sin46th magzus.org

ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE

ISSUE 58 | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 | CHARGEDEVS.COM

LUCID

THE MAKERS OF THE FIRST 500-MILE EV SHOULD BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY p. 42

air

Created by engineers with years of EV experience, the 2022 Lucid Air is a stunning debut that confronts Tesla—and Mercedes-Benz—with a new competitor.

p. 20

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MINIMIZING CHARGING LOSSES PART 2: THE CHARGER

p. 26

BRINGING PCB STATOR TECHNOLOGY TO EV MOTORS

2021 p. 62

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1/30/22 3:49 PM

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1/30/22 3:49 PM

THE TECH CONTENTS

20 Minimizing charging losses

26

Part 2: The charger

26 PCB stator technology 10

current events 10

Powertrain specialist ePropelled raises $15 million in Series A funding ACEINNA’s new high-power current sensors work with systems up to 65 amps

11 12

Sensata expands EV portfolio with purchase of Sendyne GM invests $51 million to upgrade plant to produce more EV drive unit castings Microchip Technology and Mersen collaborate on 150 kVA SiC power stack design

13 14

16

Parker LORD adds thermally-conductive adhesives to its EV portfolio Li-Cycle unveils plans for Hub facility, announces recycling agreement with LG STMicroelectronics releases SiC MOSFETs for 800 V drive systems

15 16

Electrical steel shortage could slow OEM electrification plans NGen invests $1.3 million in NOVONIX for cathode facility in Nova Scotia Goodyear’s ElectricDrive GT tire is specially tuned for EVs

17

Lightning eMotors reveals all-new commercial eChassis VisIC and Hofer to develop 3-level 800 V GaN inverter ITECH’s new power supplies can supply up to 1,020 amps

18

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Eaton buys EV connector manufacturer Royal Power Solutions for $600 million Bosch starts volume production of silicon carbide semiconductors

19

Volkswagen Group announces three major new battery initiatives

1/30/22 3:50 PM

THE VEHICLES CONTENTS

42 2022 Lucid Air The makers of the first 500-mile EV should be taken seriously

42

current events 32

SEA Electric to power 10,000 electric school buses St Petersburg, Florida’s PSTA hopes to deploy 60 new electric buses

33

Proterra to build new EV battery factory in South Carolina Taiga Motors produces electric snowmobile

34

New Jersey Senate approves bill mandating electric school bus program

33

GM delivers first BrightDrop EV600 electric vans to FedEx

35 36

Rivian to build $5-billion battery and assembly plant near Atlanta New York City orders hundreds of Tesla Model 3s for municipal fleet Volkswagen to add Plug & Charge, bidirectional charging to all ID. models

37

Cummins releases new electric powertrain for terminal tractors Deutsche Bahn orders 44 Stadler battery-electric trains

38

Hyundai ends new ICE development, suspends hydrogen vehicle GM offering electrification components to commercial customers

39 40

36

Nissan announces $18 billion in new e-mobility investment Proterra to power next-gen Citi VOLT electric buses Ford Pro delivers new E-Transit van to selected fleet customers

41

Ford to increase production of F-150 Lightning (again)

IDENTIFICATION STATEMENT CHARGED Electric Vehicles Magazine (ISSN: 24742341) November/December 2021, Issue #58 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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41 1/30/22 3:50 PM

THE INFRASTRUCTURE CONTENTS

62 2021 EV Charging Infrastructure Benchmark Comparing the user experience of the charging

62

networks: Electrify America, Tesla Superchargers, EVgo, ChargePoint, EV Connect, Greenlots and Blink

current events

55

54 55

White House releases details of EV charging infrastructure plan Ford Pro Charging offers commercial charging solution Tritium supplies chargers to Shell and Osprey, plans to go public

56

Shell converts London petrol station to EV charging hub Fifty utilities form group to coordinate EV infrastructure

57

Utrecht plans to be a bidirectional city, turning its EVs into a giant battery Atom Power’s charging solution charges EVs directly from the circuit breaker

57

58

Francis Energy and Fuel Maxx to expand Houston fast charging network OBE Power selects Driivz platform for its charging network

59

Volvo, Daimler and Traton to build charging network for commercial EVs Ford launches zero-carbon home charging initiative in California US installing workplace chargers at an impressive pace

60

Wallbox’s new Quasar 2 bidirectional home charger DOE awards Eaton $5 million to develop turnkey fast charging system

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1/30/22 3:52 PM

Publisher Christian Ruoff Associate Publisher Laurel Zimmer Senior Editor Charles Morris

Contributing Writers Matt Cousineau Jeffrey Jenkins Charles Morris Christian Ruoff Tom Spendlove John Voelcker

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

Account Executives Jeremy Ewald Cover Image Courtesy of Lucid Motors Technology Editor Jeffrey Jenkins Special Thanks to Kelly Ruoff Sebastien Bourgeois

Graphic Designers Tomislav Vrdoljak

ETHICS STATEMENT AND COVERAGE POLICY AS THE LEADING EV INDUSTRY PUBLICATION, CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE OFTEN COVERS, AND ACCEPTS CONTRIBUTIONS FROM, COMPANIES THAT ADVERTISE IN OUR MEDIA PORTFOLIO. HOWEVER, THE CONTENT WE CHOOSE TO PUBLISH PASSES ONLY TWO TESTS: (1) TO THE BEST OF OUR KNOWLEDGE THE INFORMATION IS ACCURATE, AND (2) IT MEETS THE INTERESTS OF OUR READERSHIP. WE DO NOT ACCEPT PAYMENT FOR EDITORIAL CONTENT, AND THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED BY OUR EDITORS AND WRITERS ARE IN NO WAY AFFECTED BY A COMPANY’S PAST, CURRENT, OR POTENTIAL ADVERTISEMENTS. FURTHERMORE, WE OFTEN ACCEPT ARTICLES AUTHORED BY “INDUSTRY INSIDERS,” IN WHICH CASE THE AUTHOR’S CURRENT EMPLOYMENT, OR RELATIONSHIP TO THE EV INDUSTRY, IS CLEARLY CITED. IF YOU DISAGREE WITH ANY OPINION EXPRESSED IN THE CHARGED MEDIA PORTFOLIO AND/OR WISH TO WRITE ABOUT YOUR PARTICULAR VIEW OF THE INDUSTRY, PLEASE CONTACT US AT CONTENT@CHARGEDEVS. COM. REPRINTING IN WHOLE OR PART IS FORBIDDEN EXPECT BY PERMISSION OF CHARGED ELECTRIC VEHICLES MAGAZINE. ai163277740911_ChargedEVs-GMW-Advert-HalfPage-Sept2021.pdf

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1/30/22 3:53 PM

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ZELTWANGER.COM Iss 58.indd 7

1/30/22 3:54 PM

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It seems like every year since we started publishing Charged, we’ve predicted that the coming year would be The Year of the EV. Okay, dear readers, we were over-optimistic in the past, but 2022 is going to be it.

At least 30 new EVs are scheduled to go on sale in 2022. As always, many of these are destined to be footnotes to automotive history, but a few seem likely to be significant milestones. Some of the Class of 22 are low-volume halo models that will generate a lot of media headlines, but won’t move the needle on EV adoption (e.g. the enormous and expensive Hummer EV, supercars from Maserati and Lotus). Some are tiny city cars that may see success in Europe or China, but will never be sold in the US (the Citroën Ami). Some are made by automakers whose commitment to electrification is dubious (BMW, Mercedes, Toyota) or whose continued existence is in question (Fisker, Canoo).

However, there are a few potential blockbusters in the wings. The Ford F-150 Lightning tops this list, and not only for the obvious reason that it’s an electric version of the country’s best-selling vehicle—early indications are that it’s an innovative product with some compelling features, and that demand is high.

Another pair of rides to watch will be the Hyundai Ioniq 5, which recently went on sale, and its relative, the Kia EV6, which is to arrive this year. Today’s Hyundai offers some of the best value for the price in the auto industry, and its engineers are on a mission to produce the world’s most efficient EVs. It might just be the brand that finally expands the EV market to the lower price ranges. Meanwhile, the automaker recently made history by becoming the first to end development of new ICE engines. We look forward to hearing more announcements of this kind in 2022.

Lucid and Rivian are by all accounts the cream of the latest crop of startups, and both are working to ramp up production in 2022. If they do, they’ll inject a welcome dose of new blood, if not to dethrone Big Auto, at least to keep it on the run.

There’s much more. The Nissan Ariya, the Subaru Solterra and the Polestar 3 could be contenders. A couple of Chinese brands are starting to sell EVs in Europe, and may finally be able to realize the dream of breaking into the US market.

And of course, Tesla, which continues to dominate EV production and deliveries, is going full speed ahead. We won’t see any new models hit the road in 2022 (Cybertruck, Roadster or the Tesla Semi), but the real earthquake will be the ramp of production at the Texas and Berlin Gigafactories. This could reshape the auto markets on two continents (actually three, because it will free up capacity in Shanghai for more local deliveries).

New EV models will grab the headlines, but there will be other, equally important, developments in the year ahead, and you’ll read about them in Charged. Important new tech advances are in the wind—we may begin to see forms of solid-state battery tech appear in production vehicles. It will also be an exciting time on the infrastructure front—the federal EV Charging Action Plan is taking shape, Tesla’s Superchargers will be opening up, and important innovations like Plug & Charge, 800-volt architectures and V2G will start to take hold.

Christian Ruoff | Publisher EVs are here. Try to keep up.

1/30/22 3:56 PM

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1/30/22 3:56 PM

THE TECH

Powertrain specialist ePropelled raises $15 million in Series A funding Massachusetts-based ePropelled has raised $15 million in Series A financing from individual investors. It will use the new funding to further develop its products and boost its sales and marketing efforts. ePropelled builds motors, generators and power management systems. Products include eAxles and the Dynamic Torque Switching (eDTS) powertrain system for EVs, as well as propulsion and power systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). ePropelled stresses the critical importance of EV efficiency. According to the company, battery packs account for 30% of total vehicle cost, and ePropelled’s technology can reduce that by 15%. The company claims that “in the best-selling electric vehicle in the US, using ePropelled’s technology would cut the car’s weight by 159 pounds and reduce the cost by $1,654.”

“The addressable market for our business is expected to reach $18 billion by 2025 and accelerate to over $100 billion by 2030,” said ePropelled CEO Nick Grewal.

“While EVs are popular, their higher price—driven largely by battery pack costs—is preventing wider adoption and creates a compelling business opportunity we are uniquely positioned to address with our game-changing technology.”

ACEINNA’s new ±65 A MCx1101 Current Sensor is the company’s most accurate and highest-bandwidth current sensor. Designed for WBG (wide-bandgap) applications, and available in 3.3- and 5-volt versions, this AMR-based (Anisotropic Magnetoresistive) current sensor is designed for a wide range of power systems and applications.

The MCx1101’s fast response and high bandwidth is designed for fast-switching SiC- and GaN-based power stages. It enables power system designers to make use of the higher speeds and smaller components enabled by wide-bandgap switches. Output step response time is 0.3 µs. The sensor also provides an integrated over-current detection (OCD) flag to help implement the OCD feature required in modern power systems. Over-current detection response time is 0.2 µs.

The sensors are designed to deliver a combination of high accuracy, 1.5 MHz signal bandwidth with industry benchmark phase shift vs frequency, fast output step response and 4.8 kV isolation, making them ideal for current sensing in fast-current control loops and protection for high-performance power supplies, inverters, and motor control applications. In addition to the new ±65-amp version, the sensor family includes ±50, ±20, and ±5-amp ranges, and is offered in both fixed-gain (MCA1101) and ratiometric-gain (MCR1101) versions.

“ACEINNA’s MCx1101 current sensors are fully integrated, bidirectional and provide much higher DC and AC accuracy and dynamic range compared with alternative solutions,” says Teoman Ustun, ACEINNA VP of Marketing. “For example, the new ±65-amp versions have a typical accuracy of ±3%. This new current sensor utilizes an industry standard SOIC-16 package with a low-impedance (0.9 milliohm) current path, and is UL/ IEC/EN60950-1 certified for isolated applications.”

Image courtesy of ACEINNA

Image courtesy of ePropelled

ACEINNA’s new high-power current sensors work with systems up to 65 amps

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1/30/22 3:58 PM

Image courtesy of Sensata

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Sensata expands EV portfolio with purchase of Sendyne Global electronics firm Sensata has acquired New York-based Sendyne.

Sensata is a sensor, controller, and software company with products in the automotive, heavy vehicle and off-road markets. Sendyne designs and manufactures integrated circuits and modules for EVs, charging stations, energy storage and IoT equipment.

The latest acquisition adds Sendyne to Sensata’s growing roster of electrification-related companies. In 2018, Sensata bought power contactor designer GIGAVAC. In 2021, it purchased battery management system provider Lithium Balance and battery storage specialist Spear Power Systems.

“Sendyne enables us to deliver a more comprehensive electrification product portfolio, and will help drive our electrification growth vector and accelerate our electrification strategy,” said Sensata CTO George Verras.

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GM invests $51 million to upgrade plant to produce more EV drive unit castings GM plans to invest more than $51 million to upgrade its Bedford, Indiana mold and aluminum die casting plant for some of its current casting needs, and to support the upcoming Chevy Silverado EV, which is to be launched at CES in 2022.

The Silverado EV joins the growing roster of GM vehicles with aluminum drive unit castings made at Bedford.

The one-million-square-foot plant also makes aluminum drive unit castings for the 2022 GMC Hummer EV pickup and 2024 GMC Hummer EV SUV, as well as drive unit housings for Chevy EVs.

Microchip Technology and Mersen collaborate on 150 kVA SiC power stack reference design Microchip Technology is collaborating with Mersen on a new 150 kVA 3-phase silicon carbide power stack reference design. Mersen’s current offering provides designers with a compact, high-power silicon carbide system without the need for individual device sourcing, testing and qualification.

The reference design includes Microchip’s SiC power modules and digital gate drivers and Mersen’s busbar, fuses, capacitors and thermal management. With Microchip’s 1,200 V SiC MOSFET and AgileSwitch digital gate driver, the reference design enables engineers to rapidly develop high-voltage systems using kits predesigned for their applications.

The Power Stack Reference Design provides 16 kW/L of power density at up to 130° C, peak efficiency of 98%, and switching frequency of up to 20 kHz . Using Microchip’s SiC MOSFETs and AgileSwitch digital gate drivers, the reference design enables engineers to select from 700 V and 1,200 V options, and currents up to 750 A. Microchip also provides a choice in module construction, including baseplate material, Direct Bonding Copper (DBC), ceramic material and the die attach method.

Philippe Roussel, Mersen VP, said, “We can demonstrate our ability to optimize inverter topologies from our customers, relying on our line of highly reliable bus bars, capacitors, fuses and cooling systems. The Microchip silicon carbide line-up also gives us the capacity to extend these primary specifications to higher voltage, current and switching frequency to meet every customer’s operating point needs.”

Image courtesy of Mersen

Images courtesy of GM

THE TECH

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1/30/22 3:58 PM

Parker LORD has expanded its EV product portfolio to include thermally conductive adhesives and one-component low-density gap fillers. The new adhesives are part of a strategy to create lighter-weight and smaller-footprint products that can help deliver additional energy density. Methods under development include bonding individual cells directly to the cooling plate and bonding directly to the vehicle chassis. For these designs to be viable, new bonding and thermal management technology is needed.

These Cell-to-Pack (CTP) adhesives offer strong adhesion, substantial thermal conductivity, low density, flow characteristics and low dielectric constants compared

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Image courtesy of Parker Lord

Parker LORD adds thermallyconductive adhesives to its EV portfolio

to previous offerings. The CoolTherm two-component portfolio provides a variety of thermal conductivities and chemistries to choose from, which provide high dispense rate, reliable cure performance and customizable electrical properties. There is also a new non-silicone, low-density, one-component gap filler.

“It’s exciting to share our newly-developed solutions for the EV industry. We’re thrilled to continue growing our partnerships with OEMs and battery manufacturers,” said Brad Gibson, Parker LORD Director of Sales.

1/30/22 3:59 PM

Image courtesy of Li-Cycle

STMicroelectronics releases SiC MOSFETs for 800 V drive systems

Li-Cycle unveils plans for Hub facility, announces recycling agreement with LG Li-Cycle has announced plans to build its first Hub facility near Rochester, New York. The company expects to process equivalent battery material to power approximately 225,000 EVs per year.

Li-Cycle (profiled in our July/August 2020 issue) uses a hub-and-spoke model for its recycling process. The New York Hub will be integrated with Li-Cycle’s existing network of Spoke facilities across North America, which take in end-of-life batteries and battery manufacturing scrap to produce black mass, an intermediate product containing valuable metals such as nickel, cobalt and lithium. The Hub will transform that black mass into critical battery-grade materials to be returned back to the lithium-ion battery supply chain.

Meanwhile, Li-Cycle, LG Chem and LG Energy Solution have entered into a manufacturing scrap supply and nickel sulfate purchasing agreement. LGES and Li-Cycle intend to partner on recycling nickel-bearing lithium-ion battery scrap and other battery materials to create a closed-loop ecosystem. LG Chem and LGES together will make a $50-million equity investment in Li-Cycle.

“We believe the upsizing of our commercial Hub facility is timely, to capture growth from heightened demand in North America driving significant new battery megafactory deployments. We expect the Hub project to deliver highly accretive returns,” said Li-Cycle President Ajay Kochhar.

Image: STMicroelectronics

THE TECH

STMicroelectronics has released its third generation of STPOWER silicon-carbide (SiC) MOSFETs, intended for 800 V drive systems. ST’s new SiC devices are designed for traction inverters, on-board chargers, DC-DC converters and e-climate compressors.

The new components are designed to boost the efficiency of motor drives, renewable-energy converters and storage systems.

Devices with nominal voltage ratings from 650 V and 750 V up to 1,200 V will be available, giving more choices for designers to address applications operating from ordinary AC line voltages up to those of high-voltage EV batteries and chargers. The first products available are the 650 V SCT040H65G3AG and a 750 V device in die form.

SiC says its MOSFETs have a higher voltage rating in relation to their die size, compared to silicon alternatives.

The devices have a fast intrinsic diode that delivers the bidirectional properties needed for automotive on-board chargers (OBCs) used in vehicle-to-X (V2X) applications. The company says the devices’ very high frequency capability allows smaller passive components to be used, allowing more compact and lightweight electrical equipment to be used in the vehicle.

ST will offer the devices in bare dice form, discrete power packages such as STPAK, H2PAK-7L, HiP247-4L, HU3PAK, and power modules of the ACEPACK family.

Design features include strategically-placed cooling tabs that simplify connection to base plates and heat spreaders. The options give designers choices that are optimized for main traction inverters, OBCs, DC-DC converters, e-climate compressors and industrial applications.

“We continue to drive this exciting technology forward with innovations at both the device and package levels.

As a fully integrated SiC products manufacturer, we are able to deliver continued improved performance to our customers,” said Edoardo Merli, STMicroelectronics General Manager.

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1/30/22 4:00 PM

Electrical steel shortage could slow OEM electrification plans A new report from IHS Markit foresees the possibility of an electrical steel shortage, beginning in 2025, that could pose a threat to automakers’ electrification plans.

Electrical steel is an iron-silicon alloy with magnetic characteristics that make it well suited for electric motors. Non-Oriented Electrical Steel (NOES) is one form that’s used to make motors. According to IHS Markit, high barriers to enter the NOES production industry, a geographic concentration of NOES manufacturing in Asia, limited ability to switch materials, and a small number of stamping and die companies for EV motors may all contribute to a shortage of NOES. Global demand for the NOES used in EV motors is expected to climb from 320,000 tons in 2020 to more than 2.5 million tons in 2027, and by 2025 steel mills are unlikely to be able to meet demand.

While some steel producers are planning to boost production, IHS Markit predicts it will not be enough to meet NOES demand. Instead, the report says that, in the long term, even more capacity and investments in new production capacity will be required. In the short term, the report recommends that OEMs broaden their manufacturing capacities, redesign motors to reduce NOES scrap material, replace NOES with an alternative material, and vertically integrate with steel manufacturers.

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2021-11-10 13:59:29

1/30/22 4:01 PM

THE TECH

NGen invests $1.3 million in NOVONIX for cathode facility in Nova Scotia Lithium-ion battery firm NOVONIX has received 1.675 million Canadian dollars ($1.3 million US) from Next Generation Manufacturing Canada (NGen) as part of a larger investment in building a battery development and manufacturing facility in Nova Scotia.

According to NOVONIX, “The new facility will play a key role in building a Canadian battery materials supply chain, limiting the current dependence on Asia and capitalizing on the tremendous growth in this sector created by the increased demand for electric vehicles and grid energy storage.”

NGen is a non-profit organization composed of manufacturers, technology firms and researchers that share the goal of developing advanced manufacturing in Canada.

NGen’s investment in the NOVONIX project is part of some $14 million it plans to invest to build a facility in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia for producing cathodes, with support from Canadian construction and manufacturing company Well Engineered.

Goodyear has launched its first replacement tire in North America tuned for EVs. The Goodyear ElectricDrive GT is “an ultra-high performance, all-season tire that delivers long-lasting tread wear and a quiet ride for EV drivers and passengers.”

The ElectricDrive GT features Goodyear’s SoundComfort Technology, which acts as a built-in sound barrier that helps reduce road noise. It also features an asymmetric tread pattern and specialized tread compound that are designed to provide enhanced all-season traction in both wet and dry road conditions.

The initial release of the new tire is available in only one size: 255/45R19 104W XL, which Goodyear says fits “some of the most popular EV high-performance models.” The company plans to expand its ElectricDrive product portfolio in 2022.

“Products that anticipate the mobility needs of consumers are central to Goodyear’s focus on innovation excellence,” said David Reese, VP of Product Development, Goodyear Americas. “Electric vehicles present a very specific set of requirements for load, torque, noise, range, rolling resistance and overall performance.”

“With the continued growth in the EV segment, Goodyear recognized an opportunity to provide consumers with a tire designed for the unique needs of these vehicles,” said Product Marketing Manager Andrew Lau. “We know drivers are looking for a replacement tire that delivers enhanced tread wear without sacrificing performance. The ElectricDrive GT was designed with that in mind.”

Image courtesy of Goodyear

Image courtesy of NOVONIX

Goodyear’s ElectricDrive GT tire is specially tuned for EVs

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1/30/22 4:01 PM

Lightning eMotors reveals all- VisIC and Hofer to develop new commercial eChassis 3-level 800 V GaN inverter Image courtesy of Goodyear

Commercial EV builder Lightning eMotors (NYSE: ZEV) has introduced an all-new rolling chassis purpose-built for commercial EV applications.

The Lightning eChassis, which was developed in collaboration with Mexican automotive supplier Metalsa, will be available for Class 4 and Class 5 commercial electric chassis cab, stripped chassis and cutaway chassis configurations.

The design accommodates different battery sizes and configurations, different powertrain integrations and different wheelbases, allowing Lightning eMotors to support a wide variety of vocational applications and upfitter partners. Lightning says the new eChassis will support a Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) that’s about 1,500 pounds higher than the average platform on the market today, enabling customers to increase passenger and payload capacity for electrified ambulances, shuttle buses, delivery and refrigerated trucks and work trucks.

Lightning expects to make pre-production units available starting in the second quarter of 2022, and to begin production before the end of the year.

“This collaboration with Metalsa will allow us to serve areas of the commercial vehicle market that are currently underserved with electrification options,” said Lightning CEO and co-founder Tim Reese. “Bringing this solution to the commercial EV space represents another milestone in our strategy to offer our customers purpose-built, highly-customized zero-emission vehicles that deliver superior performance at a low price.”

“One of the most exciting aspects of our partnership with Metalsa is the control it gives us over our chassis supply chain,” said Chelsea Ramm, Lightning VP, Global Supply Chain. “Constraints on the automotive supply chain have impacted the entire EV market. The Lightning eChassis provides our customers with additional options and the flexible architecture to accommodate a variety of different powertrain needs and wheelbases.”

Gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductor manufacturer VisIC Technologies plans to team up with automotive powertrain maker Hofer Powertrain to develop a 3-level 800 V GaN inverter for EVs. Hofer brings over 5 years of experience developing a 3-level inverter to the table. The company says that, compared to 2-level inverters with IGBTs or SiC chips, its 3-level inverter provides better overall system energy consumption, a reduction in drive unit noise, vibration and harshness (NVH), and decreased costs for complying with electromagnetic compatibility requirements such as the Comité International Spécial des Perturbations Radioélectriques 25 class 5 rule.

“VisIC’s D3GaN technology was developed for the high-reliability standards of the automotive industry, and offers the lowest losses per RDS,” says VisIC CEO Tamara Baksht. VisIC also says its GaN semiconductors improve the efficiency, range, and switching speed of EVs while shrinking the size of the inverter and lowering the total system cost.

ITECH’s new power supplies can deliver up to 1,020 amps ITECH has released four new IT-M3900 power supply products: the IT-M3900B for regenerative power systems; the IT-M3900C for bidirectional DC power supplies; the IT-M3900D for DC high-power supplies; and the ITM3800 for regenerative DC loads.

The maximum power of a 1U unit is 6 kW, and the maximum of a 2U unit is 12 kW. Voltages run between 10 V and 1,500 V, and the output current of a single unit can reach 1,020 A. The power supplies are designed to regenerate power, and the company says feedback efficiency can reach 95%. Optional software packages will allow the power supplies to run battery tests, simulations and solar panel maximum point power tracking. The power supplies are pre-compliant with LV123 and LV148 standards for EV component testing.

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Eaton buys EV connector manufacturer Royal Power Solutions for $600 million Power management specialist Eaton has acquired Royal Power Solutions, a US-based manufacturer of high-precision connectivity parts for EVs, mobility markets and energy management, for $600 million.

“Growth opportunities tied to the electrification of our economy are accelerating, and Eaton is fully participating through our mobility and electrical businesses. The addition of Royal Power Solutions enhances our ability to capitalize on this secular growth trend across our eMobility, aerospace and electrical businesses,” said Eaton Industrial Sector President and COO Heath Monesmith.

Image courtesy of Bosch

Images courtesy of Royal Power Solutions

THE TECH

Bosch starts volume production of silicon carbide semiconductors Bosch has started volume production of SiC semiconductors, and plans to expand its production capacity to a unit volume running into the hundreds of millions. The company is also working on a second generation of more efficient SiC chips.

To meet steadily increasing demand for these semiconductors, Bosch added 1,000 square meters to the cleanroom space at its wafer fabrication facility in Reutlingen, Germany in 2021. Another 3,000 square meters will be added to house production facilities for manufacturing the semiconductors. Compared with today’s 150-millimeter wafers, Bosch intends to manufacture on a larger wafer size and take advantage of economies of scale.

“The future for silicon carbide semiconductors is bright. We want to become a global leader in the production of SiC chips for electromobility,” said Harald Kroeger, Bosch Board Member. “Silicon carbide power semiconductors make particularly efficient use of energy.

This material’s advantages really come to the fore in energy-intensive applications such as electromobility. By producing on larger wafers, we can manufacture significantly more chips in one production run and thus supply more customers.”

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Volkswagen Group announces three major new battery initiatives The Volkswagen Group is raising its planned investment in EV and self-driving technologies to 73 billion euros ($86 billion) over the next 5 years, and has announced 3 new battery-related initiatives.

Next-gen batteries from 24M The Volkswagen Group and 24M Technologies have formed a strategic partnership under which VW will manufacture EV batteries using 24M’s SemiSolid platform. VW has acquired a 25% stake in 24M, and will establish a wholly-owned subsidiary that will collaborate with 24M to develop SemiSolid battery cell production technology for automotive applications.

“Through our newly established subsidiary and our strategic partnership with 24M, we are focused on bringing the SemiSolid platform to automotive applications, and believe we can develop cost-effective processes to meet the increasing demand for EVs,” said Dr. Steffen Blase, Head of Group Mergers and Acquisitions at Volkswagen.

Cathode materials from Umicore VW also plans to establish a joint venture with Belgian-based materials group Umicore, which will build precursor and cathode material production capacity in Europe to supply VW’s battery cell production. The companies plan to gradually ramp up the JV’s production capacity, starting in 2025 with an initial annual production of 20 GWh for Volkswagen’s plant in Salzgitter, Germany, and growing to an annual capacity of up to 160 GWh by the end of the decade—enough for around 2.2 million EVs. “The Volkswagen unified cell must be at the forefront of performance, costs and sustainability right from the start. Teaming up with Umicore enables us to establish a state-of-the-art supply chain in Europe, as we share common values such as responsible sourcing of raw materials, as well as closed-loop thinking,” said Thomas Schmall, CEO of Volkswagen Group Components.

The two companies will collaborate on the sustainable sourcing of raw materials—a strong area of expertise for Umicore—and aim to eventually add elements of refining and battery recycling to the scope of the JV. Lithium hydroxide from Vulcan VW has signed a binding lithium hydroxide supply agreement with Vulcan Energy Resources to support its plans to establish 6 battery gigafactories in Europe with a total production capacity of 240 GWh by the end of the decade.

The Group has agreed to purchase between 34,000 and 42,000 tons of battery-grade lithium hydroxide from Vulcan over the 5-year term of the agreement. Commercial delivery is to begin in 2026.

Vulcan’s Zero Carbon Lithium Project will produce battery-quality lithium from its combined geothermal energy and lithium resource in Germany, which the company calls Europe’s largest lithium resource.

CELL, MODULE, & PACK BATTERY TEST SYSTEMS • Flexible • Reliable • User-Friendly

www.bitrode.com

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THE TECH

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A CLOSER LOOK AT

MINIMIZING

CHARGING LOSSES

PART 2: THE CHARGER

By Jeffrey Jenkins n the previous article, we looked at the various losses incurred on the AC side of the circuit while charging an EV’s battery (from the breaker in the load center to the EVSE inlet on the EV), as well as things that could be done to minimize them, either by the OEM, the electrical contractor or the EV owner. This time our focus will shift over to the DC side of the circuit (and more specifically, the charger itself).

Regardless of where the charger is actually located—either onboard the EV or within a curbside DC fast charging station—a few basic functional requirements will be common to all chargers: provide galvanic isolation between the AC mains and the EV (i.e. have a transformer for isolation somewhere in the circuit); regulate and/or limit the current and voltage to the battery (i.e. be ca-

I

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THE TECH

Basic requirements common to all chargers include: provide galvanic isolation between the AC mains and the EV; regulate the current and voltage to the battery; and perform power factor correction. pable of constant current [CC] or constant voltage [CV] operation); and, more than likely, ensure the current waveform drawn from the mains is aligned in time and magnitude with the voltage waveform (in other words, perform power factor correction, or PFC). Unsurprisingly, there are numerous potential solutions to performing all three functions, but for the sake of not turning this article into a proverbial “Homeric catalog of ships,” we’ll just concentrate on the most common configurations— ignoring, for example, the use of a mains-frequency transformer for isolation, or so-called “single-stage” PFC and isolation converter topologies (which inevitably perform no function terribly well).

Assuming that isolation will be done with a high-frequency transformer, rather than a mains-frequency one, the first stage of the DC charger is the mains-frequency rectifier. For chargers that also do PFC—pretty much all of them these days—a bridge rectifier with a very small amount of filter capacitance (strictly to reduce noise and transients from the mains) will be used to produce sinusoidally-pulsating DC with a ripple frequency that is twice the mains frequency (i.e. 120 Hz for 60 Hz mains) and a peak value that is approximately 1.4x the RMS value of the mains voltage (~165 VDC for 120 VAC mains, or ~330 VDC for 240 VAC). The following PFC stage will then convert that pulsating DC to a much more smoothed-out DC with an average value close to 400 VDC, typically using a boost converter. Since the same DC bus voltage is produced regardless of the AC mains input voltage, this configuration is commonly

described as universal input—meaning that the onboard charger can be plugged into either a 120 VAC or 240 VAC outlet without any action or concern on the part of the user to ensure things don’t blow up. Finally, there are the transformer isolation and CC/CV regulation functions, which are usually performed by a single converter.

The most common converter topology used here is a full-bridge converter operating at a switching frequency of >50 kHz (typically in the range of 100 kHz-300 kHz, to be more precise) driving a high-frequency transformer. Control of the output current and/or voltage can be achieved by the conventional method of varying the duty cycle of each complementary pair of bridge switches from 0% to 50% (i.e. pulse-width modulation, or PWM), or through more exotic methods, like varying the phase shift of each pair from 0° to 180° (i.e. phaseshift modulation).

Rectifying the AC from the mains into DC is usually done with four conventional silicon junction diodes in the bridge configuration. This puts two diodes in series with the mains at all times, and since every diode introduces a voltage drop while conducting (aka its forward voltage drop, or Vf ), the humble bridge rectifier can exact a surprisingly large toll on overall charger efficiency.

Diode Vf typically has a minimum value of 0.4 V to 1.8 V (depending on diode type and peak inverse voltage [PIV] rating) which also increases with current, both from simple (ohmic) resistance and a logarithmic factor of, typically, 60 mV/decade of current (also depending on diode type). Generally speaking, the faster a diode switches from conducting to blocking (i.e. its reverse recovery time, or trr) and the higher the PIV rating, the higher the initial Vf will be. Diodes operating at mains voltages and frequencies don’t need to be terribly fast, so a conventional Si pn junction type can be used with a trr of a few microseconds, but one shouldn’t be too stingy with the PIV, as the mains are a harsh place, filled with voltage spikes and transients—typically a 600 V PIV rating is the bare minimum for reasonable survivability, but there’s often little increase in Vf when going from 600 V to 1.0 kV or even 1.2 kV. With this combination of diode type and ratings, the Vf will likely end up at around 1.0 V at nominal rated current, so we’ll see a total drop of 2.0 V in the bridge rectifier. That’s a 1.7 percentage-point hit to efficiency at 120 VAC input right there! Some improvement can be had by going with a

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much higher current rating than is necessary—lowering ohmic and logarithmic losses—but getting to the mythical 0.6 V drop of a Si-junction diode at zero current ain’t happenin’.

The next stage in the charger performs power factor correction, and this is usually done with a boost converter. In the boost topology, energy is stored in a choke when the switch is on, then some or all of that energy is released to the output capacitor via a blocking diode when the switch is off. It might seem counterintuitive, but at high power levels it is common to retain some energy in the choke from cycle to cycle (this is called continuous conduction mode, or CCM), because the peak and peak-to-peak (i.e. AC) currents are much lower than if the choke completely empties each cycle (called, unsurprisingly, discontinuous conduction mode, or DCM). In fact, the peak current in any of the power stage components when operating in DCM will be twice the average current, minimum, because current starts from zero every cycle. This not only exacerbates I2R losses throughout the power stage, it also incurs more AC losses in the choke, as they tend to be exponentially proportional to the peak-to-peak swing.

However, the one huge disadvantage of CCM operation is that the blocking diode has to instantaneously switch from conducting forward current to blocking reverse current (it needs a trr of zero, in other words), which would normally mean using a Schottky type. Before the

Some improvement can be had by going with a much higher current rating than is necessary—lowering ohmic and logarithmic losses—but getting to the mythical 0.6 V drop of a Si-junction diode at zero current ain’t happenin’.

commercialization of SiC Schottky diodes, that was a non-starter, since the PIV rating of Si Schottkys tops out around 100 V, but SiC Schottkys have PIV ratings of 600 V and above, so they are the diode of choice here. They do have a higher Vf than their Si-junction counterparts (typically >1.8 V), but this has far less of an impact on overall efficiency than in the bridge rectifier, because there is only one of them in series with the relatively high voltage output (e.g. 400/401.8 = 99.55%). The other main points of optimization are the choke and the boost switch. In CCM operation, AC losses in the core and windings of the choke are less of a concern, so the focus should be on minimizing the DC (I2R) losses of the windings themselves (the converse is true for DCM— minimizing the AC losses then takes priority). For the switch, the obvious parameter to optimize is the on-resistance (RDS[ON]), but the less-obvious—and perhaps more important—parameter is the output capacitance (COSS), because this capacitance is charged up to the output voltage value every time the switch turns off, only to be discharged across the switch at next turn-on.

This is an example of a loss that is both frequency- and voltage-dependent, and one that will covered in more detail next.

The final stage in the charger is usually a full-bridge converter which drives an isolation transformer, followed by a full-wave rectifier (with a choke-input filter if PWM is used to achieve CC/CV regulation). As with any switchmode converter, the higher the switching frequency, the smaller the magnetic and energy storage elements (transformers, chokes and capacitors), but, as was just hinted at above, increasing the switching frequency without bound is, well, bound to cause problems.

In fact, switching losses routinely dominate in traditional “hard-switched” bridge converters above a switching frequency of 100 kHz or so, and the main contributors are the aforementioned charging/discharging of COSS, along with overlap of voltage and current during the transitions. A number of solutions for reducing—or even eliminating—switching losses are possible, with varying tradeoffs between reliability, complexity and flexibility (of, more specifically, the load range that can be accommodated while maintaining lossless switching), but broadly speaking, they fall into two categories: fully resonant and resonant transition (aka quasi-resonant).

Fully resonant converter topologies use resonant LC

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THE TECH

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high minimum load or exhibiting terrible light-load efficiency; (2) this circulat(a) The topology of DBSRC; (b) The equivalent circuit of DBSRC. ing current in the resonant tank incurs additional ohmic (I2R) losses from the various resistances in its path; (3) the only way to vary output power is by + changing either the switching frequenS1 S L 3 C1 C3 D1 o T1 cy or the pulse repetition rate, making Llkg Co compliance with EMI/RFI regulations Ns 1 Np Vin dc more difficult; (4) when varying the freNs 2 quency to effect regulation of the output, S2 S4 D2 C2 C4 inadvertently crossing over the resonant peak will invert the control function, causing the output to collapse and, most Phase-shifted full bridge converter likely, destroying the switches; (5) finally, the resonant frequency is dependent on the precise values of inductance and capacitance in the tank, and these are networks (aka tanks) to shape either the current, the notoriously difficult to control in production volumes, possibly requiring hand-tuning of each unit. voltage, or both waveforms into sinusoids so that the The main solution to the downsides of fully resonant switches can be turned on (or off ) at the moment the voltage (or current) passes through zero. This eliminates operation is to confine the resonant period to just the switching transitions, and one of the most popular ways switching loss from overlapping voltage and current (if to do this is to take advantage of the ringing that natuone parameter is zero, then the product of both is zero, rally occurs between the lumped sum of COSS from each of course), but the disadvantages of resonant converters are steep enough that they are infrequently used these switch in a bridge with the leakage inductance of the days, because: (1) the resonant tank requires a certain transformer. In hard-switched bridge converters, this amount of energy sloshing back and forth between its ringing is a huge nuisance that requires dissipative snubinductor and capacitor to function, either requiring a bers (RC networks across each switch) to dampen it out

Series resonant full bridge converter

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so as to prevent failing EMI/RFI requirements. One of the most popular quasi-resonant topologies that uses the ringing between COSS and Lleakage is the phase-shifted full-bridge, and while discussing it in detail is beyond the scope of this article, those who are interested can look up Texas Instruments application note SLUA107A for more information. Regardless of the specific quasi-resonant technique employed, the current and voltage waveforms during the power transfer portion of each switching period will still be square—the same as in conventional hard-switched PWM—so peak currents and voltages will be the same as their hard-switched counterparts. Finally, because many quasi-resonant techniques utilize parasitic circuit elements for their operation, they can relax the need to minimize the leakage inductance of the transformer or the COSS of the switches, which usually translates into a lower cost for each of these often-pricey components.

Finally there are “wireless” chargers, which transmit power across an air gap from a coil in a base station to one in the EV. These chargers can be extremely convenient to use, but rarely exceed 80% transfer efficiency, and that’s before the other losses outlined above are factored in.

Still, they seem to be gaining in popularity despite that, so they will be the topic of a future article.

In the meantime, choosing SiC MOSFETs and a resonant transition converter topology for the charger are the two best ways to maximize its efficiency.

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INFINITUM ELECTRIC BRINGS ITS

Images courtesy of Infinitum Electric

THE TECH

PCB STATOR TECHNOLOGY TO EV MOTORS The startup says its axial flux motors with printed circuit board stators offer weight reduction, cost reduction and efficiency gains.

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By Charles Morris

B

atteries are getting a lot of media coverage these days—they represent a rapidly-developing technology that’s seen as the key to the electrification of transport. Motors, however, are considered a fairly mature technology, and the humble rotor and stator seldom get to be in the spotlight.

Texas-based Infinitum Electric aims to change that. The company’s bold red motors demand attention for their design and performance.

Infinitum Electric says its unique motor design—an axial flux architecture that uses a printed circuit board (PCB) stator—dramatically reduces size and weight, improves efficiency and reliability, and also offers high speed, excellent torque, quieter operation and a modular platform.

Charged recently spoke with Infinitum VP of Business Development Bhavnesh Patel to catch up on what the company is doing, and get a more detailed explanation of what makes Infinitum’s motors different.

Q Charged: Could you explain the advantages of using

a PCB stator? Is it suitable for EV applications?

A Bhavnesh Patel: Every motor or generator has a stator.

It typically consists of heavy iron with copper wire wrapped around it. We etch the copper onto a PCB to replace that iron-copper stator. Our motor is equal in performance to a conventional motor with a third less copper and absolutely zero iron. This results in a much smaller, lighter electric motor.

A traditional cylindrical motor type is a radial flux motor.

Our equivalent is an axial flux motor, which has a much thinner form factor and is a lot simpler to put together. You have a rotor on the bottom, a rotor on the top and then your stator sits in the middle. What we do for our traction motor is stack a couple of these together. We have a 150-kilowatt machine that we’re working on right now. It’s a very modu-

lar approach—if we have a customer that says, “Hey, I need 200 kilowatts or 300 kilowatts,” we stack multiple modules together. Beyond the modularity, we have a very significant power density advantage, meaning that for the amount of mass we have, we can put a lot more power through it.

And we ultimately make the vehicle a lot lighter and more efficient.

Q Charged: Why do you stack modules?

A Bhavnesh Patel: There are a couple of reasons why we choose to stack it. One is that, with an axial flux technology, as the torque in the application goes up, the diameter increases. In order to constrain the diameter, we can stack multiple modules. We could do a 100-kilowatt motor with one stator—it would just be wider. For a passenger vehicle, for example, that might not be feasible, but a truck application absolutely could be feasible. It depends on the application. We’ve stacked modules, we’ve done single-stator—both are very feasible.

Q Charged: How do you achieve a third less copper usage?

A Bhavnesh Patel: The surface ratio of a PCB stator vs a copper wire-wound stator is greater, which allows for more effective cooling. Thermal dissipation is the constraint in running additional current through copper. A larger surface ratio allows for higher thermal dissipation and as such, less copper is required. This is a fundamental physical property. In a conventional liquid-cooled traction motor, two approaches are typically utilized—a water jacket integrated into the motor housing, which cools the iron stator and fluid across the copper winding end-turns.

In both approaches, the cooling is not being directly applied to all sources of heat.

The liquid-cooling approach we’ve taken is different.

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THE TECH

We etch the copper onto a PCB to replace that ironcopper stator.

We essentially hollowed out the shaft on the motor and inserted nozzles that spray the fluid across the surface of the entire stator. We’re getting the fluid directly on the heat source, and can more effectively remove heat from the motor. One of the limitations in how much current you can run through a stator, whether it’s ours or anybody else’s, is how hot it gets. And because we’re more efficient at removing heat, we can run a lot more current through it. Typically, with an air-cooled radial flux motor, your current density is in the range of 3-4 amps per square millimeter (3,000 amps per square inch). With our liquid-cooled PCB stator, we can run 42-56 amps per square millimeter (27,000-36,000 amps per square inch), so it’s orders of magnitude greater.

Q Charged: In the gap between the stator and the rotor,

there’s a fluid?

A Bhavnesh Patel: Yes. On a conventional radial flux

Infinitum Electric’s PCB stator for its axial flux motor A Bhavnesh Patel: No. In the first project we did with

liquid-cooled motors we used DEXRON VI Automatic Transmission Fluid (ATF). We recognized it’s not optimized for cooling, but it’s a fluid commonly used as an automotive lubricant. We found that it really didn’t matter—having that fluid across the stator gave us very effective cooling. We didn’t make any modifications to the stator, so there was no special coating. More recently, we’ve worked with a couple of well-known chemical companies that have engineered more optimized fluids for electric motors. Those will improve thermal management even more than we’ve already achieved.

Q Charged: Is liquid cooling the big design challenge

for EV applications?

motor, you have a very small air gap, and that air gap prevents you from having fluid on the inside of the motor because that fluid creates losses. With ours, we have a fairly wide air gap and in most cases, that wide air gap is a negative property. In our case, it enables us to run fluid without creating the losses you would typically experience with a radial flux motor.

A Bhavnesh Patel: Yes. More generally, removing the heat from an electric motor is always a big concern. It doesn’t matter which traction motor you’re looking at— they all use liquid cooling to remove heat.

Q Charged: Will it be completely filled with fluid?

A Bhavnesh Patel: When you see an efficiency specifica-

A Bhavnesh Patel: No, not quite. It will be sprayed with a

relatively low flow rate. Most traction motors require a coolant flow rate in the range of 20 or 30 liters per minute.

Our designs typically use a flow rate of 3 liters per minute.

We’re simply spraying that fluid across the surface and don’t need as much liquid to cool the motor.

Q Charged: Do you have to coat the PCB with some-

thing special to keep it covered in fluid?

Q Charged: How does the efficiency of a PCB-stator

motor compare to traditional iron cores?

tion for any motor, it will typically list the peak efficiency, for example, 96%. We can match the peak efficiency of conventional iron-core motors, but more importantly, our part load efficiency, or the efficiency across the full operating range, is our competitive advantage. The efficiency of a motor is determined by variable and fixed losses. Variable losses fluctuate with the load and fixed losses are independent of the load. With conventional iron-core motors, both axial flux or radial flux, the iron core contributes to fixed magnetic core losses, which exist

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Traditional stator from a radial flux motor recently invested in Infinitum Electric to develop a new line of smaller, lighter, quieter and more efficient alternators. Our alternators are expected to be one third the size and weight of traditional alternators. We’re targeting the growing $17-billion annual alternator market.

Being able to take what would typically be a 300-pound, couple-hundred-kilowatt alternator and make it a third the size and weight is very attractive, as it potentially reduces shipping and handling costs, material costs, and provides more efficient power generation.

Q Charged: So, would you say the main benefit to your

customers would be weight reduction, and thereby cost reduction? regardless of the speed or load. This results in a steep decline in motor efficiency as the speed and load are reduced. By eliminating the iron in our motor, we found that even at 30% load, we maintain very high efficiency. It’s not just the fact that we can match the peak efficiency target, we can also maintain a high level across a wide range on the speed/torque curve.

Q Charged: Your website says your motors produce very

little noise because of the absence of certain magnetic forces between the rotor and the stator. Can you elaborate?

A Bhavnesh Patel: When you have an iron core, there’s a magnetic interaction between the rotor and the iron. That magnetic interaction results in cogging torque, which is one of the sources of noise and vibration in an electric motor. Eliminating the iron eliminates cogging torque. The best way to think about it is, if you take a motor and you spin it with your hand, you can feel slight notching. With our motor, when you spin the shaft, it spins like a flywheel.

Q Charged: Are your motors in production for indus-

trial applications?

A Bhavnesh Patel: Absolutely. We’re in production. We got our first products UL-certified in 2021. We’re selling into industrial applications ranging from fans to pumps, and starting to enter material handling as well. That’s an Infinitum-branded product that we’re selling directly to companies making fans, pumps, conveyor systems, and other industrial applications. Caterpillar Venture Capital also

A Bhavnesh Patel: Yes, weight reduction and cost reduction are key benefits, but I’d also add noise, vibration, reliability, and efficiency gains, which equates to extended vehicle range.

Q Charged: How does Infinitum Electric’s PCB design,

prototyping and production process compare to traditional stator manufacturing methods?

A Bhavnesh Patel: The process from idea to prototype

and eventual commercialization is very different for our technology as compared to conventional motors. The first step is gathering basic application requirements, such as the power, speed, voltage, physical constraints, etc. We input these details into our automated design tool called AutoFlux, which produces dozens of options within minutes. Our electromagnetic engineers then filter out the most promising designs based on the client’s objectives (i.e. highest efficiency, lowest weight, or lowest cost). With input from our client, we’ll narrow down the list to a handful of promising designs and send the Gerber file to one of our PCB manufacturers (Gerber is the equivalent of CAD but for circuit design). Within a few days, we can have a new stator produced and ready for testing. The simplicity of the rest of our motor enables us to complete the prototyping and testing process in a fraction of the time.

Once prototyping is complete, serial production can be scaled up with limited capital investment. The PCB can be sourced from almost any region of the world, and the rest of the components require simple casting or machining processes.

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Q Charged: Do you use the same magnet configurations

as a standard axial flux motor, or is it something different?

A Bhavnesh Patel: It’s a pretty standard magnet material

and magnet configuration. The dimensions and the layout are fairly simple. There’s not a whole lot of complexity in terms of the shape of the magnets. If you look at some of the well-known EV manufacturers out there that use magnets in their motors, it’s a fairly complex geometry and a fairly complex process of placing those magnets into the rotor.

Our approach is very simple. We have an automated machine that essentially slots magnets onto the rotor, and that’s it.

The coefficient of expansion of the FR4 and the copper are almost equal, so the whole board expands and contracts at an equal rate, and you never ever have wires rubbing against each other.

Images courtesy of Infinitum Electric

THE TECH

Q Charged: One of the failure points of a standard

motor is that the insulation and the windings will break down. Tell me a bit about the insulation of your stators.

A Bhavnesh Patel: You’re exactly right—one of the failure

modes on a traditional motor is the copper wire windings eventually failing. On wound stators, you’re taking copper wire, you’re bending it over and over, then you’re running current through that, so you’re heating it up and cooling it down over and over again. Over time with expansion and contraction, these wires rub against each other and they eventually break. The other source of failure is the insulation which sits between the copper windings and iron. The copper and iron have slightly different expansion rates, which causes the insulation to fail over time.

The variability in the conventional stator manufacturing process introduces hotspots that create additional potential failure points. Our PCB stators, on the other hand, are made on a fully automated piece of equipment. You don’t have any of that variability that you typically see on an iron-core stator. As the stator heats up and cools down, the coefficient of expansion of the FR4 [laminate material used to make PCBs] and the copper are almost equal, so the whole board expands and contracts at an equal rate, and you never ever have wires rubbing against each other.

There’s no possibility of that happening because of the way the windings are laid out.

We’ve eliminated two of the most common sources of failure. The next most common source of failure is the bearings. Any time you have an inverter-driven motor, it generates bearing currents, and these currents cause the bearings to prematurely fail. Motors typically use more costly ceramic bearings, or they have these grounding rings to mitigate this issue.

Q Charged: What about the standard lifetime of the PCBs? What fails on them if they do fail?

A Bhavnesh Patel: There was extensive testing done on a

three-megawatt motor for a wind turbine application, and they found that the PCB stator was about nine times more reliable than a conventional iron-core stator.

The main failure points are typically manufacturing defects. In some cases on any PCB production line, you might get voids in the board. The other possibility is vias, which are the interconnects between the layers, failing. The good thing is that all of those issues tend to be identified during the production process because there’s automated inspection equipment that can identify those defects prior to full production being completed. And PCBs have been around for a long time, so the process of quality assurance is robust.

Q Charged: Is there anything else on the circuit board?

Do you have sensors and other circuits in there?

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A Bhavnesh Patel: Yeah, absolutely. Because we’re using the circuit board, it’s a lot easier to embed chips and sensors. We typically embed a temperature sensor and an accelerometer on the stator, so we’re able to detect the vibration and temperature of the interior of the motor. This allows us to determine the health of the motor, and also the driven equipment. For example, in a pump application, if you have a blockage in the pump, you might see that on the vibration of the accelerometer before you actually see that physically. In relation to EVs, you might see unusual operating vibration on your motor before you would actually see it in a real-life catastrophic failure.

Q Charged: Do you develop the power electronics as well?

A Bhavnesh Patel: Yes, we’ve

developed power electronics, both IGBT and silicon carbide MOSFET-based. We generally prefer the silicon carbide—it’s more efficient—so that’s generally been what we’ve led with, both on the industrial side and the EV side.

Some of the partners we’re working with within the transportation segment have their own power electronic platforms that they prefer to use. We’re amenable to using their platform if they want, but we have our own as well.

www.RhombusEnergy.com

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Image courtesy of SEA Electric

Image courtesy of PSTA

THE VEHICLES

Midwest Transit Equipment and SEA Electric to power 10,000 electric school buses SEA Electric and Midwest Transit Equipment (MTE), a major US bus dealer, have partnered to update 10,000 school buses with battery-electric power-systems. The deal will cover both Type A and Type C school buses, and deliveries will take place over the next five years.

The buses will be powered by SEA Electric’s SEA-Drive power system. SEA says repowering the nearly-new buses will extend their service life by at least ten years.

MTE says it will be able to deliver two to three repowered buses at the same price as one new electric bus.

Each bus will have full vehicle-to-grid capabilities.

“The secondary use of school buses fitted with all-electric drivetrains makes a lot of sense—it keeps costs down, opens up considerable availability, and creates green jobs right here in the US, all while making a difference in the environment and the health of the communities we serve,” said Mike Menyhart, President Americas and Chief Strategy Officer at SEA Electric.

St Petersburg, Florida’s PSTA hopes to deploy 60 new electric buses The Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, which serves Charged’s home city of St Petersburg, Florida, hopes to add 60 electric buses to its fleet over the next five years. The PSTA board has unanimously approved an agreement with bus-maker Gillig to provide the 60 new e-buses.

The procurement, which is expected to cost $80 million, including charging infrastructure, will be subject to the availability of funds. PSTA is depending on the implementation of the $1.2-trillion federal infrastructure bill, which includes $39 billion in funding for public transit.

“We will be [purchasing the buses] based on the amount of grant funding we have in place at any given time,” said PSTA Chief Finance Officer Debbie Leous.

“We will be placing the first order on this procurement by buying two years’ worth of buses. We will be seeing 12 electric buses received by 2023 and another 12 by the end of 2024.”

PSTA bought its first two e-buses in 2017, and currently operates six. The agency uses both overnight charging at depots and en route charging stations, including an inductive charging station built by Utah-based WAVE. Local utility Duke Energy has contributed to funding the charging infrastructure.

PSTA estimates that each of its electric buses saves around $20,000 per year in fuel costs.

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Commercial EV OEM Proterra (NASDAQ: PTRA) plans to open a new manufacturing plant in South Carolina to produce battery systems for its Proterra Powered division, which provides batteries for other EV-makers’ commercial vehicles, including delivery and work trucks, industrial equipment, buses and more.

The new factory will be Proterra’s third battery production facility. In December 2020, the company opened its second battery production site, co-located at its electric bus manufacturing facility in Los Angeles County.

Proterra’s new 327,000-square-foot manufacturing facility will be located at the 43-acre Carolina Commerce Center in Greer, South Carolina, near Proterra’s electric bus manufacturing plant in Greenville, and adjacent to the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport.

Proterra plans to invest at least $76 million in the new plant, and expects to create more than 200 new jobs there over the next several years. The factory is expected to launch in the second half of 2022 with multiple gigawatt-hours of annual production capacity.

“Electric vehicle technology is an opportunity to create clean energy jobs, strengthen American manufacturing, and advance the US’s climate leadership,” said Gareth Joyce, President of Proterra. “With our company’s history in South Carolina and the Upstate region, we are excited to build on our strong partnership with the state of South Carolina, Spartanburg County, and the City of Greer, and bring EV battery system manufacturing to the region.”

Image courtesy of Taiga Motors

Image courtesy of Proterra

Proterra to build new EV battery factory in South Carolina

Taiga Motors produces electric snowmobile Taiga Motors, a startup that makes electric off-road vehicles, has produced its first customer-ready electric snowmobiles, and is working to secure the necessary approvals to begin deliveries in early 2022.

Taiga has used a clean-sheet engineering approach to develop electric snowmobiles and personal watercraft. It says its EVs deliver extreme power-to-weight ratios and thermal specifications that outperform comparable ICE powersports vehicles, delivering up to 35% more power than the best two-stroke engines.

Each model in Taiga’s snowmobile range comes in standard and performance versions, with a choice of 20 and 25 kWh battery packs. An advanced thermal management system ensures the battery pack operates in its sweet spot—even when temperatures get as low as -40° C (-40°F).

Taiga vehicles use standard SAE J1772/CCS charging connectors, and all offer DC fast charging capability.

The Ekko model is available with a 120 hp (89 kW) or 180 hp (134 kW) powertrain, which enables 0-62 mph acceleration of 4.1 or 3.3 seconds. Estimated range is 61 or 81 miles.

The Atlas comes with a 120 hp or 180 hp powertrain, and gets to 62 mph in 3.7 or 2.9 seconds. Estimated range is 64 or 87 miles.

The two-seat Nomad has a 90 or 120 hp powertrain, which delivers 770 or 1,124 lbs of towing capacity. Estimated range is 62 or 83 miles.

The company is working to develop off-road Taiga Charging Network which features ABB’s Terra AC and DC charging stations. It aims to deploy 1,100 charging sites by 2025.

Starting at $15,000, the Taiga snowmobiles are available for pre-order in North America and Europe, with a $500 refundable deposit.

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THE VEHICLES

The New Jersey State Senate has approved legislation that would require the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) to develop and implement an electric school bus program.

The bill would provide funding for three years for the purchase of new electric school buses and charging infrastructure in at least 18 New Jersey school districts.

At least half of these would be located in “low-income, urban or environmental justice communities.”

On a typical school day, more than 800,000 New Jersey students ride to and from school on one of the state’s 15,000 diesel school buses.

“School buses are known to emit greenhouse gases and carcinogens, which contribute to climate change and threaten exposed individuals with elevated lifetime risks of developing cancer, asthma, and heart disease,” said State Senator Patrick J. Diegnan, the bill’s primary sponsor.

In a joint op-ed for NJ.com, Diegnan and clean energy advocate Hayley Berliner noted that mass adoption of electric school bus technology comes with challenges.

The sticker price of a new electric school bus can be nearly triple that of a new diesel bus, but e-buses save money over the lives of the vehicles through lower fuel and maintenance costs, and offer the opportunity to use vehicle-to-grid capabilities to generate revenue for school districts.

A University of Delaware study estimates one electric school bus could save a district about $230,000 over its 14-year lifespan.

Diegnan’s legislation requires the NJDEP to develop a program to determine the operational reliability and cost-effectiveness of replacing diesel school buses with electric buses. According to the bill, $45 million is to be made available for grants—$15 million for each year of the three-year program. Districts or bus contractors selected to participate will submit reports to the NJDEP detailing the cost to operate e-buses, including maintenance records and transponder data, and details of any reliability issues.

Image courtesy of GM

New Jersey Senate approves bill mandating electric school bus program

GM delivers first BrightDrop EV600 electric vans to FedEx FedEx has confirmed delivery of five EV600 electric delivery vans from GM’s BrightDrop division—these represent just a taste of the total order of 500 vehicles.

“Transforming our pickup and delivery fleet to electric vehicles is integral to achieving our ambitious sustainability goals,” said Mitch Jackson, Chief Sustainability Officer at FedEx. The EV600 is powered by GM’s new Ultium platform.

According to GM, it has an estimated range of 250 miles, and offers over 600 cubic feet of cargo area. The first few EV600 vans will go into service at the FedEx Express facility in Inglewood, California.

GM has also begun deliveries of the GMC HUMMER EV Edition 1 Pickup, which is also built on the Ultium platform. The automaker says it plans to develop 30 new EVs by 2025. GM’s next Ultium-based vehicle, the Cadillac LYRIQ, is expected to launch in the first half of 2022, and will be assembled in Spring Hill, Tennessee. The Chevrolet Silverado EV officially debuts at next month’s CES. “This is the first chapter for Ultium—and for GM’s transition to a zero-emissions future,” said GM President Mark Reuss. “Both commercial and retail customers will benefit from the EV experience, from exhilarating acceleration to low cost of operation, versatility and ability to customize after the sale. GM is ideally positioned to provide EVs for every customer in every segment, retail or commercial.”

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™ C OAT I N G SYS T E M S BY

Rivian to build $5-billion battery and assembly plant near Atlanta Rivian Automotive is the brightest rising star in the EV firmament at the moment, and it’s flush with cash following a $11.9-billion stock offering in November. Now the company has announced plans to put some of that nest egg to work at a new $5-billion battery and assembly plant east of Atlanta, which is projected to employ 7,500 workers.

Sources told AP that the headcount at the plant could grow to as many as 10,000, which would make it among the largest auto assembly complexes in the US. The deal is expected to be the largest industrial project in Georgia history, surpassing the 4,400-worker Kia complex that opened in West Point in 2009.

Founder and CEO Robert Scaringe told Bloomberg Television in November that the ability to recruit good workers [read: non-unionized workers] was the most important factor in the decision.

The state of Georgia is believed to have offered rich incentives to Rivian, which reportedly also considered factory sites in Texas, Arizona and Michigan. Georgia’s Mega Project Tax Credit could be worth $118 million in state income tax credits, and local governments may also reduce property taxes.

Rivian, like Tesla, sells directly to customers, and has no plans to build a dealership network. Georgia, like Texas, generally prohibits this sales model.

We expect Rivian to work the political levers to try to change this state of affairs (as Tesla has been doing in Texas for years, so far without success).

Many foresee surging demand for EVs, and Rivian, which says it has a yearly capacity of 150,000 vehicles at its existing plant in Normal, Illinois, is not the only automaker that’s expanding production capacity. At least one auto analyst is skeptical. “It seems like it might be a little premature to invest that much in another large plant just yet,” said Sam Abuelsamid, Principal Mobility Analyst for Guidehouse Insights, adding that Rivian may also be scouting a site in Europe.

Abuelsamid expects Rivian to make various parts for its vehicles at the new Georgia plant, as Tesla does at its factory in Fremont, California. Tesla has often become frustrated with suppliers’ inability to react quickly enough to its rapidly-evolving needs, and brought production of parts in-house.

With this massive new investment, Rivian has plunged further into the dreaded Valley of Death, and it needs to start bringing in some serious revenue before the massive costs of ramping up production drain its bank account. “If actual deliveries don’t start picking up, the markets could turn against [Rivian] as they have with some other EV startups not called Tesla,” Abuelsamid said. “Rivian will be facing serious competition in a much shorter time frame than the near-decade head start that Tesla had.”

Mr. Abuelsamid is referring to Ford, GM and Tesla, which will be bringing their own electric pickup trucks to market soon.

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THE VEHICLES

New York City orders hundreds of Tesla Model 3s for municipal fleet In October, New York City announced a new investment of $75 million in electric vehicles and charging infrastructure, as part of a plan to transition its entire vehicle fleet to EVs. The current phase of the plan includes purchasing 300 EVs to replace fossil fuel-powered models.

Now Tesmanian reports that this will include hundreds of Tesla Model 3s. Public records show a proposed contract under which the Department of City Administration would purchase Tesla Model 3s for the sum of $12,360,000, to be delivered within 5 years. The agency is expected to make a final decision this month.

The contract doesn’t state the number of cars the city will buy, but Tesmanian calculates that the amount indicates about 274 base-trim Model 3s (fewer if they are Long Range or Performance models).

“You can count on New York City to lead the way when it comes to finding sustainable climate solutions, fighting back against global warming, and building a greener future for the next generation,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio.

“The EV investment and infrastructure that we put in place today will become the foundation of a clean and reliable transportation system for the next generation of New Yorkers,” said Ben Furnas, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Sustainability. “Today’s announcement is a key example of the City’s commitment to end the age of fossil fuels, improve air quality and public health—especially in Environmental Justice communities most impacted by polluting tailpipe emissions.”

The Volkswagen Group has announced a package of charging-related initiatives under the brand name We Charge, which will include new charging solutions for home and mobile charging, new functions in the ID. models and, “soon,” bidirectional charging.

“Charging must become simpler and easier to integrate into daily activities,” says E-mobility Marketing Head Silke Bagschik. “With the new software in our ID. models along with solutions like Plug & Charge, we are making a decisive contribution to realizing such goals.”

In 2022, Volkswagen’s ID. models will add support for Plug & Charge, which is based on the ISO 15118 standard, and allows a vehicle to start charging as soon as it is plugged in, with no need for an app or RFID Card. In 2022, Plug & Charge will be supported by several large European charging networks, including Ionity, Aral, bp, Enel, EON, Iberdrola and eviny.

In addition to making things easier for the consumer, Plug & Charge is an enabling technology for bidirectional charging, “a ground-breaking technology about to be launched at Volkswagen.” As VW explains, “Electric cars can feed electricity they don’t need into the customer’s home network (vehicle-to-home), and in the future they will also provide electricity to stabilize the electricity grid. All ID. models with a 77 kWh battery will have this capability in future. An over-the-air update rolled out gradually will be used to make this available for vehicles already delivered as well. A special DC BiDi wallbox will be used for the power transfer and communication.”

“We want to make it possible for the batteries in our electric vehicles to be used on the energy market as flexible, mobile energy storage units. This can make charging significantly cheaper for customers, [who] will then be able to feed their own power into the public grid,” says Elke Temme, Head of the Charging and Energy business area at Volkswagen Group Components.

Image courtesy of Volkswagen

Volkswagen to add Plug & Charge, bidirectional charging to all ID. models

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Image courtesy of Cummins

Big engine specialist Cummins has released the new PowerDrive 8000 system for terminal tractors. Cummins will begin field tests of the new product with Kalmar, one of Cummins’ lead customers, in early 2022, and the two companies will partner to offer battery-electric terminal tractors globally.

Terminal tractors (aka drayage tractors or yard goats) are ideal for electrification, due to their duty cycle and operation within confined spaces, which makes infrastructure planning and build-out comparatively easy.

Cummins designed the PowerDrive 8000 specifically for the duty-cycle and power requirements of the distribution center and port environments. The driveline can handle a variety of vehicle configurations, supporting gross vehicle weights from 80,000 to 195,000 lbs. The system is equipped with compact, temperature-controlled batteries, which enable the vehicles to operate in tough climate conditions around the world. Each terminal tractor will be powered with up to 182 kWh of Cummins batteries, and will be equipped with DC fast-charge technology.

“Cummins is thrilled to work with Kalmar to bring a zero-emission solution to the terminal tractor market,” said Amy Davis, President of New Power at Cummins.

“After decades of serving this market, we understand the requirements for this application and have specifically designed a solution to serve our customers better.”

“In line with our commitment to having a comprehensive electric product portfolio, we’re delighted to release our new Cummins-powered electric terminal tractor,” said Gina Lopez, Kalmar VP, Terminal Tractors. “We selected Cummins because of our longstanding cooperation in providing world-class drivetrain platforms, their global reach and their proven electric solution.”

Image courtesy of Stadler

Cummins releases new electric powertrain for terminal tractors

Deutsche Bahn orders 44 Stadler battery-electric trains DB Regio, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn which operates regional and commuter train services in Germany, has ordered 44 battery-electric Flirt Akku multiple units from Swiss manufacturer Stadler. The first of the 44 multiple units are to go into passenger service on eight routes in the Pfalz region December 2025, and the diesel trains currently in use are to be replaced by the end of 2026.

Stadler’s Flirt Akku is designed for networks in which electrified sections alternate with passages without overhead lines. On the electrified lines, the trains draw current from catenary wires, as do classic electric railcars, while charging their batteries.

This is Stadler’s second major German order for the Flirt Akku—the Schleswig-Holstein local transport association ordered 55 units in 2019. Stadler offers the Flirt model in electric, diesel, bi-modal, battery-electric or fuel-cell versions (“akku” is a German word for “battery”).

The Flirt Akku’s operational range in battery mode is at least 80 kilometers—Stadler has demonstrated 185 km in test journeys. In the Palatinate network, the longest section of track without overhead lines will cover around 48 km after completion of the planned partial electrification.

Each of the trains ordered by DB Regio is 55 meters long, and can carry a total of 325 passengers, including 172 in seats.

“We are already the most climate-friendly mobility company in Germany,” says Maik Dreser, Chairman of Regional Management for DB Regio Mitte. “By 2040, we at Deutsche Bahn want to be climate-neutral. Alternative drives and fuels are an essential part of achieving this goal.”

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THE VEHICLES

Legacy automakers’ increasing focus on EVs is welcome news, but as long as they continue to develop new internal combustion engine technology, their commitment to electrification can only be seen as tentative. Seen in this light, Hyundai’s recent decision to close its ICE development division (reported by the Korea Economic Daily) may be considered a major milestone.

Hyundai’s engine development division, which has been in operation for some 40 years, was located at the company’s Namyang R&D Center in South Korea, which employs around 12,000 researchers. Teams that were working on ICE development have been reassigned to the company’s electrification design center. The R&D center will also focus on raw materials for batteries and semiconductors.

“Now, it is inevitable to convert into electrification,” said newly-appointed R&D chief Park Chung-Kook in a message to employees. “Our own engine development is a great achievement, but we must change the system to create future innovation based on the great asset from the past.”

Hyundai and sister company Kia recently unveiled a target to sell 1.7 million EVs worldwide in 2026.

Meanwhile, in a development that may or may not be related, Hyundai has indefinitely suspended work on its Genesis hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, according to Chosun Ilbo (via Electrek). Chosun doesn’t say that Hyundai has permanently canceled the fuel-cell Genesis, but the project is at least on pause for the moment.

Last September, Hyundai revealed a hydrogen strategy that included the introduction of a new third-generation fuel cell in 2023, and fuel cell systems for all commercial vehicles by 2028. Since then however, an internal audit showed that fuel cell development has fallen short of targets—sales have been lower than expected, costs are falling only slowly, and hydrogen fuel prices are higher than forecast.

General Motors has announced a new strategy to offer its EV technology to other vehicle-makers and commercial customers.

The company estimates that the total addressable market for electrification components could reach $20 billion by 2030, as a growing number of industries introduce their own emissions reduction goals.

“GM has an established strategy, network of integrators and co-development agreements to apply an extensive array of components and solutions to a broad range of customers and use cases,” says Travis Hester, GM’s VP of Electric Vehicle Growth Operations. “GM is uniquely positioned to serve as a leader not only through new EVs across our brands, but through additional technology applications.”

Chevrolet Performance offers powertrain components to the vehicle aftermarket. With the upcoming Electric Connect and Cruise eCrate Package, the division will add EV technology to its offerings, enabling customers to work with qualified installers through GM’s electric specialty vehicle modifier (eSVM) program.

GM Powered Solutions will begin introducing tailored electric component sets to customers in the marine, on-highway, off-highway and industrial segments.

In a strategic collaboration with Textron Ground Support Equipment, GM will provide EV components to electrify Textron GSE’s TUG line of baggage tractors, cargo tractors and belt loaders. GM will provide technology to Powertrain Control Solutions, which will integrate the components into electric powertrains for TUG equipment, assisting in the electrification of airport ground support equipment.

GM has made a strategic investment in Seattle-based Pure Watercraft, and the two companies will collaborate to develop and commercialize battery-electric watercraft.

Image courtesy of GM

Hyundai ends new ICE development, suspends work on Genesis hydrogen vehicle

GM begins offering electrification components to commercial customers

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Image courtesy of Nissan

From

Nissan announces $18 billion in new e-mobility investment, including solidstate batteries and 15 new EVs Nissan, an early EV pioneer that later seemed to lose interest, has become the latest automaker to announce a new electrification plan. The company’s Nissan Ambition 2030 strategy calls for investments of 2 trillion yen (around $17.6 billion) over the next five years.

“With Nissan Ambition 2030, we will drive the new age of electrification, advance technologies to reduce carbon footprint and pursue new business opportunities,” said Nissan CEO Makoto Uchida.

Nissan says it will introduce 23 new electrified models, including 15 new EVs, by 2030, across the Nissan and Infiniti brands.

The company plans to proceed at different rates in different markets. By 2026, it hopes to make electrified vehicles (EV, PHEVs and hybrids) 75% of sales in Europe, 55% of sales in Japan and 40% in China. In the electrically-challenged US, the company is setting a much more modest goal of 40% by 2030.

Nissan will continue to develop its lithium-ion battery tech, and hopes to introduce cobalt-free technology, and reduce battery costs by 65%, by 2028. The company aims to launch an EV with its proprietary all-solidstate batteries by 2028, and prepare a pilot plant in Yokohama as early as 2024. Nissan expects its solid-state tech to bring pack-level cost down to $75 per kWh by 2028.

Nissan is also wisely seeking to establish a global circular battery supply chain. Working with its partners, the company hopes to increase its global battery production capacity to 52 GWh by 2026, and 130 GWh by 2030.

Working through 4R Energy, a joint venture between Nissan and Sumitomo, the automaker intends to expand its battery refurbishing facilities beyond Japan, establishing new locations in Europe in 2022, and in the US in 2025.

The company aims to fully commercialize its vehicle-to-everything and home battery systems by the mid-2020s. It also plans to invest up to 20 billion yen by 2026 in charging infrastructure.

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Proterra to power next-gen Citi VOLT electric buses from Turkish OEM Anadolu Isuzu Commercial EV specialist Proterra will provide battery technology for a new generation of electric buses made

by Turkish commercial vehicle manufacturer Anadolu Isuzu.

Anadolu Isuzu operates in the medium-size bus and truck segments, and sells in around 50 countries, mostly in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. The company recently took its first 8-meter NovoCiti VOLT electric bus on a demo tour across Europe.

Under the newly announced collaboration, Anadolu Isuzu will incorporate Proterra’s battery technology into its new 12-meter and 18-meter Citi VOLT electric bus models. The Proterra battery system will enable driving ranges between 200 and 405 km.

“The climate crisis can have far-reaching ramifications in the medium and long term. That’s why we are going to continue to work on many [electric vehicle] development projects including midibus and truck projects. In line with our vision, I’m delighted to be working with a world-class innovation partner such as Proterra,” said Tuğrul Arıkan, General Manager of Anadolu Isuzu.

“The technology powering Proterra’s proven fleet of transit buses in North America can work for communities across Europe, too. We share the vision for a healthier environment with the team at Anadola Isuzu and look forward to helping power more clean, quiet electric vehicles around the world,” said Gareth Joyce, President of Proterra.

Ford Pro delivers new E-Transit van to selected fleet customers Ford says its 2022 E-Transit van is showing up to work a little early. Through a Ford Pro pilot program, several companies, including Penske Truck Leasing and National Grid, have taken delivery of preproduction units of the E-Transit.

The pilot vans will be operating in fleets serving the rental, delivery, service, maintenance, telecom and utility industries, and will give companies the opportunity to investigate how the automaker’s Ford Pro Intelligence and Ford Pro Charging solutions can help improve fleet efficiency.

Penske plans to validate the E-Transit van’s capabilities, driving experience and charging strategy for rentals to small- and medium-size businesses. “We expect to see strong utilization and interest from customers making final-mile deliveries, regional deliveries, and eventually consumer use for smaller household moves,” said Penske Truck Leasing President Art Vallely.

Ford Pro Intelligence delivers solutions that connect to the vehicle wirelessly to help businesses manage fleets with real-time vehicle insights such as charge event monitoring, vehicle tracking, state of charge, range, charge history and logs, charging/battery settings and alerts, and departure preconditioning.

Ford Pro Charging will provide tools to enable home, public and depot charging tailored to fleet operational needs. Employee home charging will include hardware and software solutions to manage overnight charging, along with energy reports to make driver reimbursement simple. For public charging, customers can access the BlueOval Charge Network, which currently includes some 19,500 charge stations and 63,000 charging plugs nationwide. Depot charging solutions monitor optimal charging times for fleets to help avoid utility demand charges. The E-Transit will begin arriving at dealerships in early 2022.

Image courtesy of Ford

Image courtesy of Proterra

THE VEHICLES

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Image courtesy of Ford

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Ford to increase production of F-150 Lightning (again) Responding to soaring demand for its EVs, Ford has been regularly announcing increases in planned production numbers. In December, CEO Jim Farley said demand had been “two to three times what we expected.”

Now Ford says it plans to double production of the F-150 Lightning at the Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Dearborn to 150,000 vehicles per year.

This week, the first group of reservation holders will be invited to begin placing firm orders.

Ford is racing to make its production ramp-up more flexible. To achieve the latest production increase, a small task force of employees from manufacturing, purchasing, strategy, product development and capacity planning are finding ways to quickly adapt and expand production. Ford is also working with key suppliers to find ways to increase capacity of key EV parts, including battery cells, battery trays and electric drive systems.

“With nearly 200,000 reservations, our teams are working hard and creatively to break production constraints in order to get more F-150 Lightning trucks into the hands of our customers,” said Kumar Galhotra, President of Ford’s Americas and International Markets Group. “People are ready for an all-electric F-150, and Ford is pulling out all the stops to scale our operations and increase production capacity.”

The autoworkers’ union signaled that it’s on board with an aggressive electrification push. “The pride and quality UAW members are putting into building the iconic Ford F-150 Lightning is evident in the high pre-production demand,” said UAW Vice President Chuck Browning. “UAW members are leading the way in doubling the amount of vehicles Ford is producing for this game-changing model of our legendary union-built vehicle.”

Deliveries of the 2022 F-150 Lightning pickup will begin in spring 2022 with a starting MSRP of $39,974 before any available tax incentives.

It’s not only the Lightning that’s lighting things up at Ford. The company also recently tripled planned production for the Mustang Mach-E, and expects to exceed 200,000 units per year by 2023.

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THE VEHICLES

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NOV/DEC 2021

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THE VEHICLES

Created by engineers with years of EV experience, the 2022 Lucid Air is a stunning debut that confronts Tesla— and Mercedes-Benz—with a new competitor.

By John Voelcker t’s been a long time coming, but the 2022 Lucid Air has been worth the wait. The new carmaker’s all-electric luxury sedan not only competes directly with the aging Tesla Model S, but also with the brand-new Mercedes-Benz EQS. And Lucid’s Dream Edition Range model includes a feature neither can offer: 520 miles of EPA-rated range, the highest among the dozens of EVs on sale for 2022.

Lucid execs say making an all-electric competitor for the classic Mercedes S-Class was always the goal—they politely dismiss the idea that the Model S would be any kind of target. In that light, it’s worth noting that Lucid CEO Peter Rawlinson was Lead Engineer on the Model S more than a decade ago.

As one Lucid exec told this reporter several years ago (after a guarantee of anonymity), “We think we can do the same thing Tesla did—but better.”

I

Smaller outside, bigger inside The dimensions of the 2022 Lucid Air are hard to peg from the outside. In Mercedes terms, the company says, it has the (mid-size) footprint of an E-Class sedan, but the wheelbase and the cabin space of a (full-size) S-Class.

Indeed, the Air’s short nose and tail, minimal overhangs and long wheelbase give it distinctively different proportions than a gasoline luxury sedan. Crucially, though, it doesn’t look “weird,” and many buyers may never be able to articulate quite why it looks different.

These days, gold is a car color irretrievably associated with the Rad Era (often seen in old-lady Lexus models).

With contrasting silver roof edges, however, Eureka Gold works so well on the Air sedan that it’s the signature color of the Dream Edition launch version. A deep lustrous

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Images courtesy of Lucid

Lucid execs say making an all-electric competitor for the classic Mercedes S-Class was always the goal—they politely dismiss the idea that the Model S would be any kind of target.

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THE VEHICLES

maroon metallic, also with silver pillars, is Lucid’s other distinctive color—and it’s stunning. Inside, the buyer has a choice of interior themes (“looks,” really), each intended to evoke a different sort of luxurious environment. The 520 launch Dream Editions, for instance, get “Santa Monica,” which blends perforated Nappa leather, Alcantara, buffed metal and open-pore eucalyptus wood.

Derek Jenkins, Lucid’s Senior Vice President of Design and Brand, suggested the entire goal was to be “calming,” providing a sublime elegance that relaxes drivers and passengers rather than facing them with new and unfamiliar ways of interacting with the car. In other words, yes, the Lucid Air has some switches and knobs: not every single function is controlled through a central touchscreen.

Other executives echoed Jenkins’s quiet elegance theme, using phrases like trying not to be “tacky” and contrasting to other luxury cars that were “a bit shouty.”

Capacious cabin, optional foot garages The cabin space is large, though it doesn’t feel particularly expansive due to its low height. Inside, the glass roof gives an open feeling—its single-piece glass windshield actually reaches from the cowl all the way up to past the driver’s head, a triumph of elegance. Lucid, however, has managed to provide proper sun visors, unlike the peculiar unfolding Tesla Model X units intended to solve the same problem with a similar piece of glass.

Still, legroom is generous front and rear. The rear seat is slightly more pleasant in the lower-range model, which deletes a couple of battery modules to provide depressions in the floor that give added footwell space (now universally known by the delightful German term foot garages).

Other makers can do luxury, including Mercedes, which has been first among high-volume luxury brands for decades. It seems safe to say the Air and the new EQS

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Images courtesy of Lucid

Its single-piece glass windshield actually reaches from the cowl all the way up to past the driver’s head, a triumph of elegance. are roughly on a par in materials and quality, but the EQS offers more features (five separate types of massage built into each front seat, as just one of many examples).

Efficiency in every aspect It’s the care and attention to efficiency in every part of the car’s drivetrain that sets the Lucid Air apart. Consider the specs for the high-end, all-wheel-drive models of each of the three competitors.

Tesla’s Model S Long Range has the smallest battery capacity of the three, at 100 kWh, from which it extracts 405 miles of combined EPA-rated range. The MercedesBenz EQS 580 4Matic has a bigger battery, at 120 kWh (108 kWh usable), but less range: 340 miles. The Air’s battery capacity is 118 kWh—both gross and usable, Lucid says. How does that work? “Lucid has the hardware and software expertise to use the full energy of the battery

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THE VEHICLES

while preserving battery life and fast charging performance in hot and cold climates.” In other words: “We’re not saying.”

In comparison to the Benz, the Lucid battery has 9 percent more capacity—yet it produces a range rating of 520 miles, or 53 percent more. Similarly, the Lucid has 18 percent more battery capacity than the Tesla, but 28 percent more range. Viewed as a ratio of rated range to battery capacity, Lucid delivers almost 9 percent more than Model S and a whopping 40 percent more than the Benz.

During an interview with CEO Rawlinson in mid-2020, when the company first projected a rating of 500-plus miles, he returned again and again to the engineers’ obsessive focus on efficiency. A two-year hiatus from 2017 through 2019, while Lucid sought funding to build its Arizona factory and put the Air into production, gave engineers the chance to make several more iterations of the power unit in particular.

Over the break, engineers doubled the battery voltage from the standard 400 volts. It’s now rated at 800-924 volts. That in turn permitted use of ultra-fast DC charging at more than 250 kW—as pioneered by Porsche, and still offered by only a handful of EV makers (including Hyundai-Kia). The Lucid also has bidirectional charging, providing up to 10 kW of output through the company’s home charging station. The company will provide buyers with 3 years of free DC fast charging through the Electrify America network.

While the Lucid Air itself is just going into production, the company’s engineers have deep experience extracting maximum performance from battery packs under the toughest conditions. Lucid’s technology division, Atieva, has built the batteries used in the standard-spec Formula E electric race cars for several years now, and has all the data on how they performed. No other startup EV-maker beside Tesla is likely to have that depth of understanding of how its cells perform under extreme conditions.

In comparison to the Mercedes-Benz EQS, the Lucid battery has 9 percent more capacity—yet it produces a range rating of 520 miles, or 53 percent more.

Images courtesy of John Voelcker

Lucid Inside in future?

Other innovations from that period include reductions in the size of the power unit, which comprises the electric motor, power electronics and gearing. That unit may well be sold to other automakers, execs hinted in November, perhaps offering a kind of “Lucid Inside” branding on far higher-volume vehicles.

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Among the many examples of Lucid’s obsession with engineering is the novel idea of putting the differential inside the electric motor’s hollow center shaft. Absent a motor for each wheel, some kind of gearing is needed to allow each of a pair of wheels at one end or the other to rotate at different speeds while cornering. Most EVs attach a separate differential unit to the motor output shaft.

Burying the gears inside the motor itself eliminates that unit entirely. Lucid wouldn’t let media take photos of the tiny differential unit, but one reviewer accurately termed its gears “horological,” or watch-like. It’s that small, and consequently elegant.

Another interesting aspect of the Air’s engineering— and there are many—is a continuous-wave copper winding for the motor, which makes mass production far easier compared to the dozens of individual wires that must be inserted into other EV-makers’ motors.

Another interesting aspect of the Air’s engineering—and there are many—is a continuous-wave copper winding for the motor, which makes mass production far easier.

Careful analysis of the electrical characteristics of the motor showed an “electromagnetic dead zone” that gave engineers the space to route cooling channels without compromising performance.

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Images courtesy of Lucid

Luxury over sportiness Like any EV with a battery of more than 100 kWh, the Lucid Air delivers breathtaking acceleration if you sort out the right drive modes (Smooth, Swift and Sprint), suspension and regeneration settings. The Dream Edition Performance delivers a combined 816 kW (1,111 hp) in Sprint mode, and 0-to-60 mph acceleration in less than 3 seconds.

That said, all six Lucid executives we interviewed were clear that the car was intended to compete with other large luxury sedans, not the smaller sport sedan subset of that (at least initially), so the suspension has been tuned for comfort rather than ultimate road-holding.

James Lickfold, the Director of Chassis and Vehicle Dynamics, noted that the Air has relatively narrow tires for a vehicle its size, a check on the upper limits of its adhesion. But despite its lack of air suspension, the big Lucid

felt composed and rode smoothly—certainly more so than Tesla Model S Performance versions with far more aggressive wheel-and-tire combinations.

Road-holding is certainly capable, though for some reason the car felt heavier than its 5,100 pounds—a relatively light weight for that size of battery, owing to its all-aluminum structure.

Chief Engineer and Senior VP Eric Bach said the Air can be powered by one, two or three motors. The performance capabilities of the powertrain can be seen in a prototype Megawatt Drive Unit in the lobby, with a pair of rear motors said to be rated together at 1,000 kW (1,340 hp). This likely signals a sportier version that will emerge in due course.

At the other end of the scale, the single-motor Pure edition will deliver 408 miles of range starting at a base price of about $79,000 before incentives.

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A startup to take seriously The 2022 Lucid Air is a remarkable and impressive debut vehicle from one of the few startup automakers that can and should be taken seriously. Like Rivian in an entirely different segment, it has produced a fully capable vehicle that delivers capabilities its conventional competitors with combustion engines simply can’t match.

Many hurdles remain before Lucid can emerge from startup status to reach the level it’s taken Tesla 15 years to achieve. That company is now the sole startup carmaker whose survival as a brand is no longer seriously in doubt. Lucid will have to scale up production beyond its target of 20,000 cars in 2022, and sell many more than the 17,000 Airs for which it’s taken reservations.

At the same time, it must increase its service capabilities and showroom footprint not only in the US, but globally. And it has to get its second vehicle, the seven-seat Gravity SUV, into production within a couple of years to gain an offering in the segment that now outsells luxury sedans: luxury sport utilities.

Still, on the strength of its willingness to bring reporters into its headquarters, make executives available from multiple disciplines, and demonstrate near-production versions of its brand-new car, Lucid appears to be quietly confident. That’s a refreshing change from the idea that a car and a company can easily become a cult.

Like Rivian in an entirely different segment, Lucid has produced a fully capable vehicle that delivers capabilities its conventional competitors with combustion engines simply can’t match.

Note: Both Lucid Air vehicles we drove were pre-production versions that will not be sold to the public. Executives said all the concerns we noted were “on the list” for updates or changes—or at least discussion—and would be addressed before production vehicles were delivered to buyers. Those included items as diverse as a noisy brake pedal, leisurely accelerator mapping, a markedly peculiar turn-signal noise, and a “rain-sensing” wiper setting that proved not to sense much rain. We look forward to learning more about production quality as Lucid’s paying customers take delivery.

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Images courtesy of Lucid

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

White House releases details of EV charging infrastructure plan The EV industry applauded the inclusion of a plan to fund charging infrastructure in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)—now rechristened the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL)—that President Biden signed into law in November. However, until now we didn’t know exactly what we were cheering for.

Now the administration has released an EV Charging Action Plan to outline the steps federal agencies will take to implement the new policy.

The DOE and DOT will establish a Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, which will collect input and guidance from industry leaders, manufacturers, workers and other stakeholders. The initial focus will be on “building a convenient, reliable public charging network…with a focus on filling gaps in rural, disadvantaged, and hard-to-reach locations.”

The administration has set a goal of deploying 500,000 chargers. According to DOE data, the US currently has around 43,000 public charging stations and 120,000 charging ports, mostly Level 2 chargers.

At this stage, there’s still a lot about the plan that’s unclear. Based on the administration’s announcements, the following is what we understand to be the deal.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law establishes two separate programs, and two separate pots of money, to promote deployment of EV charging infrastructure.

The National Electric Vehicle Formula Program will provide $5 billion in “formula funding” for states to use “to build a national charging network.”

The Charging and Fueling Infrastructure grant program will provide $2.5 billion for “communities and corridors” through a competitive grant program to “ensure that charger deployment meets administration priorities such as supporting rural charging, improving local air quality and increasing EV charging access in disadvantaged communities.” According to the Federal Highway Administration, these grants can also be used for hydrogen, propane and natural gas fueling stations.

In addition to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the DOT and DOE will launch a new Advisory Committee on Electric Vehicles, and plans to appoint

members to this committee by the end of the first quarter of 2022. Interested stakeholders can submit suggestions or comments through the DOT’s Charging Request for Information.

The administration is already developing the standards described in the BIL. No later than February 11, the DOT will publish guidance for states and cities to “strategically deploy EV charging stations to build out a national network along our nation’s highway system.” No later than May 13, DOT will publish standards for EV chargers in the national network to ensure functionality, safety and accessibility.

Another key component of the administration’s EV strategy is “to increase domestic manufacturing of EV batteries and components and advance environmentally responsible domestic sourcing and recycling of critical minerals.”

In June, the administration released 100-day reviews of the supply chains of four critical products, including batteries and critical minerals and materials. The Federal Consortium for Advanced Batteries released a 10-year, “whole-of-government plan” to urgently develop a domestic battery supply chain. The DOE Loan Programs Office (LPO) published new guidance for approximately $17 billion in loan authority under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program (ATVM) to support the domestic battery supply chain. The DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) launched a new effort to support deployment of energy storage projects by federal agencies.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes $3 billion in competitive grants for battery minerals and refined materials aimed at accelerating the development of the North American battery supply chain, and another $3 billion in grants aimed at promoting manufacturing of batteries and components, and to establish recycling facilities in the US. The act also includes funds to promote R&D for recycling projects, and efforts to cooperate with retailers and state and local governments to increase the collection of spent batteries for reuse and recycling (a good idea that recycling pioneer JB Straubel suggested).

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Image courtesy of Ford

Ford Pro, a division of Ford that caters to commercial fleet customers, has launched a comprehensive solution for commercial EV charging. The new Ford Pro Charging program is designed to help ease the complex transition from ICE to EV fleets by delivering software and commercial hardware infrastructure to support charging and energy management.

Ford Pro Charging offers a turnkey solution that starts with site review and design consultations to determine the number and type of chargers needed, plus service to manage installation of commercial-grade charging hardware.

Ford Pro Charging is leveraging data streams from today’s connected Ford commercial vehicles to predict and manage the operational needs of electrified fleets. The software analyzes how each fleet operates, and orchestrates charging management based on those behaviors— for example, determining the optimal times to charge based on energy rates.

While some fleets need the control and certainty of depot chargers on company property, others may not desire to make an investment in depot charging infrastructure.

Ford Pro Charging offers access to over 70,000 public charging ports, including over 3,200 DC fast charging stations, on the nationwide Blue Oval Charging Network.

For fleet drivers needing to charge overnight at home, Ford Pro offers a solution that includes home charger installation and software for tracking and reporting driver reimbursement.

Ford Pro Charging takes an open-standards approach, and is designed to interoperate with EVs from many OEMs and vehicle classes—from forklifts to heavy-duty trucks. In conjunction with Ford Pro E-Telematics, features such as battery pre-conditioning can maximize range and battery performance. Customers can manage their vehicles and fleet operations with a single account that gives them access to the full suite of Ford Pro Charging management and E-Telematics solutions.

Image courtesy of Tritium

Ford Pro Charging offers commercial charging solution

Tritium supplies chargers to Shell and Osprey, goes public on Nasdaq Australia-based fast charger manufacturer Tritium (Nasdaq: DCFC) has executed a global agreement with oil giant Shell to provide fast charging technology and services. The new agreement is expected to accelerate the supply of Tritium DC fast chargers to Shell’s charging operations in Europe, South Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America.

“This is a great opportunity for Tritium. We have been selling EV charging infrastructure to Shell since 2020,” said Tritium CEO Jane Hunter.

Meanwhile, Tritium has secured an order for 110 rapid chargers from the UK’s Osprey Charging Network. The Tritium chargers are expected to be added to 40 new charging destinations, increasing Osprey’s network by 25%.

Many of the new charging destinations will be located within greater London, which recently expanded its ultra-low emissions zone.

“It’s a race to meet the ever-growing demand for EV charging in the UK,” said Osprey Charging Network CEO Ian Johnston. “Easy and intuitive user experiences are key to EV uptake, and Tritium excels in developing products that are easy to use. With their modular and scalable charging technology, Osprey gets market-leading reliability and the flexibility to easily increase charger power.”

Tritium recently became a public company through a business combination with Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corporation II. In January, Tritium began trading on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol DCFC.

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Image courtesy of Shell

Fifty utilities form group to coordinate EV infrastructure deployment

Shell converts London petrol station to EV charging hub For better or for worse, oil companies are gushing into the EV charging business. Shell currently operates a network of nearly 8,000 EV charging points, and recently opened its first “EV hub” in the UK. The oil giant has converted an existing petrol station in Fulham, central London, to an electric vehicle charging hub that features ten 175 kW DC fast charging stations, built by Australian manufacturer Tritium. The hub offers “a comfortable seating area for waiting EV drivers,” along with a Costa Coffee store and a Little Waitrose & Partners shop.

The hub has solar panels on the roof, and Shell says the chargers will be powered by 100% certified renewable electricity.

Many urban dwellers in the UK, who would otherwise be likely EV buyers, don’t have the option of installing charging at home, as they have no assigned parking spaces, and rely on on-street parking. This is a thorny problem, and it remains to be seen whether “charging hubs” are a viable solution (not having to visit gas stations is generally considered one of the major benefits of EV ownership).

Shell launched a similar EV hub in Paris earlier this year. The company is also pursuing other ways to provide charging for the drivewayless masses. It aims to install 50,000 ubitricity on-street charging posts across the UK by 2025, and is collaborating with grocery chain Waitrose in the UK to install 800 charging points at stores by 2025.

More than 50 US electric utilities have formed a new group to coordinate their efforts to expand the nation’s EV charging infrastructure.

The Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group, announced the formation of the National Electric Highway Coalition, which includes 50 EEI members, as well as the Tennessee Valley Authority. The organization is “a collaboration among electric companies that are committed to providing electric vehicle fast charging stations that will allow the public to drive EVs with confidence along major US travel corridors by the end of 2023.”

To date, EEI member companies have invested a collective $3 billion in various electromobility-related projects.

Kellen Schefter, EEI’s Director of Electric Transportation, said the utilities’ roles in the coalition could take various forms. One constructive strategy would be to focus on extending high-voltage connections to existing or new charging locations along highway routes, whether the chargers themselves are operated by private charging networks or directly by the utilities. “It’s really going to be all-of-the-above,” said Schefter.

It isn’t yet clear exactly how the $7.5 billion in funding earmarked for charging networks in the $1.2-trillion federal infrastructure bill will be allocated (assuming it survives the political chaos in Washington), but Schefter said he assumes that much of it will go through state governments. According to the current plan, $5 billion will be funneled through state governments, and $2.5 billion will fund the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Program, which will support charging stations as well as hydrogen, propane and natural gas infrastructure.

As E&E News reports, most utility plans for charging infrastructure projects will need approval from state utility commissions. According to a recent EEI survey, 52 electric companies in 31 states and the District of Columbia have received regulatory approval to begin electric transportation programs of various types, with budgets totaling nearly $3 billion. However, most of these are pilot projects—more than 80 percent of that dollar figure represents large programs in California, New York and New Jersey.

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The Dutch city of Utrecht has a plan to turn EVs into energy storage assets with a city-wide implementation of V2G technology—Utrecht’s goal is to be the world’s first “bidirectional city.”

“We see two megatrends: enormous growth of renewable energy generation, and at the same time, an enormous growth of the number of electric cars coming to the market and being rolled out,” says Robin Berg, the Director of We Drive Solar, which is building and managing a new network of bidirectional chargers.

“For the energy transition to be effective without a huge investment by grid operators and other storage facilities, the way forward is to combine those two trends, and to enable the batteries and cars to be a buffer for renewable energy to balance the system.”

As Fast Company reports, a parking lot belonging to an insurance company called ASR now sports a sunroof with 2,000 solar panels, and 250 bidirectional chargers.

When the sun shines, the panels power the adjacent office building and charge parked EVs. When it’s dark, the EVs’ batteries discharge energy to the building. A software package balances the energy demand. Hundreds of additional bidirectional chargers have been installed elsewhere in the city, and thousands more are in the pipeline.

We Drive Solar is working with several automakers that will soon implement V2G technology. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, which supports bidirectional charging, will arrive in 2022, and Utrecht already plans to deploy a public car-sharing fleet of 150 Ioniq 5s.

The University of Utrecht estimates that around 10,000 EVs with bidirectional charging will be enough to balance the city’s entire electricity demand. That’s less than 10% of the current number of cars in the city.

We Drive Solar will study the effects of V2G on the cars’ batteries—it doesn’t expect to see any increase in battery degradation. “We won’t drain the whole battery,” Berg says. “We will just take out some power and put some power back, and this up-and-down process is not a [complete charging cycle]. It’s especially the whole cycles that are causing the battery to degrade sooner.”

Image courtesy of Atom Power

Utrecht plans to be a bidirectional city, turning its EVs into a giant battery

Atom Power’s charging solution charges EVs directly from the circuit breaker Atom Power, manufacturer of a UL-listed solid-state digital circuit breaker, has launched a new EV charging solution called PURPL, which charges vehicles directly from the circuit breaker, and incorporates energy management technology to keep electricity costs low.

Because PURPL charges EVs directly from the breaker, the charging station itself does not contain expensive electronics—it’s simply a metal tube or wall box with a charge plug and cable.

“Electric vehicle charging infrastructure is a natural application of our third-generation solid-state circuit breaker platform, because it provides unparalleled real-time energy management needed to keep utility bills low and reduce the infrastructure required to accommodate EV charging at multi-family and commercial facilities,” said Ryan Kennedy, CEO, Atom Power.

Utilities in states including California and New York have implemented “charge-ready” and “make-ready” programs that offer rebates to property owners to reduce the costs of adding EV charging infrastructure at their buildings. According to Atom Power, Because PURPL charges EVs directly from the circuit breaker, rather than from electronics in a charging station, it can support the goals of these make-ready utility programs.

“Atom Power can help utilities and municipalities reach their transportation electrification goals by providing an infrastructure system that can also charge the cars itself. There is no better make-ready solution,” said Kennedy.

PURPL also addresses large-scale EV charging installations for fleet owners and at multi-family buildings.

When multiple chargers are used at these locations, it can lead to expensive utility demand charges. Atom Power’s Energy Management system can sense and respond to demand changes within seconds.

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Image courtesy of Francis Energy

Image courtesy of Driivz

THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Francis Energy and Fuel Maxx partner to expand fast charging network in Houston EV charging provider Francis Energy plans to expand its network of fast chargers by partnering with Fuel Maxx, one of the largest gas station retail chains in Texas.

Under the agreement, Francis Energy will begin installing its fast charging stations at 3 Fuel Maxx locations in Houston, with an option to expand to additional locations in the future. This will be Fuel Maxx’s first foray into EV fast charging.

Francis Energy’s current network includes more than 550 fast charging ports at 120 sites in 3 states. Fuel Maxx operates 65 gas stations across the Houston metropolitan area.

“Francis Energy is committed to eliminating range anxiety, which gives confidence to the increasing numbers of drivers making the switch to electric vehicles,” said Francis Energy founder and CEO David Jankowsky.

“We are excited about building out our network in the nation’s fourth-largest city.”

“Our goal as a company has always been to serve our customers’ needs,” said Fuel Maxx Energy Supervisor Afsha Maknojia. “As the industry evolves, we will make it our mission to stay ahead of the curve. Fuel Maxx will now begin its journey into alternative energy, with Francis Energy’s EV charging stations.”

OBE Power selects Driivz platform for its charging network OBE Power, which operates a private network of smart, distributed EV chargers, plans to adopt Driivz’s end-toend charging and energy management platform.

Miami-based OBE Power offers an owner-operated Charging as a Service (CaaS) business model for host customers and charge point operators, including software that enables cross-platform integration, fleet operations and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) connectivity. Its customer base includes Miami-Dade County, Royal Caribbean, Related Group and the Stiles Corporation.

OBE Power selected Driivz for its EV charging and smart energy management platform, which it calls “the industry’s most robust, scalable and proven EV charging platform.”

Driivz will provide OBE Power with real-time monitoring of charger status and remote self-healing that’s designed to proactively resolve up to 80% of charger issues. The platform also provides smart energy management that optimizes electricity costs based on demand, a capability particularly critical to OBE Power, given its focus on urban centers.

The technology-agnostic Driivz platform supports a growing number of different chargers and standards. It also supports streamlined payments across borders in multiple currencies and languages, a feature that’s especially important to OBE Power, which has big plans for expansion in Latin American markets.

“Using Driivz’s proven, well-established EV charging and energy management solution lets us focus on our core mission of enabling best-in-class services for our clients while keeping pace with the rapidly growing demand we are facing,” said Julia Wilkinson, CRO of OBE Power.

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Image courtesy of Driivz

Ford launches zero-carbon home charging initiative in California

Volvo, Daimler and Traton to build charging network for commercial EVs in Europe Commercial vehicle manufacturers Volvo Group, Daimler Truck and the Traton Group have agreed to create a joint venture to build and operate a high-power public charging network for heavy-duty long-haul trucks and coaches across Europe.

The planned JV, which will be equally owned by the three firms, is scheduled to start operations in 2022. The parties have committed to invest a total of €500 million.

The plan is to deploy at least 1,700 charging points on and close to highways, as well as at logistic centers and destination points, within five years. The new charging network will be open and accessible to all commercial vehicles, regardless of brand.

“Innovative partnerships like these will enable the much-needed change that will benefit our customers and the entire industry,” said Martin Lundstedt, President and CEO of the Volvo Group.

“It is remarkable that three fierce competitors in the area of trucks and vehicle technology are taking action together to start establishing the needed charging infrastructure” said Martin Daum, CEO of Daimler Truck.

“The Traton Group, together with our brands Scania and MAN, will be part of the solution when it comes to a CO2-neutral world,” said Traton Group CEO Christian Levin. “A collaboration with strong competitors like Daimler Truck and Volvo Group might seem unusual.

However, this unique cooperation will make us faster and more successful in delivering the transformational action needed to tackle climate change.”

Ford has launched a new sustainable charging program that allows plug-in vehicle owners in California to opt for carbon-neutral home charging. Ford is participating in the California Air Resource Board (CARB) Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) program, which allows customers to match the use of electricity for charging with 100-percent local renewable energy.

Owners of eligible plug-in vehicles opt into the program through the FordPass app, which automatically tracks the amount of electricity used while charging at home. Ford generates, or buys, an equivalent amount of California-sourced Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), then sends evidence of the matching amounts to CARB, ensuring that all home charging activity is matched with zero-carbon electricity.

“By working with regulators, utilities and customers for home integration services, we’re enabling EV drivers to lower their carbon footprints, potentially save money and help protect the grid, all through their smartphones,” said Matt Stover, Ford’s Director of Charging and Energy Services.

The program is available to California-based owners of all Ford plug-in vehicles.

US installing workplace chargers at an impressive pace Based on a report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the DOE says that between the last quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2021, 9,894 workplace chargers were installed in the US. The DOE defines workplace chargers as private charging stations for the use of employees only. The DOE reported that by the end of March 2021, about 95% of these were Level 2 chargers, 4% were Level 1 chargers, and less than 1% were DC fast chargers.

Chargers at federal workplaces contributed to this growth. According to the NREL report, 408 federal workplace chargers were added to the tally in 2021.

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Wallbox’s latest Quasar 2 bidirectional home charger allows an EV to provide backup power Image courtesy of Wallbox

Charging station manufacturer Wallbox (NYSE: WBX) has introduced a new generation of its bidirectional home charger for the North American market.

In service areas that offer time-of-use rates, EV owners can schedule charging sessions at times when rates are low and discharge their car battery to power their home when rates are high. Users with solar panels can also store excess energy in their EVs during low usage periods and discharge it at other times. (All vehicle-to-home applications require an EV capable of bidirectional charging.)

Quasar 2 retains the functionality of its predecessor, Quasar, and is even more powerful, offering 11.5 kW/48 amps of power for charging and discharging. It also adds a new feature called Blackout Mode, which allows an EV to be used as an emergency power source in power outages.

“Bidirectional charging opens up numerous opportunities for smarter energy management in the home,” said Enric Asunción, co-founder and CEO of Wallbox.

“Not only does Quasar 2 allow us to rethink the way we produce, store and use energy on a day-to-day basis, it has the potential to [allow] users to power their homes for over three days during a power outage.”

“The average American experienced more than eight hours of power interruption in 2020,” said Douglas Alfaro, General Manager of Wallbox North America. “With Blackout Mode, we are able to offer EV owners some relief by helping mitigate the impact of a major energy disruption in the home.”

DOE awards Eaton $4.9 million to develop turnkey fast charging system The DOE has awarded power management company Eaton $4.9 million for a program to reduce the cost and complexity of deploying DC fast charging infrastructure.

Under the three-year program, Eaton will develop and demonstrate a compact turnkey fast charging solution that is anticipated to reduce costs by 65% through improvements in power conversion and grid interconnection technology, charger integration and modularity, and installation time.

The grant represents one of several EV- and alternative fuel-related projects that DOE has funded for fiscal year 2021.

Eaton and its project partners aim to accelerate fleet electrification by providing a compact, cost-efficient and fully integrated solution that is factory-optimized for local grid interconnection and immediate use. Eaton will develop a new solid-state transformer design and modular chargers packaged on a compact skid in order to expedite installation, reduce required equipment and minimize deployment cost and footprint.

Eaton’s solid-state transformer technology will enable direct connection to the utility medium-voltage distribution system, eliminating the need for additional power conversion devices. The system also includes integrated energy management and charge control software to help avoid peak energy costs by accurately forecasting and managing electrical demand.

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2021 EV CHARGING

INFRASTRUCTURE

BENCHMARK This year, Blink and Tesla Superchargers were added to the list of charging networks tested in 2020: Electrify America, EVgo, ChargePoint, EV Connect and Greenlots.

Electrify America earned the top score in the Digital Platform category, as well as the top combined score for both categories.

Tesla Superchargers received the top score in the Charging Location Experience category—earning the most points in four of the five scoring subcategories.

verybody’s talking about EVs these days, and more often than not, charging infrastructure is one of the first subjects that come up. Industry experts have different ideas about how much public charging will be needed, what forms it should take, and how it should be funded, but everyone seems to agree on the critical importance of reliable, convenient and affordable DC fast charging to enable widespread EV adoption.

For some years, Tesla’s proprietary Supercharger network was the only game on the highway, and many in the industry have called it the “gold standard” of fast charging. Today, drivers of non-Tesla EVs have access to a growing number of fast charging sites in most regions of the US. However, as Charged and other media have reported, the public charging experience often leaves much to be desired, and there’s a need for independent testing to help the EV industry focus its efforts to improve various aspects of public fast charging, including reliability, convenience, coverage and price.

E

Global engineering firm umlaut, part of Accenture, has been performing independent benchmarks from the user’s point of view in various industries for over 20 years. Last year, umlaut adapted its testing expertise and methodology to the US EV charging market and collaborated with Charged to publish the results of its 2020 USA EV Charging Infrastructure Benchmark.

Now, a year later, umlaut has conducted a second US study, this time in the Northeast. And this time, the study has added two more networks: Blink and the EV trendsetter Tesla.

For its 2021 EV Charging Infrastructure Benchmark report, umlaut conducted a comparative study of the largest fast charging networks and rated each of them using several criteria. umlaut looked at interoperability, pricing, transparency, functionality and availability, among other elements. How fast, and how simple, is the charging process? How convenient are the charging locations? Is the charging power that’s delivered the same as what’s advertised (which is dependent on the state of the charge of the EV’s battery)?

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

What was tested: methodology As they did for the 2020 benchmark, umlaut’s team set out in 2021 to test and compare the user experience at some of the best DC fast charging sites on each of the tested charging networks. Only top-rated sites were chosen, based on data from PlugShare—a free app (acquired by EVgo in July 2021) that allows users to fi nd and review over 140,000 charging stations in North America. So, to be clear, this is a comparison of the charging industry’s best efforts: a search for the best user experience currently available. umlaut’s testers covered 2,100 miles to fi nd and test top sites from each network—through 7 states over 6 days during September 2021. The testers used a Ford Mach-E and a Tesla Model 3 as test vehicles, and conducted nearly 150 tests at 28 stations (4 each from 7 different networks) in Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Th is testing methodology is tailored very specifically

umlaut’s testers covered 2,100 miles to find and test top sites from each network—through 7 states over 6 days during September 2021. to the user’s perspective of the charging networks. Also, this year the team used a device called a PLC sniffer to trace the communications between the vehicles and the CCS charging stations to add some technical performance metrics to the scoring system (not applicable to Tesla Superchargers).

In order to rank the different networks, umlaut split its analysis into two areas: the charging network’s Digital Platform (website and app); and the Charging Location Experience. The company developed a comprehensive set of key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to compare the most important aspects of charging among the different networks.

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Category 1 Digital Platform Website

Especially for new EV drivers, a company’s website might be the fi rst point of contact. The following questions are important for users: • Is there a tutorial and knowledge base to demonstrate to new EV drivers how charging works?

• What types of network memberships are available?

• How transparent is the pricing?

• What route planning features are available?

App operation

The focus in this category is the user interface of a network’s smartphone app. Criteria considered include: • ease of use • intuitive operation • ease of account creation • charging instructions • ease of locating available charging stations

App functionality

The capabilities of smartphone apps were considered as a separate category. umlaut took a detailed look at the functionalities of the various networks’ apps, including: • real-time data • reservation options • route guidance • fi ltering options (charging power and plug types) • tech support options • information about charging power and time • language options • visibility of stations belonging to other networks

Price transparency and payment

Whereas gas stations display their pricing on prominent signage, at EV charging stations it is often not clear what the cost of a charging session will be. The umlaut team evaluated: • price structure • price transparency (ability to see pricing before, during and after charging) • roaming (ability to use multiple networks with one membership) • available payment methods (credit, debit, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay)

Category 2 Charging Location Experience Charging station environment and features

The physical surroundings and amenities of a charging station are important. umlaut’s testers considered the presence and quality of features including: • signage • illumination • ease of parking • roofi ng/weather protection • charging connector options (CCS, CHAdeMO, Tesla) • charging power available • amenities (restrooms, shops, restaurants) • free WiFi

Tech support

From instructions to authentication and payment to technical problems, there are several issues that can disturb a successful charging process. umlaut contacted the networks’ support hotlines for help with various simulated scenarios, and scored the results based on the visibility and availability of the hotline number, multi-language options, error access and any charging tips provided.

Access and payment

umlaut awarded extra points for networks that support Plug & Charge, a new system that authenticates a network member and initiates charging as soon as a vehicle is plugged in, with no need for an app or RFID card. The testers also considered the range of payment options available at the actual charging site, as well as (naturally) the price of charging.

Technical performance

Does the charging process start on the fi rst attempt?

How long does it take to initiate charging? How does the actual charging power delivered measure up to what is promised?

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

Here’s what was not tested • Th is is not a test of the feasibility of long road trips while using any of these charging networks. Not all of the tested networks are available nationwide, and this is not a comprehensive overview of the US charging market. Instead, we’re focused on the user experience at the charging site and while using the apps and websites.

• Th is is not an ownership-experience benchmark of the EVs used in the tests—a Ford Mach-E and Tesla Model 3. No data or metrics from the cars were measured, and the EVs did not affect the scores earned by the charging networks (which made it tricky to include Tesla’s closed-loop EVto-Supercharger ecosystem in the study—more on that below). There are countless vehicle reviews and owner-satisfaction surveys for EVs online, so if that’s what you’re looking for, you’ll have no trouble fi nding it.

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Apples-to-apples: How do we include Tesla?

Last year, a lot of people asked, “Why didn’t you include Tesla Superchargers in the benchmarks?” The answer was simple: umlaut set out to develop a scoring methodology to compare the user experience of public charging networks, and many of those scoring categories didn’t apply to Tesla’s proprietary closed network.

Th is year, umlaut tried to adapt those scoring categories to fairly account for Tesla’s proprietary nature in a way that would produce the most useful data to compare it to open networks. That’s easier said than done, however.

The fi rst obvious challenge is that Superchargers can only charge Teslas, and there are a few scoring subcategories that are affected by this, including the Connector Type metric. “Th is might sound like an automatic negative for Tesla, but it isn’t necessarily,” explained Christian Sussbauer, one of umlaut’s EV experts who led the study. “We do not simply count the number of EV models with different connectors—that methodology wouldn’t make sense. Instead, we looked at the market share, how many EVs with the different connectors are actually on the road, and what percentage each charging network can serve. That’s actually quite a bit for Superchargers because the number of Teslas on the road in the US is 75% to 80% of EVs.” The bigger challenge with including Tesla in the 2021 Benchmark is that none of the open network’s scores are affected by the vehicles being used to test them.

So if the Mustang Mach-E’s dashboard or navigation displays a bunch of useful info while charging at a ChargePoint station, that doesn’t affect ChargePoint’s score in any way. All the other open networks are only scored by the data available on their apps, websites and

charging station displays. So, to include Tesla, all the data and info available on the vehicle was ignored as well, and only the Supercharger locations, along with the charging info available in Tesla’s app and website, were considered.

Th is will probably be the most controversial part of the methodology, as Tesla drivers will be quick to point out that one rarely uses Tesla’s app or website in the same way one would with the other networks, because most of that useful charging and navigation info is elegantly built into the vehicles. But, again, that’s not what was tested here. Th is is not a comment on the Tesla ownership experience, it is an attempt to compare the DC fast charging networks in the most useful way. To do so, Superchargers were considered a standalone charging network independent of Tesla vehicles.

The challenge with scoring these metrics is revealed in the Digital Platform category results, where Tesla Superchargers lost a lot of points because the smartphone app and website are not as useful as those of some of the other networks, regardless of what Tesla vehicles display. However, as you may have read, Tesla is plotting a course for all EVs to have access to its Supercharger network, and plans to use its smartphone app to make that happen. So, at the very least, these results can serve as a useful guideline for Tesla on how to improve its app and website for all the future EVs that will use Superchargers without the benefits available in Tesla’s closed vehicle-charging ecosystem.

If you have questions/comments about the scoring methodology, please let us know: best-in-test@ChargedEVs.com

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE Network ratings Last year, Electrify America was the clear winner of umlaut’s Best-in-Test award for the USA EV Charging Infrastructure Benchmark. Th is year, it was a closer race. EA once again won in the Digital Platform category with a score of 275, but ChargePoint ran a close second with 270. Tesla Superchargers, which were not included in last year’s rankings, handily won the Charging Location Experience category with a score of 484. However, as Tesla’s app and website lack a lot of useful info, Superchargers earned a dismal score of 165 in the Digital Platform category, and Electrify America once again took the overall prize with 702 points.

Tesla Superchargers came in second overall with 649, followed by ChargePoint (611), EVgo (578), Greenlots (548), Blink (505) and EV Connect (472).

“We had a lot of internal discussions about including Tesla Superchargers in this year’s Benchmark,” said umlaut’s Christian Sussbauer, “because we really want to create a testing system that will capture the right metrics and provide the most useful information to the EV industry. To be honest, if you asked me before we conducted the tests, I think I would have predicted that Tesla Superchargers would end up leading in total points because it’s well known that they do a great job in many aspects of fast charging. And actually, our test results show this clearly—Superchargers excel in many important areas. It’s actually a little boring to test Supercharger stations because you just plug them in and they reliably work.”

“We were happy to fi nd a very high level of simplicity and reliability with Electrify America this year as well,” Sussbauer continued.

“Using an EV with Plug & Charge enabled on Electrify America’s network was a very good user experience. All of the EV industry should strive to replicate that aspect of Superchargers and Electrify America/Plug & Charge. And in the end, Electrify America also has a very useful smartphone app and website that combined to put them over the top in terms of total points scored for the metrics we were measuring in 2021.”

an EV with Plug & Charge “Using enabled on Electrify America’s

network was a very good user experience. All of the EV industry should strive to replicate that aspect of Tesla Superchargers and Electrify America/Plug & Charge.

”

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Electrify America // Overall score: 702 points “Electrify America delivers an increasingly consistent and positive experience at its charging locations.”

PROS:

▶ Plug & Charge available ▶ App is much improved, and is easy to navigate ▶ Many high-powered stations (up to 350 kW) along highways ▶ Illumination makes charging stations easy to find at night ▶ Solid, high-quality website ▶ New feature displays kW requested by EV and kW provided by EVSE

CONS:

▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

Relatively high prices No roaming possible with other networks Charging process takes a long time to start No RFID card available No QR code scanning for charging station identification Support hotline waiting time was more than 10 minutes in some cases ▶ Up-front payment required to create account ▶ No multi-stop travel planning on website

Tesla Superchargers // Overall score: 649 points “By far the best charging locations and environment, and the connection between Tesla’s EVs and Superchargers is state-of-the-art.”

PROS:

▶ Automatic authentication and payment (same functionality as Plug & Charge) ▶ By far the fastest to start and stop charging process ▶ Huge number of stations along highways (up to 250 kW) ▶ High-quality website and app: glitch-free

CONS: ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

No charging for non-Tesla EVs Charging costs not shown in the app App has limited charging station map functions App doesn’t show service hotline number Hotline not always available, or long waiting times (over 10 minutes)

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ChargePoint // Overall score: 611 points “Charging stations always worked perfectly.”

PROS:

▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

Roaming with some other networks Great new display and positioning of stations Very silent EVSE Most other networks’ stations shown in the app Good payment options Displays in 6 languages

CONS:

▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

Plug & Charge not available Not many high-power stations No lights at some charging locations Sometimes difficult to reach EV inlet with cable Account required to see charging map and pricing Hotline number not displayed at all locations

EVgo // Overall score: 578 points “EVgo is the only network that supports all current US DC fast charging standards.”

PROS:

▶ Roaming with some other networks ▶ Support for all US charging standards (CCS, CHAdeMO, Tesla) ▶ Consistent price structure ▶ App provides easy access to nearest charging station on home screen

CONS:

▶ Plug & Charge not available ▶ Not many high-power stations (most are 50 kW) ▶ Charging stations in poor condition compared to other networks (dirty, faulty displays, etc)

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Greenlots // Overall score: 548 points “App experience is the best among all contenders—account creation is very fast.”

PROS:

▶ Best roaming options among all contenders ▶ Comprehensive real-time data during charging (kW, kWh, SOC, time) ▶ Charging station identification is quick from the app ▶ Hotline service is also provided in Spanish

CONS:

▶ Plug & Charge not available ▶ Often, an unnecessary additional step is required to start charging (Start button on the station itself) ▶ No payment options besides RFID and app ▶ Many chargers have no proper display ▶ Price information missing ▶ Not many high-power stations ▶ Website experience needs improvement ▶ Process to start and finish charging takes a long time

Blink // Overall score: 505 points “The website is very informative.”

PROS:

▶ Notification when a charging station becomes available ▶ Great experience with service hotline

CONS: ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

Plug & Charge not available No roaming with other networks Not many high-power stations Too few payment options at charging locations Pricing very high—sometimes $10 minimum Prepayment required to create account No filters on website No filter in app for power levels (kW) One display got so hot that touchscreen didn’t work

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

EV Connect // Overall score: 472 points “Good charging experience—easy and convenient.”

PROS:

▶ Hotline service is good ▶ Good charging station locations ▶ Prices are indicated during charging process

CONS: ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶ ▶

Plug & Charge not available Maintenance of charging stations needs to be improved Very little information provided on website Unsatisfying experience with the app Number of successful charging attempts was low— only 1 out of 4 stations worked consistently ▶ Charging start process takes too long ▶ Real-time data is not always correct

Conclusion and outlook: 2021 key findings The overall US charging network is growing quickly, and the customer experience is improving. Newer public charging stations are delivering a better charging experience. umlaut found clear improvements in reliability and interoperability (roaming) among networks compared to last year’s tests.

Capacity seems to be sufficient for today’s volume of EVs, at least in the regions where umlaut conducted this year’s tests. Popular charging sites in some of the country’s EV hotspots may be crowded, but umlaut’s testers experienced no wait times during their 6-day testing process.

Plug & Charge, a new system (part of the ISO 15118 standard) that makes the charging process much more seamless and convenient, is the talk of the charging world these days. Unfortunately, it may be a while before it’s implemented on a widespread basis—umlaut’s testers were able to use Plug & Charge only at Electrify America stations. (Tesla’s Superchargers have always used a proprietary system that offers the same features.)

While the EV charging experience is steadily getting better, there is still considerable room for improvement, especially when it comes to networks’ digital platforms (websites and apps)—this category had the largest disparity among different networks.

Interoperability, or roaming—the ability to access different networks with a single membership, as

one does with cell phones—is still limited. Electrify America, Blink and Tesla offer no roaming capability.

Most networks don’t even show the locations of other networks’ stations in their apps. Drivers still need a third-party app (such as PlugShare) to locate all available charging stations, and the integration of charging into popular navigation apps such as Google Maps is poor.

At charging sites, drivers will often miss the convenience they were used to in the old gas station days (though not the smell). It’s sometimes unclear what the charging price is, or what charging power level is on offer. Waiting times to start and end charging with CCS are too long compared with Tesla. And many charging locations lack amenities such as food, restrooms and weather protection. When things go wrong, calling a service hotline can be a frustrating experience—wait times often exceed 10 minutes.

Charged and umlaut plan to continue this collaboration to bring you future reports on the state of the charging network user experience. The next benchmarks will expand to new North American markets in the United States and Canada.

You can reach the testing team with comments, clarifications, suggestions for future work, etc. at: best-in-test@ChargedEVs.com

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2021 TEST RESULTS

Subcategory scores

Charging start and stop times Total start time

*This chart displays the fastest start and stop times measured for each charging network. **Tesla does not follow the ISO 15118 standard for its EV-EVSE communication, so the charging stages could not be identified.

Successful and unsuccessful charging attempts

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THE INFRASTRUCTURE

The testing experts: umlaut Hakan Ekmen

Q&A with Hakan Ekmen, Managing Director umlaut umlaut is a global, full-service, cross-industry, endto-end engineering consultancy company with 4,200 specialized experts and engineers, and operations in 50 locations all over the world. It was recently acquired by Accenture. The company regularly releases “technology roadmaps” in various industries, including energy, telecommunications, automotive and aviation. umlaut has more than 20 years of experience in testing and benchmarking, and has worked with all the US automotive OEMs on various vehicle-related technologies, as well as all the telecom operators in areas like 5G. For example, every year umlaut assesses over 200 telecom networks in more than 120 countries. Its methodology is respected as the de facto industry standard.

Charged recently chatted with umlaut Managing Director Hakan Ekmen to learn more about the company’s busy year and the 2021 EV Charging Infrastructure Benchmark.

Q Charged: First of all, congratulations! I under-

stand umlaut was acquired by Accenture in 2021.

A Hakan Ekmen: Yes, Accenture has made a series of acquisitions to build its capabilities across industries.

Recent acquisitions include operational technology providers like Advoco here in the US, a systems integrator for asset management solutions. Also, some consultancy companies and technology companies, like SALT Solutions in Germany. The move to acquire umlaut is one of the biggest acquisitions in the history of the company. The idea is that engineering and manufacturing of products all around cloud, artificial intelligence, 5G, will be redefined. The agreement was closed a few months back, and now our 4,200 employees are with Accenture‘s Industry X service.

umlaut’s EV testing team

Christian Sussbauer

Alejandro Areta

Q Charged: Can you compare this year’s EV

Charging Infrastructure Benchmark and last year’s in both Europe and the US? What differences have you seen, what’s encouraging, and what still needs to be done?

A Hakan Ekmen: First of all, we have to ensure continuity. We cannot start an exercise and then change it abruptly. Therefore, the methodology we are doing has to evolve, always keeping in mind that it should have end-user relevance. We did make some changes in the methodology, introducing technical key performance indicators (KPIs) in the charging process. Last year was the first year we assessed US charging infrastructure, and we started in the state which had the most relevance for electrified vehicles—California.

A total of 5 charging providers were tested last year.

This year, we added Tesla and Blink, because to make it more relevant, the methodology and the things we do should evolve. We have also introduced some new KPIs, to have in-depth analytics, because the industry is interested in this comprehensive level of data and analytic insights.

The 2021 benchmark indicates that charging infrastructure is growing substantially, and the charging process is becoming more reliable. Our testers found

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Austria, Switzerland and Belgium. Fastned ranked first among CPOs in the Netherlands. Among the EMPs, Smatrics won in Austria and Move in Switzerland. In Luxembourg, where Chargy is the only CPO, no winner was chosen.

Q Charged: Do you have any other services for EVs

and e-mobility, and how do they integrate with all your other services?

clear improvements in holding charging power, as well as roaming and interoperability between charging networks, compared to last year.

The user experience is always a main focus for us, and many steps in the process could be removed or improved, as each customer interaction has the potential for error. If you look to what steps are of concern from an end-user perspective, then we see that the whole chain can be improved in the future.

In Europe, we also published a charging infrastructure benchmark, and we definitely see that, with the rising numbers of EVs, the importance of charging infrastructure is growing. In Germany, for example, 25% of new cars are electrified. There are now 70 electric vehicles for every charging station, which means if you just wait, it’ll explode. But you see also that the automotive industry is managing the transition well. umlaut and our partner, Connect, conducted and published a comprehensive end-user charging test of EMPs (providers of charging apps and billing solutions) and CPOs (operators of charging points) in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

When you look to the end results, EnBW won twice in Germany, ranking first in the EMP and the CPO categories. Ionity secured victory among the CPOs in

A Hakan Ekmen: That’s definitely a future topic for us.

Our experts are always working end-to-end, including all the relevant topics—strategy, business model, end users, quality management and many more. We cover the entire value creation process from battery to vehicle, and charging infrastructure to the ecosystem.

New examples are battery storage systems, fuel cell electrical vehicles and aircraft electric charging infrastructure. Then H2 infrastructure and the usage of H2 as a fuel is a central component to decarbonize the mobility sector, which was also relevant for the US. We see the whole chain as relevant, and we are ramping up our talents here. Across the regions, in the US, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, Europe, the UK, Australia, India and a lot of other countries, we are ramping up the talents on our team to become a relevant partner for our customers there.

We also are working on additional benchmarks relative to the connected vehicle space and ADAS [advanced driver-assistance systems], which we’re going to release soon.

In the connected vehicle benchmark, we look to the cockpit of a vehicle, and we test more or less everything that is there—entertainment, usability, all the functionality the users are receiving when they are sitting in a car. We have established this format in the US, in Europe and in China recently. We compared, for example, how the Chinese OEMs are performing compared to the European ones. It’s interesting when some Chinese OEMs are entering Europe, what they can expect out of this.

Our Best in Test seal isn’t necessarily awarded to the vehicle, but to the measure of the OEM’s most connected features. So for example, we’re evaluating the highest-level ADAS feature that is available in the market for customers to experience. We have an entire benchmarking system and methodology for both the ADAS features and for the connected vehicle features.

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Three infrastructure eggs that need to hatch nyone who follows the ongoing discussion about the pace of EV adoption is probably tired of hearing about chickens and eggs. In some quarters, it’s taken as a given that a lack of charging infrastructure is holding back EV adoption, and that massive numbers of public charging stations need to be deployed ASAP, preferably financed by taxpayer money.

Not every e-mobility expert agrees. Your correspondent believes that what’s holding back EV sales is the still-steep price premium, and that once EVs reach price parity with stinkpots, most of the issues around charging will work themselves out.

The obsession with public charging has a lot to do with the human tendency to see any new technology through the lens of the old. People have been making regular stops at gas stations all their lives, so naturally they assume that EVs need to make regular stops at charging stations. EV drivers know this isn’t the way it works. Contrary to what the EVclueless seem to believe, replacing all the world’s gas pumps with DC fast chargers is neither necessary nor desirable.

Make no mistake, infrastructure is of critical importance—just not in the way that it’s depicted in the popular press. At this point in EVolution, there are three major infrastructure issues that need to be addressed.

One of these is charging on long road trips. The highway charging network is steadily growing—as detailed in this issue, umlaut’s testers found substantial improvement just in the last year. However, there’s still work to do before charging up is as quick and easy as gassing up.

On the tech side, solving the problem (or seizing the opportunity) of highway charging seems straightforward. Providers simply need to roll out lots more chargers, and equip them with the latest advances (350 kW power levels, Plug & Charge) to boost speed and convenience. The business case is far less clear. Selling electrons (like selling gas) is bound to be a low-margin business, and it remains to be seen whether independent charging providers will be financially viable.

Oil companies and electric utilities are emerging as major players in the charging space, and some fear that this bodes ill for a competitive market.

Another issue is commercial fleet charging. Commercial EVs have now proven their reliability after years of pilots, and fleet operators are starting to place large orders—and running into another problem. Here’s a story we hear often: a company tests a few EVs, they work fine, so the firm orders a lot more, only to find that the simple charging infrastructure that worked with a dozen EVs is inadequate for a fleet of hundreds. Both OEMs and third-party startups are stepping up to solve this problem by offering turnkey charging packages. The market seems likely to work out the fleet charging challenge, but it will take some years.

A

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By Charles Morris

Today’s most intractable infrastructure issue is The Plight of the Drivewayless. Installing a home charger is always more of a challenge for renters than for homeowners, but landlords can be convinced to cooperate, and most apartment-dwellers have assigned parking spaces. The real problem is that many urban drivers rely on on-street parking, and have no possibility of installing chargers of their own.

Someday, once self-driving tech and wireless (or robotic) charging come into widespread use, cars could simply charge themselves as their owners sleep—but this solution remains years away. An obvious fix is to equip almost every urban parking space with a charger (this would also enable large-scale V2G applications), but this isn’t likely to happen soon either.

The conundrum is largely a regional one. In much of the US, building a residential building without plenty of dedicated parking would be unthinkable (in Florida, the new condo towers going up all have multiple floors of parking—seemingly one for every couple floors of living space).

In some regions however, notably England and China, this is a real problem, and we haven’t yet seen a viable nearterm solution.

Urban fast charging is becoming a trend—Shell recently converted a London petrol station to an EV charging hub with ten DC fast charging stations and “a comfortable seating area for waiting EV drivers.” This is actually cool, but it isn’t a solution for The Plight of the Drivewayless. Who wants to buy an EV if it means driving to a “hub” every couple of days, waiting (however comfortable the seating) for half an hour, and paying a premium price to charge?

Destination charging holds more promise. Workplace charging is a solution for some, but many of those who live in dense cities don’t take their cars to work—they use them to go shopping, or for outings away from the urban core.

Every trip has a destination, and if most destinations had charging—problem solved. Site owners can offer charging to attract customers, so it can be a win-win proposition.

Unfortunately, charging stations at shopping centers and other long-dwell locations remain fairly rare, and few headline charging initiatives seem to focus on them.

Meanwhile, there’s an overriding meta-challenge that applies to all public charging, and that is maintenance.

The industry is learning that public chargers break down a lot. Keeping them up and running is a huge expense, and it casts doubt on the long-term viability of many public charging projects. Deployments are often partnerships that involve property owners, charging operators, utilities and/ or local governments. There needs to be a clear understanding as to who will be responsible for maintenance, and a reliable revenue stream to pay for it.

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