission to build a comprehensive public DC fast charging network across the US. Last year it expanded into home charging with the launch of its Level 2 Home Charger.

Now EA has formed a new business unit called Electrify Home, which aims to leverage the company’s considerable charging expertise to deliver a line of fast and effective home charging products.

The Electrify America Level 2 Home Charger comes with a NEMA 1450 power plug, and can also be hard-wired. It includes a docking station that allows for wall mounting. It sports a NEMA 3R enclosure suitable for indoor or outdoor locations, and a 24.6-foot long cable. An LED color indicator displays charging status. Each product comes with a 3-year warranty and 24-hour tech support.

The Electrify America Level 2 Home Charger comes with a NEMA 1450 power plug, and can also be hard-wired. It includes a docking station that allows for wall mounting. It sports a NEMA 3R enclosure suitable for indoor or outdoor locations, and a 24.6-foot long cable. An LED color indicator displays charging status. The charger comes with a 3-year warranty and 24-hour tech support.

“Right now, about 80 percent of electric vehicle charging is done at home. With the launch of Electrify Home, we’re providing flexible and forward-thinking home charging solutions for EV drivers of today and tomorrow,” said Nina Huesgen, Senior Manager, Home and eCommerce at Electrify America. “EV drivers need more charging options to feel truly independent and confident in their decision to go electric, which is why Electrify America has expanded its focus to create a connected and smart home charging ecosystem.”

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Oil giant Total acquires London charging network Total, along with fellow European oil giants BP and Shell, has been buying up assets all along the EV charging value chain. Now we learn that Total has acquired a major UK charging network, Source London, which operates over 1,600 on-street charging points in London.

Total acquired Source London from the French Bolloré Group, which also operates electric car-sharing services in several cities around the world (a couple of these have gone bust). Source London was launched in 2010, and is said to control over half of the public chargers in the London region.

Total says the Source London network will continue to be powered by 100% renewable electricity, to be supplied by subsidiary Total Gas & Power.

“By combining these existing infrastructures with Total’s know-how in terms of installation, operation and management of public electric vehicle charging networks, we are starting a new phase, supporting the expansion of electric mobility in London,” said Alexis Vovk, Total’s President of Marketing and Services. “In collaboration with our partners and the local authorities, we will be able to meet both the strong growth in demand for on-street charge points and the needs for new mobility solutions of London users.”

Total already has stakes in charging networks in Amsterdam and Brussels, and aims to build a network of 150,000 charging stations in Europe by 2025.

i-charging’s new blueberry range of fast chargers covers light- and heavy-duty EVs Portuguese EVSE manufacturer i-charging has introduced its first range of DC fast chargers. The new blueberry line offers power levels between 50 kW and 600 kW, and is available in three configurations: blueberry, blueberry PLUS and blueberry CLUSTER. It supports charging of EVs with battery system voltages of up to 1,000 V. The blueberry range is based on i-charging’s dynamicblue technology, which uses a patented system to allow sequential and simultaneous charging, and to serve an unlimited number of outputs through the dynamic allocation of energy to each output.

The blueberry charger also includes a new cable management system that extends and retracts a 4.7-meter cable as needed.

Blueberry chargers come equipped with a 32-inch screen that displays charging information, as well as optional promotional videos or other multimedia content.

The blueberry app allows users to specify the time of charging, as well as time or spending limits.

The first models in the new range will be certified for the European market this year, and are expected to be certified for the American market in 2021.

“This new range of fast chargers is disruptive in the current market, and covers all vehicle segments, light and heavy,” said CEO Pedro Moreira da Silva. “It is a reason for great pride for us, with only one year of existence, to be able to present this differentiating solution in a market in constant evolution.”

Image courtesy of i-charging

Image courtesy of Source London

THE INFRASTRUCTURE

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Image courtesy of Fermata Energy

THE INFRASTRUCTURE

SAE publishes Wireless Charging standard SAE International has published a new global standard that specifies both the vehicle-side and charger-side requirements for wireless charging of EVs. The new standard, SAE J2954, was more than a decade in the making.

Wireless power transfer begins with parking a vehicle over an SAE J2954-compatible transmitting pad on the ground (the Ground Assembly, or GA). After a communications handshake, charging begins automatically.

Power is transferred by creating a magnetic resonance field between the GA and a receiving pad fitted on the underside of the vehicle (the Vehicle Assembly, or VA).

The energy crosses an air gap (the ground clearance between the pads) and is then converted from AC into DC on the vehicle to charge the battery pack.

Tests using a 10-inch ground clearance have shown that WPT systems can operate at grid-to-battery efficiencies of up to 94%.

“Charging your EV should be as simple as parking and walking away. The SAE J2954 standard gives freedom and convenience to do exactly that, safely and automatically,” said Task Force Chair Jesse Schneider.

The new standard specifies three power levels: WPT1 (3.7 kW), WPT2 (7 kW), and WPT3 (11 kW). To validate its performance targets and safety limits, the standard includes key parameters such as minimum efficiency, limits on electromagnetic interference (EMI), and foreign object detection. There are three overlapping ranges of vehicle ground clearances, from 100 to 250 mm (3.9 to 9.8 inches); and three levels of grid input to the GA, up to 11.1 kVA. Parking tolerances are ±75 mm (3.0 inches) in the direction of travel and ±100 mm (3.9 inches) in the lateral direction.

Wireless communication for control of the WPT charging process was standardized by SAE J2847/6, which was published in 2015, and updated in 2020. “SAE J2847/6 is a communications document utilizing WiFi, IEEE 802.11n, designed specifically with the SAE J2954 standard, and facilitates the automatic wireless charging experience while allowing for continuous optimization of the WPT system,” said Ky Sealy, co-lead of SAE J2847/6.

Virtual Peaker and Fermata Energy aim to bring V2G technology to utilities Kentucky-based Virtual Peaker and Fermata Energy have announced a partnership to integrate Fermata’s vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology with Virtual Peaker’s residential demand response platform, which is currently in use by several US utilities.

Virtual Peaker’s Distributed Energy Resource Management System (DERMS) application is a cloud-based energy management platform that can connect to any in-home smart device to allow utilities to run residential demand response programs. Fermata Energy’s bidirectional charging system, which conforms to the new UL 9741 Standard for Bidirectional EV Charging System Equipment, allows vehicle batteries to be charged while returning excess energy to the electrical grid.

This two-way system delivers energy to an EV at offpeak times, and returns stored power to the grid during peak demand times.

“The new relationship with Fermata Energy gives Virtual Peaker an early entry into the V2G market, which we expect will experience explosive growth in the coming years as more Americans understand the value of preserving renewable energy sources and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels,” said William (Bill) Burke, founder and CEO of Virtual Peaker.

“Fermata Energy’s turnkey system accelerates the transition to a clean-energy economy, creating abundant power storage that can be deployed quickly and at scale,” said David Slutzky, founder and CEO of Fermata Energy.

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Porsche Digital has spun off an e-mobility company called &Charge. The Frankfurt-based startup is offering what it calls the first loyalty program for e-mobility in Europe. It provides a digital platform through which users can obtain credit for their online purchases, which can be redeemed for electric mobility services.

For purchases, bookings and other transactions that are processed via the online platform, users receive “kilometers,” which can be redeemed as charging credits for EVs or free trips with public e-scooters and car-sharing services. Customers can also use their collected “kilometers” to support certified climate protection projects, in partnership with climate solutions provider South Pole.

The &Charge platform is currently available in Germany, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. Other countries are to follow shortly. Porsche Digital says over 600 e-commerce companies and 11 mobility providers have joined the initiative as partners.

“With our platform, we…create lucrative incentives for sustainable mobility,” says Eugen Letkemann, CEO of &Charge. “The key to this is that we can offer our users a broad portfolio of services, both in terms of collecting and redeeming kilometers.”

Image courtesy of Lion Electric

Image courtesy of &Charge

Porsche Digital spins off e-mobility loyalty program as &Charge

ABB and Lion Electric partner to offer end-to-end charging solution for heavy-duty vehicles ABB has joined forces with Canadian heavy-duty EV manufacturer Lion Electric to sell and service EV charging equipment.

ABB will offer its complete EVSE product line to Lion Electric, to be sold under the new Lion Energy infrastructure division. This will enable Lion to offer an endto-end infrastructure solution, streamlining the process of charging station installation. Lion Energy will provide infrastructure design and review, project management, utility coordination and customized consultation to its customers, in tandem with the vehicle purchasing process.

Lion Electric personnel will be trained to service ABB’s EV charging solutions, and ABB will support end customers’ installation of charging equipment, making electrification easier for school and transit bus fleets.

Over the last decade, Lion Electric has delivered over 300 electric school buses in the US and Canada. Lion also offers a portfolio of all-electric Class 5 to Class 8 trucks, available in various configurations. Providing a reliable charging infrastructure that scales with the needs of large BEVs such as buses and trucks is expected to accelerate the purchase of Lion Electric’s EVs by mitigating the challenges related to EV adoption.

“Collaborating with innovative vehicle makers to ensure the vehicles and the charging work seamlessly is a crucial part of ABB’s mission to write the future of electrification,” said Bob Stojanovic, ABB’s Head of EV Charging Infrastructure for North America.

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SHOPPERS BUY MORE EVS IF THEY UNDERSTAND CHARGING, AND NOW THERE’S PROOF.

By John Voelcker

Images courtesy of Chargeway

N

ew-car salespeople have simple motivations: They want to spend the least possible time selling you a new car for the highest possible commission. You buy a new car every five years or so—they sell up to 25 cars a month. They make money on the difference in knowledge.

That makes electric cars a problem—it takes time to explain them to shoppers. Why should salespeople spend the time to learn to educate buyers about unfamiliar vehicles that make up just 2 percent of US sales? Vehicles they may never have driven? Asked about EVs, many salespeople freeze, blank, deflect, even lie in order to move shoppers to vehicles they understand better—and that take less time to sell.

Charging is particularly confusing. Virtually every shopper asks about public charging stations—where they are, how long they take to recharge a car—even though data shows they won’t use them nearly as much as they imagine. But today, it’s a rare salesperson who can explain the differences among different types and speeds of EV charging. Many can’t even explain how their own products are charged.

Now, we have proof that educating both salespeople and shoppers about charging actually boosts sales of

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G, F.

EVs. The full details were presented in a white paper published online by the global EVS-33 conference, and Charged got an exclusive early look at the results.

Information, not engineering The secret sauce is the Chargeway system, which explains charging types and rates using simple, intuitive graphics. It establishes a system of labels for different kinds of charging, and also includes a phone app, kiosks in dealerships, and navigation and routing software similar to that pioneered by Tesla, which calculates trip routes and timing via en route charging stations.

When shoppers know there are lots of public charging facilities nearby (which they never knew existed), and discover they can make road trips (without getting stranded), they’re more likely to buy an EV. Imagine!

Like many innovations, Chargeway was born when founder Matt Teske found a major pain point, in this case shopping for EVs. Having educated himself on charging for his own electric car—his first plug-in vehicle was a Chevy Volt—he faced the same gibberish of charging lingo the EV industry has used for a decade.

Engineers sometimes used pictures of the different types of plugs to identify relevant standards. As Teske’s wife noted, “The plugs look like Star Wars characters, and the names do too.”

Meanwhile, surveys of auto show attendees found that the majority of drivers knew only that their car used one of two types of fuel: “regular” or “premium.” They knew what a gas station looked like, and how to find one.

Compare that level of understanding to the array of Level 1, Level 2, J-1772, CHAdeMO, CCS, Tesla Supercharger, home charging, charging at work, destination charging, fast charging, volts, kilowatts, and more. Novices’ eyes glaze over within seconds.

A marketer and graphic designer by trade, Teske saw a crying need for a simple, intuitive system to explain all that. He created the Chargeway system of colors and numbers to encompass all varieties of charging—not

only in North America, but globally—and future-proofed it. If a new standard is launched, he adds a new color.

Higher speeds? Add a higher number.

Teske unveiled the prototype Chargeway system at the Forth Roadmap conference in June 2017. Among EV professionals attending, it received almost universal praise. Teske refined the system and, like any good entrepreneur, had to figure out a business model for it. He gave a progress report the next year at the same conference.

The common pain point among shoppers, car dealers, and salespeople is charging information. Teske realized that dealerships in particular yearned for an easy, readyto-use system to educate all parties, their salespeople included, on how charging worked—especially crucial at those dealerships where the turnover of sales staff approached 50 percent a year.

The solution was Chargeway “Beacons” (interactive kiosks) inside new-car showrooms. An interactive app lets salespeople and shoppers together see how much public charging already exists in their area, plan EV trips, and calculate how long charging en route would take for longer journeys. The same app can then be downloaded onto their phones.

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Lots of talk For 18 months, Teske talked about Chargeway to anyone and any group that would listen. State dealer associations liked the kiosk idea, since it solved a problem for their members. Electric utilities came to appreciate the idea at varying paces, as utilities don’t historically have to do much marketing to consumers. Most automakers thought it was interesting—especially their EV teams— and waited for greater adoption before committing to anything.

One nice thing about Oregon is that it’s progressive, but also small enough that new ideas can actually move through state government. As Jeff Allen, Executive Director of Forth Mobility, said in 2015, “We tend to collaborate really well across companies and government, and we have a history of innovative, supportive public policy.”

One crucial partner was the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT). ODOT allowed Chargeway to place its graphic logos on the new and existing charging sites the agency was involved with, and now roughly one fifth of the state’s public charging infrastructure has the big colored circles with numbers inside that appear in the Chargeway app.

However, hard data and proof of results were needed to expand Chargeway beyond Oregon. Teske had talked to dozens, if not hundreds, of organizations, agencies, utilities and carmakers. Quite reasonably, most said,

“OK, it sounds great. Now go prove it actually gets more EVs on the road.”

In January 2019, Chargeway launched a pilot project with two utilities, Portland General Electric and Pacific Power.

Other partners included Forth, various state agencies (including ODOT)—and most importantly, the Oregon Auto Dealers Association (OADA).

Chargeway Beacons (kiosks) would be deployed at up to a dozen dealerships around Oregon, coordinated with messaging and marketing efforts from the local utilities. Teske and his team trained dealership personnel on how to use the Beacons, complete with role-playing to make answering questions on charging easy, quick and intuitive.

Two to 10 times as many EVs sold Fourteen months later, seven Beacons were up and running in dealerships. The results were clear: EV sales in dealerships with a Chargeway Beacon had risen by 2 to 10 times compared to those at dealers with similar inventories of EVs but no Beacons.

On average, the Beacons were used 1.5 to 2 times per day at the dealers. The highest usage came at the Forth EV Showcase in downtown Portland, which sees substantial foot traffic. Overall, Beacons in the metro Portland area were activated 1.5 to 4 times a day.

Chargeway restricted its Beacons to dealers that had 5 to 10 EVs in inventory, meaning that EV sales could be completed as quickly as any others, without having to request a vehicle for delivery. Among Beacon-equipped dealers, Wilsonville Chevrolet (15 miles outside Portland) sold four times as many EVs as other Chevy dealers with similar inventories of Volts and Bolt EVs. Perhaps the best proof of Chargeway’s impact has come from salespeople, who are deeply relieved that they can take advantage of the Beacons’ guidance, right alongside the customers they’re trying to sell to. In late August, a Hyundai salesperson handed a note to the Chargeway rep who had just trained him on how to use the Beacon going into his dealership.

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Images courtesy of Chargeway

“I will now be able to sell twice as many EVs in a day due to how much time the Beacon saves that I spend researching & answering detailed charging questions.

Thank you for designing this extremely user-friendly device to help our dealership & many others! Thanks again!

Dav at Hyundai.”

Then came COVID Teske was scheduled to present a 12-page white paper on Chargeway’s results at the annual Forth Roadmap conference in June. This year, Roadmap was combined with the huge global EVS conference, which was to be held in Portland for the first time. It would have provided a global audience for Chargeway’s first proof that its system increased EV sales.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. The combined Roadmap-EVS conference had to be canceled.

Instead, the Chargeway white paper was published in full by EVS-33 in September. Now Teske is hitting the (virtual) road, presenting the findings to relevant associations, trade groups, consumer-education initiatives and more.

While COVID denied Chargeway an in-person audience of thousands, Teske says it offered at least one benefit: auto dealers are now working far harder on digital tools to do more of their business outside showrooms.

Chargeway has every intention of being part of those efforts. “We’re working on this product roadmap” right now, Teske told Charged.

Unsurprisingly, Beacon usage plummeted along with showroom traffic during the spring shutdown. But in July, Teske says, usage returned to its pre-COVID levels, and Chargeway is continuing efforts to expand outside its Oregon base.

The company had already deployed Beacons in Indiana, Texas, and Washington state. Those efforts are resuming, and discussions are underway for similar programs in several more states.

Chargeway is also talking with utilities in those areas and others, as well as dealership groups and associations.

The negotiations bring together partners who may never have worked together—auto dealer trade groups and electric utilities, for example—to join forces in a new type of digital effort to sell a new type of product. That takes time.

Next stop: EV dashboards?

Given the impact of COVID on the dealerships that

carmakers need to sell their vehicles—especially high-effort electric cars—Teske says Chargeway is now seeing increased interest from car companies that understand they must focus on every step of the EV sales process.

In fact, Chargeway is in discussion with six EV-makers (Audi, BMW, Ford, Jaguar, Lucid and Volvo) about ways in which they might work more closely together.

These could include licensing the company’s software to integrate not only into their vehicles but across multiple online, retail, and mobile touchpoints for both new-car shoppers and existing owners.

Despite the virus-imposed pause, Teske remains optimistic about the long-term benefits of Chargeway. More testing will be needed, with a broader array of dealers, brands and locations, but he’s confident the concept has proven itself. That confidence comes from what he has felt all along, now confirmed by this first study: better, easier-to-understand information on EV charging does in fact sell more EVs. It may sound obvious, but it took a graphic designer with a keen eye for marketing who’s a car fanatic, an EV driver, and concerned about climate change, to figure out how to do it.

The full Chargeway white paper, Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Chargeway Oregon Program, is available online from EVS-33 (www.evs33portland.org).

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NeoCharge’s Images courtesy of NeoCharge

SMART SPLITTER

By Christian Ruoff

REDUCING BARRIERS TO LEVEL 2 HOME CHARGING alifornia-based startup NeoCharge has developed an economical, quick and safe way to add a Level 2 EV charging station to your home. The company’s Smart Splitter allows you to safely plug your EV charger and an appliance such as a dryer into the same 220-volt outlet, eliminating the need for a dedicated circuit or a panel upgrade.

Unlike some start-ups that rush products to market, NeoCharge took the time to invest in safety and reliability, putting its products through the rigorous UL safety testing process.

The company offers three versions of its Smart Split-

C

ter. The Appliance Smart Splitter splits power between an appliance and an EV charger, and the Dual-Car Smart Splitter lets you charge two cars simultaneously on the same circuit. Both work with all EV chargers and all EVs. (There’s also a Dual-Appliance version, which allows two appliances to share a circuit.)

Charged recently spoke with Ryan Meffert, NeoCharge’s Director of Business Operations. Meffert, who studied industrial technology in college, became enamored of the startup environment while working for software provider Mindbody. Later he worked for Northrop Grumman, but he found that he missed the startup

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culture. When he met the co-founders of NeoCharge, Akhil Veluru and Spencer Harrison, they were in the midst of prototyping their new product, and Meffert seized the chance to immerse himself in the day-to-day operations of a stimulating startup company.

NeoCharge was founded about two and a half years ago, and it has spent that time developing and thoroughly testing its Smart Splitter products.

Q Charged: What was the inspiration for the Smart

Splitter?

A Ryan Meffert: What we saw in the EV industry is that there’s so much money being poured into the public infrastructure of charging, but there’s a lack of focus on the residential home charging aspect, so we looked into what it takes to get Level 2 charging at home. The problem is, installing home charging can require hiring an electrician, pulling permits, and making multi-thousand-dollar panel upgrades. It’s a 220-volt outlet that allows for home charging access, and a lot of homes have 220-volt appliances in or near their garages. So, the product that we came up with was the Smart Splitter, which allows you to share an existing 220-volt outlet, with no need to make any structural changes, hire an electrician, rewire your home, or get a panel upgrade.

Now you’re able to share your existing infrastructure and get the charging access you need, and it’s a lot cheaper than the traditional route. It’s especially useful for renters, because they have no option to make any structural changes to the homes that they’re renting. If they have a 220-volt outlet, they’re able to plug this in, and boom—they have a plug for their electric vehicle.

Something many people don’t realize is that [the existing electrical infrastructure] isn’t prepared to have all these EVs. [Many] homes were built with 100-amp panels, and when you want to get charging at home, you have to get a panel upgrade, which is an expensive pro-

cess, costing multiple thousands of dollars. The highest [quote] we’ve ever seen was $27,000 to get charging and get a panel upgrade, which is an absurd number. We’re trying to reduce that barrier and convince people that it is not as crazy as you think, because we want more people to be able to drive electric vehicles.

Q Charged: What makes it smart? It seems like there

are a lot of things going on inside that box other than just splitting the power.

A Ryan Meffert: The key piece we wanted to offer

customers was the ability to control and have some insight into their charging. The smart capability is the ability to go on an app on your phone and to be able to schedule your charging, in order to take advantage of utility time-of-use rates. We wanted to give users the ability to help out the electrical grid and save money on charging their electric vehicles. Then there’s the aspect of notifications. Is your dryer running, or is your car charging? Is your car fully charged?

Our goal now is to work with utility providers and allow them to get some insight into electric vehicles and large appliances that are being plugged in around cities. So, the smart capability is really the notifications piece, the ability to schedule your charge during less expensive times. [We’ll be introducing] further features with the grant we just won from the California Energy Commission.

Q Charged: What’s going on inside the box?

A Ryan Meffert: The left side is the primary, which takes priority over the right side, which is the secondary. So, you would plug in, let’s say, your dryer into the left side and your EV charger into the right side. Then, whenever the Smart Splitter device senses that the dryer is trying to run, it pauses your EV charger and lets the dryer run its full cycle. When your dryer is finished, the

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

A Ryan Meffert: It’s been testing with customers for

Smart Splitter automatically switches back to charging your car.

We use a relay mechanism along with the actual firmware within the device senses all this and runs an algorithm to know when to switch at the right time.

That’s the piece that you might think is very simple, and ultimately, the entire goal of the smart splitter is to be simple, but to actually make it function as we have is very tricky.

Q Charged: You support a bunch of different outlets,

I see.

A Ryan Meffert: Yeah. We don’t want to exclude

anyone who has an old appliance that’s running a three-prong, 220-volt outlet, so we made that configuration for them. It also comes with a bracket to help secure it to the outlet. That’s mainly just for the safety aspect. You have a lot of cords attached to the device, and we want to ensure that this thing stays put and doesn’t move, which is why we include a mounting bracket.

Q Charged: So, you went through actual UL testing

in the labs?

two and a half years, and it took us about a year and a half to receive UL testing. That was a very intense process, but going through it ensured that, on our end, everything is safe. We had to make many design changes based on UL requirements, and we would do it all over again, because it ensures the safety of our customers.

You’re putting in a Smart Splitter device that is handling the largest electricity loads in your house, so we’re proud that we have safety certifications that differentiate us from some competing products. We have full confidence that our device is as safe.

It’s pretty scary when you look at some of the popular EV charging products being sold on the internet that aren’t tested and certified. People don’t realize how unsafe it can be until they’re educated on it. But I believe they’ll see the value in going through independent testing. That’s why UL [exists] in the first place.

Q Charged: What’s the difference between your

Appliance Smart Splitter and your Dual-Car Smart Splitter?

A Ryan Meffert: The key difference is the amperage.

The Dual-Car version has 50 amps, and that allows us to split the power and be able to charge two cars with one outlet. Let’s say you have a Tesla, and you upgraded your whole electrical system. You have a 220-volt outlet in your garage, and now you get another Tesla.

That’s awesome that you’ve got two Teslas, but now you’re going to have to go through all of this upgrading and spend a ton of money just to get another outlet for you to charge your car.

Instead, you can just utilize our device, plug it in that existing outlet, and share that outlet to charge both of your cars. What we allow it to do is to charge one of your cars at half speed, and the other car at half speed.

Or you can charge one of your cars till it’s fully charged, and then automatically overnight, it’s going to switch and fully charge your other car. The priority aspect is still giving the left charger full priority, so that’s going to charge fully, and then when that’s done, your other vehicle is going to charge.

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Q Charged: To split the power 50-50, you have to

change the settings in your EV, right? You have to tell the vehicle to ramp down power?

A Ryan Meffert: Yes. You can set the power limits on your car, and a lot of EV chargers—some of the best sellers—have the same capability.

Q Charged: If you’re splitting the power between two

EVs and one tries to draw more power, what happens?

A Ryan Meffert: Our Smart Splitter technology ensures that you are not able to draw more power than what your outlet is rated for.

Q Charged: Where are you currently selling these,

and how much do they cost?

A Ryan Meffert: We have a few resellers that we’re very proud to work with, and we’re selling directly on our web site for $449 or $499.

We think it’s a great value when you consider the alternative of hiring a licensed electrician to add a dedicated circuit, which may require an expensive upgrade to your electrical panel. And when people understand the intense safety process that we went through getting UL-certified, it adds a lot of peace of mind. Also, it’s compact, and the portability aspect is crucial for many EV drivers. Let’s say there’s an Airbnb somewhere with a 220-volt outlet. You have charging at your Airbnb now, and you can take this product with you, which no other product can do.

We pride ourselves on our customer support. I like to personally call up every customer and ask about their situation. One of the coolest pieces about what we’re doing is that a lot of times we had an impact on them deciding to drive electric. And that’s the cool thing—we gave them the capability because we saved them that much money.

Q Charged: Do you have more EV products coming

down the line?

A Ryan Meffert: Yes. They’re a ways away, but we’re not

The importance of exhaustive safety testing To ensure that a product adheres to strict construction and operational safety guidelines, manufacturers will send samples to one of the Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratories (NRTLs), such as Intertek or Underwriters Laboratories (UL).

Safety engineers at these labs perform months of extensive safety testing and go through any applicable industry standards line by line to ensure that the product complies in every way.

Once a product passes all of the tests, the NRTL will issue the product its seal of approval—for example, the familiar UL mark, or Intertek’s ETL mark. Only products that bear one of these marks, or the mark of another approved NRTL, on or near the rating plate, are safety-certified.

The rigorous and comprehensive certification agencies typically test for three separate facets of product safety: • Electrical safety • Fire safety • Mechanical safety In addition, they test for: • Longevity • Resistance • Durability “When building the NeoCharge Smart Splitter, we had to ensure the entire design aspect of the product could withstand UL’s intense safety requirements,” says Ryan Meffert. “Making sure this product is as safe for the customer as possible, and also meets electrical code standards, is a very large challenge to overcome, but NeoCharge was able to achieve this through a year-and-a-half-long process, and is now in full production.”

stopping at the Smart Splitter, I can tell you that.

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Utilities are hot on EVs—but not for the obvious reason.

By Charles Morris lectric utilities are emerging as mighty champions of electromobility. Around the US, they’re investing large sums in charging networks, rolling out web sites touting the benefits of EVs to their customers, and deploying their formidable lobbying power to encourage state governments to enact pro-EV measures.

The reason for this might seem obvious—the more EVs on the road, the more demand for electricity. However, that’s not the main reason power providers are so charged up. Electric cars have been around for a decade, but the utilities’ fervent EVangelism is a more recent phenomenon. What’s really turning up the voltage is the prospect of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology.

Utilities are investing heavily in battery storage, which gives them several important tools. Two of the most important are load balancing—smoothing out the fluctuations in demand between times of heavy and light electricity usage—and the ability to store energy from intermittent renewable sources. As the cost of battery storage comes down, it’s becoming a better solution (cheaper, more flexible, and much greener) than the coal or gas peaker plants that utilities currently use to manage the gaps between supply and demand.

If a large number of EVs with bidirectional charging capability were hooked up to the grid, they could act as an enormous virtual battery. V2G tech is still pretty much in the pilot stage, but utilities are quite keen on it, and they tend to have long timelines. Looking to the future, utilities have a huge incentive to encourage their customers not only to buy EVs, but to leave those EVs plugged in as much as possible. This explains why they’re racing to roll out large numbers of public Level 2 chargers. Most drivers will never really need to use these chargers, but every extra minute that an EV is plugged in somewhere makes the virtual battery (or storage asset, in utility-speak) that much more useful. It’s in utilities’ interest to make public charging free, or even to offer incentives to get drivers used to plugging in even when they don’t need to.

However, there are compelling arguments against letting utilities monopolize the public charging scene, as any of the independent charging network operators will be happy to explain. In several cases in California, private charging providers have raised objections to utility plans for large EVSE projects. In 2016, the CPUC forced San Diego Gas & Electric to scale back a proposal for 5,500 V2G-capable public chargers after other charging operators cried foul.

Many are skeptical that network operators will ever see much profit from charging for electrons—maintenance

E

Iss 51 pg 76-84.indd 82

costs for public chargers are too high, and pricing power is too low. However, companies such as EVmatch, which provides software services to charging site hosts, and ChargePoint, which has assets at every link in the charging value chain, may thrive, especially if they can stake out positions in the coming V2G field.

Other players are also eyeing the V2G pie. Fleet operators who implement V2G will be able to offer large chunks of virtual battery capacity to utilities—but they’ll expect to be paid for it. In fact, some commercial EV-makers (see our interview with Proterra CTO Dustin Grace in this issue) and fleet charging providers (see last issue’s profile of Enel X) are dangling the possibility of monetizing their vehicles’ downtime as an additional selling point for fleet customers.

Some find it puzzling that industry leader Tesla has shown so little interest in V2G. “Vehicle-to-grid sounds good but I think actually has a much lower utility than people think,” said Elon Musk at the company’s recent Battery Day. Elon’s stance has sparked some very lively discussions online—some say Tesla is missing the boat in a short-sighted attempt to drive customers to its overpriced Powerwall products, while others think the Powerwall model offers more direct benefits to consumers than V2G, which really only benefits the utility. Also, Tesla’s planned network of Robotaxis promises to offer a different revenue stream to EV owners, and one that wouldn’t be very compatible with the V2G model (unlike today’s typical vehicles, Robotaxis won’t spend much time idle).

One thing seems certain—consumers aren’t likely to give their utilities control over their charging in exchange for a toaster or a t-shirt. If companies want their customers to join the glorious virtual battery, they’re going to have to offer real incentives, and that means cash. Could it be that, someday, EV drivers will expect not to pay to charge, but to be paid to charge?

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