Welcome everyone. Reimagine Mobility Podcast series here with Alan Bedewi. He's a supervisor on the vehicle engineering team here at AVL Mobility Technologies. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. What does vehicle engineering mean? I mean, you're not designing the whole vehicle. You're not designing everything. It's a term I hear oftentimes even in our customers. And I always have to ask, what does it mean?
So tell our listeners and viewers here what this vehicle engineering would mean with or for you of what you're doing. Sure. So I think there's a couple different sort of branches of vehicle engineering that we do. So from a high level vehicle benchmarking, that's a major one.
So oftentimes customers come to us and they want to understand something about a vehicle that they don't make oftentimes, even for their own vehicles, to be honest, because there's certain things that we have the capabilities or the capacity to do that maybe even OEMs don't. So benchmarking is a big one, which is essentially fingerprinting of a vehicle. So you want to find out everything about it with lots of sensors on it, all different types of test maneuvers.
And we want to get an overall kind of picture of the whole vehicle. Mm hmm. Another thing in vehicle engineering would be integration projects that we do. So and that's a big one. Oftentimes, larger scale vehicles, trucks is pretty common and will either be integrating a new component or changing the architecture of a vehicle, things like that.
So some products I've worked on the past are essentially converting trucks or busses from either gasoline to electric or some type of hybridization in fuel cell stuff. And hydrogen is getting really popular now, too. So that's a big one. Then I would say the third section of vehicle engineering is much more broad and all encompassing, which is really they come and a customer comes to you and says, I have some kind of problem or I want to just figure out something.
And it doesn't necessarily have to be the whole thing, but vehicle or any specific test necessarily, it could just be a certain use case maybe that they want to understand more about or if a another vehicle has an interesting component that they want to understand more about. All of those things, I'd say, would fall into the very general vehicle engineering and sort of be the consulting service. That we do within the vehicle engineering space.
So homologation then would be part of vehicle engineering. Yeah. So homologation would fall into usually the benchmarking step of things. So often for our programs will test lots of stuff.
So on road testing and on the dyno and we get to the dyno portions, that's where we do a lot about homologation, and especially in recent years with the rise in EVs and so many more BEVs that now are interested in learning that new process essentially and everything that goes into, you know, how do you get that range number on electric vehicle, things like that. That's a lot of the homologation process.
And so whether we do the full homologation and go all the way to the EPA for a customer, that's one option. The other option is just essentially testing other vehicles and seeing does that match with the EPA, set the match with the manufacturers as it does so on? Some of it is sort of just confirming what's out there.
And then the other side of it is actually helping BEV manufacturers, especially the start ups and things like that, to actually certify that cars take them to the entire process, multiple cycles of testing and full discharges and all that kind of stuff. So we have some technologies that evolve where we help with range extension you just mentioned and Right. So somebody currently can drive, let's say 300 miles on a full charge. They say we would love to push it to 350.
Can you elaborate a little bit what we do? I know there's energy management that's sometimes a a subsystem focus. Sometimes we're told, hey, you can make changes through the complete system, which may make it a little easier, right? Different consumers can be scaled down or depending on when they need to be active or not, turn them on, turn them off. As the more complexity you want, the more extensive it gets, but potentially also the more beneficial as it relates to range in this case.
But tell me a little bit what what do we do in the space again, when somebody comes and says, you know, if we could get this to 350, my boss would be happy to consumers would be more happy and all that. So I'll speak a little bit about that. Actually, I recently did a program that was that very same thing where essentially the car was brought to us to get ready for this homologation process and they had a target of greater range than what they were able to achieve initially.
A lot of times, I will admit those targets tend to be fairly arbitrary. It's always looking for a number, so it's kind of better to come back from the opposite approach and start to maybe tweak things on the bottom end and in calibration and then sort of see where you can get. Well, of course, you know, we're always trying to get the most out of it, but from our perspective, there's kind of two different paths that you could take with this sort of I guess so consider optimization.
And it really depends on what stage the manufacturer is in their process. If you can go a hardware route or software or so from hardware, all kinds of things. Obviously a bigger battery gets you more rate one option, right? But that's the easy one. Yeah. But oftentimes other hardware components that could be changed, a lot of it ends up being in the in the the HVAC systems and the thermal conditioning and things like that. So pumps and heaters and things like that.
How much are you heating the battery conditioning it, how much are you heating up the motors, How much flow are you putting through everything? So like you said, it was kind of optimizing the consumers. And the other thing is that from that perspective, so you want to optimize a big way that you can get your sticker number up essentially is to optimize your testing in extreme temperatures. So if I can actually happens a little bit of the homologation process.
But so essentially, especially for BEVs, there's a two cycle and a five cycle process. So the two cycle you go, you run your highway and your city cycles and you do a full depletion in that whole process. So essentially you get your efficiency information from the cycles and you get your full depletion energy from the battery. So that gives you technically everything you need for a sticker for that. For the label. You have your range and you have your efficiency.
Now when you get those numbers, the EPA essentially and this dates back to all of ICE calculations as well. So that's interesting and not really a lot of has changed on the actual calculation perspective going from ICE to BEV a couple of new processes. But essentially when you go through all the papers, most of the calculations are just screenshots from the old stuff from ice.
So it's really we have an interest replacing CO2 per grams per mile or something that or mpg with now kilowatt hour 100 miles or something like that. So, so yeah, you get your two cycle data and now okay, you've got a range and you got efficiency. Now what the EPA says at that point is while we know that you're not going to get that range, all the time. So what we'll do is we'll give you a 30% reduction in everything your range, your efficiency, all that. Okay, 30% down.
So it's called the 0.7 factor. Now, as a manufacture, you might say. Well, I like how much I brought that down. I want to prove to the EPA that my car is better than what you're saying this. So now we enter the five cycle testing, so that breaks it down into again, you do your city highway, plus you do an aggressive cycle and those are all at your normal ambient temperatures, you would say with no HVAC.
But then you do the two extreme temperature test, essentially, which would be SCO3, which are up at 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and you have solar loading coming down and you're running the AC. You can see all of the efficiency effect from that. And then you also do a cold depletion task was essentially the city cycle repeated over and over again. And you're running it's at minus seven degrees Fahrenheit and you're running the heat during that one as well. So now you kind of get your bookends.
And based on that, you put all of these calculations back in and that those five cycle numbers compare to the two cycle numbers actually get you a new factor.
So the interesting thing in the challenge with some of the customers and you even see it in production vehicles now is you might do all of that testing and then you come back and you're fact worse than .7, it’s .69 or 68 you know right in the end and I've seen also even manufacturers OEMs that you go and look for the data and they only post two cycle because the either one be all of the extra effort that went into getting the five cycle wasn't worth it to them.
They didn't care about the range number. So my examples like the Porsche Cayenne, the EV that they did, they never even did the five cycle stuff and maybe was better maybe it was worse. But also they probably don't care much about the lable right it’s a performance car. So essentially in the end, the manufacturer I think often will try the five cycle and then see where they are. Right. So in the program that I did recently, we tried to five cycle and it was that very same situation.
So The Factor came out to like .68 I think. And so then we went back and essentially tried to make all these improvements on thermal, HVAC, all that kind of stuff, trying to, yeah. Decrease the pumps, the pump speed, how much they're running, balance out the temperatures a little bit more. There was a big opportunity. we could have made a very large change hardware based if they rerouted maybe I think it was a cooling reservoirs and did some different routing essentially from a harbor position.
But even then that was much less hardware, but still too late in the game to make that change. And really you can really make the biggest changes with hardware and we have a lot of good thermal experts, which I think is what is really going to be driving the getting every last mile out of these views in the future is the understanding of thermal systems and how they all kind of play with each other. So you've got battery cooling, you've got your all your electronics and motor cooling.
Sometimes you'll also have an additional one for HVAC control things. And so you're getting to lots of these different cooling loops, all with TS and thermostats and control valves and all kinds of. So it's a it's a pretty intense science and so on. So yeah, the big thing was we wanted to make some of those changes. We couldn't from a hardware perspective.
So we ended up doing a lot of software engineering and through all of that we did all of our five cycle testing and made calibration improvements along the way. And then essentially at the end we had made a huge improvement. I think it was up like ten or 10% maybe from the range that they had before. But still the factor was below point .7. So in the end it's like you, you can do a lot from the from the calibration side, but sometimes you are hardware limited now and that's why it's like that.
You know, I think what we're learning in the industry is that being thermally efficient as a vehicle, as an electric vehicle, is not trivial task. Now, there was a recent study or an article that I saw where they did a big survey of all the EVs in the market and they found on average you were losing 50% of your range in the winter. And I know. That is a huge thing. And I think that making that more efficient is, like I said, it is not trivial. It's not a very easy task.
And a lot of people might think it is so. But surrounding the whole .7 factor thing, I think some of that also might change in the years to come. It’s a very legacy factor. Well. Do you think you made an interesting point that people think it's easy? Is is it easy because we're were were screaming right now so loud to say, oh, software defined vehicle. I give you an update every day, Alan, And you're driving a new vehicle every other day.
Are we are we suddenly getting to a point where we're give the consumer or even our engineers the impression that everything's easy because it's just software, right? I mean, I've been in this space now 25 years, hardware and software from the beginning, and there was always the battle between the software engineer and the hardware engineer. Right. The hardware engineer said, you're dang software don't work.
And and the software engineer would say, you know, your your your hardware is wrong and then it was always, well, it's just software, just make an update. Who cares? I'm not going to change my hardware.
So we're now in a stage where you're saying it's easier to make hardware changes because really software as it comes to the cooling loop or the thermal management is really at least not yet the dominant technology used or help me a little bit because I think there's there's an interesting point there. Yeah, I think the side is still really, really critical and important. And even with new hardware, right, you can still leave it on the table if you don't. The right. Software. Yeah.
Now, but for sure the hardware changes I think push the needle more. It's like and like you said in the beginning, right, I want 50 more miles. So if that's the demand and everyone starts to maybe think that 50 miles is no big deal, right? Just a couple of software changes and. Maybe the misconception is that the electric vehicles now. Right. Is that because everything because it's an electric vehicle and has more software in there, that everything can just be changed that way.
But that's really not how it is. And a lot of the times, too, right? So you can optimize all the things that you have control strategies over. So that's mainly ends up being the thermal stuff and your 12-V consumers and things like that and different things you can do there.
But as far as like motor efficiencies and things like that, that's not something we're changing with based control strategies is not going to come back more to inverter technology, E-Motor technology, the pairing of those two and how you're kind of doing, I think, which that is, I would say yeah, a little bit. Probably more from a hardware perspective, I a little. More hardware driven now to get. The big the big range increases that I think some companies maybe falsely think is possible.
More of. A hardware thing. Okay. But again that all of this requires intense software optimization and you know, we could put something really big in there and get your number. But really my my idea is like the goal should be to optimize whatever hardware and. How many people play with SOX algorithms I'm playing, meaning they realize our calculating it too conservative or we're not allowing enough energy to come out right.
I hear a lot of times from like, say, Tesla, get another update and then suddenly I get either more or less right and people complain one way or the other. I think they do mostly updates what I'm hearing from that regard. So so how much is there? Then again, not thermal management, but more again, going back to the range, how much is there when people say, okay, now we have data for six months, maybe we use AI now and realize we're really not calculating the right way.
There's really a whole lot more I can get out of these individual cells or out of my existing pack. I can get you 75 more miles to 50. How much is that? How much you see that? Yeah, it's it's an interesting topic on we haven't worked directly or at least I haven't worked directly in seeing a manufacturer making those changes.
But in the benchmarking we do see that the usable battery energy changes over time are sure and, and I think like you said, yeah, using AI tools and being able to, I think the the big limitation in all of this stuff with optimizing these electric vehicles is yeah, what to do with big data. Right. Amounts of data that even some of the best tools. It's hard to maybe pick out the little nuances that you're trying to find.
I think when we get yeah, more into these air tools for maybe be able to crunch massive amounts of data and Tesla does a good job at this right. Because they, they crowdsource so much. Yeah I know they can. Look a million to two-million miles worth of data and say okay well we had this SOC limit and the batteries aren't really degrading so maybe we can widen that now. So now when you have your 0 to 100 on on the screen, really the battery goes probably 5% lower and 5% higher.
And it's it's shifting that usable range up and down. Can you drain out more? Can you put in more of that kind of thing? Yeah. And the other interesting thing is that SOC that that value your state of charge is such a fluid number in most vehicles can because it's constantly being recualcualted essentially. Now. Resistance checks and temperature and your voltage at the time. Aging and whatever else all of that stuff.
People have this misconception that SOC is like a finite number, very or very, I would say like a concrete number that you'd like rely on. Like 75% today was the same as 75% tomorrow is really not the case. It’s very much recalculated all the time. All the time. Okay.
When you talked about how can you improve the thermal management, which then hopefully gives you, which gives you more range, hopefully the range more to the additional range you want, how much a simulation play this how much how much do we use simulation tools nowadays. Yes, we use simulation quite a bit. And it kind of depends on the customer. But we're trying to get into we're trying to have our customers see the value in that more so more often, basically.
And we did do that for for some of this last project because essentially, if you can get the customer to maybe give us a good simulation, some type of model of some of their hardware and their kind of vehicle, and then we can play with a lot of the calibration changes or even like small component changes on our end and and get to maybe the answer they want quicker or at least cost less.
Essentially running as we were moving towards the space and just really trying to get customers more and more on board with it is that let's do a lot of simulation work upfront and then let's do or maybe like a little bit of real work to get all the inputs we need to do the bulk of it in simulation. And then let's come back here to verifying the real world. That's going to be exactly the same.
But that's, I think, how you skip a lot of the physical work that has to get done that could be rather costly. So, yeah, we're definitely trying to move more into that space and we have a lot of good talent in the in the modeling now. So that's something that we're trying to offer more and more and kind of get people to come on board with because especially with with EVs now so much, it is like you can really get good simulation model for, you know, kind of like a e-motor transactional package.
And then maybe maybe we go and do component testing on another vehicle and understand what their e-motor package is like. And then the customer over here says, Well, what would it be ours on? I guess not Sure there may be using a newer technology and the OEM is not necessarily going to go in and develop all that technology first, where you want to see what is it going to be like for your vehicle. Is this a worthy path for us to trial down homes like so?
I think that, yeah, the simulation aspect, which is getting more and more popular, it can really make everybody more efficient and effective because you're doing a lot more, I guess, planning and direction setting upfront and maybe not wasting as many efforts down the line where it's like, Oh, that wasn't very fruitful and. Hiring is interesting. In your opinion, What's people are in the thermal management?
Our customer base let's say, right, which all mobility anything from on the ground, in the air and in space soon too. What are people mostly missing? Is it a missing that. No, it's not software. Software will not fix it. There's a major hardware component you got to address first if you want to get more efficient, is it? No. You can do a lot of software. Is it you miss the fact that you're calculating your SOX algorithms wrong too conservative? What is it in your opinion?
So I think actually a lot of it does come down to hardware in at least how you route your thermal systems. routing. Yeah routing, okay, now. Acting all these moves together, how how do the different loops have to share coolant. Right. Because the the whole you have these really advanced thermal systems but the idea in the end really is to be able to control each sub loop as their own temperature. Right. You want this for HVAC, someone you know, bring the heat in.
This is what I get when I want to control my motors to this temperature. I want to control my battery to this very specific temperature maybe I want to preheat my battery, but now I'm motor rate. So all it's it's making the early decisions on how to route everything and link them together where you share reservoirs, all that kind of stuff.
So it's I think a healthy and then a lot of times when we get to it like even if that all that is good, it's that everything is just not optimized yet, which it really takes. Take some of the physical testing and then say like, okay, well can we reduce this flow rate a little bit? And maybe that cuts down our consumers. when what often I think comes up is that like we said, right, being thermally efficient is not easy. It's not trivial. We're all learning as an industry, I assume, still right?
And so when you have when you have thermal experts that can really look at it, the first thing that they start saying is they come in with essentially hardware changes like, oh, okay, so now when you're running this, your e-motor is heating up, but it's causing your battery heat up. But you didn't want it to. But it's because that's after this in the loop and we don't have any intermediate stop.
And all that I think is because then it's also harder to like optimize really finally and squeeze every last bit because you're always going to have to make a compromise or loop or something. And it's I think, yeah, a lot of it comes down to how you route it, how you, how you position loops, where you put your components in line, things of that nature. I think. Um. Okay, cool. Last question.
What do you see in homologation thermal management, the stuff that you're working on, like one of the topics you're working on, many of them, I know that you're going to see the biggest change over the next five years technology wise, purely technology wise, or maybe what the customers want in a vehicle, right?
Either going back to old technology because it's better, more reliable, more efficient, whatever, or no scrap, all the old stuff, the next generation, any that we're doing is going to use this technology. What do you see over the next five years, Maybe one or two points, but that you see? Sure. So the big one that everyone is very interested in is and it sort of plays into the thermal part.
But again, it's for like getting your durable efficiency better, but it's a 12 volt management is that it became much bigger than I ever expected. Don't you think that EVs right not everything is 12 or everything is electric, so it just makes it easier. But really it's because you have a battery and everyone looks at your range in a way that they never looked at a gas tank before, right? No, never. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you everything how the EPA was. But we're kind of came out of nowhere.
It's like no one ever cared how much you could fit into the car. So now I think we have gas stations first before we had cars, and now we have cars. First of all, we have infrastructure. Maybe. I don't know. And it's like and because it takes more time. So I think the big thing, I think a big change that will change. I think a lot of how people think about this and think about range is right. So 12 volt management has become extremely important.
So we're always trying to take down those consumers. Now everyone is looking at your 12 volt consumers with under a microscope and now it's like, well, it doesn't change your efficiency that much. But over a 400 mile battery now and get to that after ten. Yeah now 50 milliamp more draw matter suddenly where before and who cares.
And. Matter everything the ICE world from the 12 Volt perspective was much more forgiving I guess and and in zero same and again we didn't you weren't worried about the range the other thing that I think is going to really change how people think about this will be battery technology and power density. All right. Once we move past more because unfortunately right now today, like essentially unless I'm driving a Tesla, I know that going to be a supercharger everywhere.
I have range anxiety in every car, essentially getting to know no matter what it is. And I always thought that it wasn't going to be like that. These were big enough and there's enough chargers around. But I still find myself thinking about how I know other people do. So until we get to a point where range anxiety is something that we're not thinking about. So much, I think everyone's always going to be hyper on this, but once you get power, it's all about power density, right?
So we can fit a lot more energy into a much smaller space. Suddenly hypermiling out of this to get the last, I don't think is going to be new. And so now, as you say, now the energy management goes up and once we have more capacity again, maybe it becomes less important that that. Capacity is as easy to come by as putting a bigger gas. Tank. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, no. One, people care less about the range. All right? Some batteries get get more power dense, your infrastructure goes up.
Suddenly all of the. I truly believe that the range number will become less and less important. All is rage. Still, I ask, not a question Nobody is. Is range today more important still, as he was, in my opinion, two or three years ago for EVs, then charging time because I've heard many people now talk about it's really not about range anymore. It's about charging time. But I don't know if that's like, you know, somebody started is because they want us to focus on more, focus on charge time.
Look how great we are and forget about range anxiety because yeah, I know it's a chicken and egg and we we don't really own the gas stations or the charging. So I don't know what in your opinion that deals with this all the time or your or our customers your customers more concerned about how fast they can charge a battery or still more concerned about addressing the range anxiety because it's two different things. Right. And no, I think I think the range is is. Still okay now and.
Especially cause even if and that's the problem is even if my charge times were faster you still need to have them everywhere on and it's still got to be and it still has that Yeah. Has to be within reach and it still has to be quick enough for it to be like usable right now. And I think that as far as like charge rates and your C one rate how fast rechargeable battery I think that also will come with better battery.
Yeah surely our ranges will end up going up and the speed will will decrease the speed. Increases up. And I will get to that point. And I think that that right now the range is still the main focus because. R Right, everyone trying to work with what they can. So our C1, our charge rates really just aren't there yet to be super fast and the battery technology just isn't quite there to be super dense.
So everyone does everything they can to cut down all these other consumers just to get the most out. Yeah, they don't have the infrastructure and we still don't quite have the, unlimited range in your mind. Sure you're not worried. Now. So until those aspects I think until the battery technology kind of changes a little bit, then it's always going to be hyper focused on getting the most out of what you can because.
Yeah. And I'd also heard a couple of things now that I think Elon Musk is working with the government to essentially make Tesla Superchargers now open the bill, charge other vehicles as well. So and that could be a huge game changer, right? Because if the Superchargers are everywhere, he built that infrastructure and when I have when I'm driving down my Tesla, I don't feel anxiety because my car is constantly telling me where supercharger is.
I mean getting close to is going to letting me know right zone. I think that could also be a big game changer for vehicles that they're able to use those fast because that's easy. And I think that a lot of times customers are interested in especially at temperature, too. So and that's the big thing, is that temperature changes so much with our battery capacity,
charging rates and all these things. So and I think that the thermal aspect does come in a little bit to that as well, because with faster charge rates, we also will have to that will be also somewhat of a product of improving our thermal efficiency in the way the battery gets. So and and is that as well with new battery technology?
I think that's going to be the thing that kind of that kind of breaks us through the the little spot that where everything got wet trained anxiety in those times and hyper focusing scheduler part day. The mileage really isn't the thing that we're focused on because the rest of the technology has made it sort of irrelevant. Well, let's see if solid-state battery solve all our problems. Right. And we'll see why. Thank you very much, Alan, and thanks for tuning in.
Thanks for listening. To Reimagine Mobility Podcast. If you like the episode, please. Subscribe and. Tell a friend.